While Restoration playwrights were influenced by Shakespeare and earlier English tragedians, the years that Charles II and his court had spent in France during the Interregnum (1642-60) made them acquainted with French playwrights and theorists who exercised an important (albeit unfortunate) critical authority concerning tragedy that created a thematic and stylistic disjunction between the major serious dramatists of the Restoration and earlier English playwrights.

French influence on Restoration drama can be overstated. French critics, for instance, thought they could derive from Aristotle a set of rules called “the unities.” The unity of action meant that there should be a single, serious action of magnitude to the play; i.e., not merely the elimination of subplots, but assuredly the absence of comic interludes (such as the gravedigger scene in Hamlet). The unity of place stipulated a single setting.