primarily used to mirror directly the manners, modes and
morals of society, the stage became the forum for debate,
spectacle, and entertainment. In Shakespeare’s epilogue he
makes a clear statement of faith and gives Prospero the task of
admitting that the play world now lies in ruins, and to appeal to
the grace of the theatre audience. On line eleven and twelve of
the epilogue he says, “Gentle breath of yours my sails must fill,
or else my project fails”. Here he is asking for good comment
on the play, and as Shakespeare had shares in the Globe and
was part owner in the Blackfriars theatre he had a vested
interest in his plays being successful.
In 1592 all the London theatres were closed due to an outbreak
of the plague. When the theatres opened again some two years
later, the public were probably slow in returning to the theatre.
So gaining a theatre audience when the audience was ever
decreasing would have been a difficult and worrying time.
At the time when this play was written the interclass
mobility naturally created by the rise and fall of families
meant that the class structure was breaking down, and so
Shakespeare gives in his epilogue the emphasis upon loss
and recovery, art and nature, and the sense of order.
The theatre of restoration was quite different from
Shakespeare’s theatre, with the audience now largely upper
class. Dryden directly links his epilogue to the past and present
topics of the time. Since 1620 the theatre had been in decline
and Dryden writes of this in his epilogue. On line four Prospero
speaks “Among the muses there’s a gen’ral rot”, here he is
saying that all the different categories of the arts are in a
desperate state. On the next line “ The Rhyming Mounsieur”
seems to be a direct attack on the French drama at this time.
Although English drama was still active and popular it did go
into critical decline. Yet French drama of this period reaches
the highest peaks of achievement in the works of Racine and
Moliere, and it bears very little relation to most English
Restoration. Dryden links “The Rhyming Mounsieur” to the
“Spanish plot” as though he is suggesting French drama is an
attack on England in the same way the Spanish Armada was,
which took place in 1588. The long decline in English theatre
production since 1620 wasn’t helped by extreme Puritan
moralistic pressure that resulted in the long parliament putting
an end to theatrical performances in 1642.
In 1665, during the great plague, there was enforced theatrical
inactivity, and just a year later the great fire of London took
place. This could be the reason why Dryden talks of ill poets
and the ghosts of poets in his epilogue, and why he wrote that
sixty-seven was a very damning year.
At the end of the epilogue, Dryden, like Shakespeare is making
an appeal to his audience, asking for them to be gracious to the
pen. The lingering uncertainty of their art meant that in this
period, as in others literature was an index to the health of the
society that fostered it.