Restoration actors and actresses worked very hard. Acting on approximately two hundred days of the year over the course of an eight- or nine-month season (not counting summer tours and fairs), key company members could each be expected to play on relatively short notice perhaps as many as thirty different roles. The bills changed quickly, alternating between stock plays, revivals from recent seasons, and new plays. In the face of sometimes fickle demand for drama (daily attendance at plays varied considerably throughout the period), the actors and actresses supplied a specialized and highly skilled service – the performance.

Their business, practically speaking, was to embody the characters sketched by the playwrights, but their larger, unstated task was to provide their audiences with symbolic actions of various kinds. Whether they intended to or not, actors and actresses in Restoration England made themselves objects of public fantasy. According to Tom Brown, the acid-tongued observer of the London underworld, their workplace became known as the “Enchanted Island,” and their job was to populate it with attractive (and compliant) natives.