Seven years before Charles II was returned to power, eleven after the Puritan regime had brought all legitimate theatrical activity in London to an abrupt halt, Aston Cokaine, writing a dedicatory poem to Richard Brome's belatedly published Five New Plays (1653), was already looking forward to the day when the playhouses would reopen. Presciently, he imagined a restored theatre which would be first and foremost a place for the revival of England's native dramatic classics, and only secondarily a venue where living playwrights might resume their interrupted careers:

As Cokaine's poem in part suggests (apparently remembering Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights among the glories of the lost Caroline stage), the repertories of the pre-Civil War playhouses had always included a substantial percentage of revived plays, some of them half a century old by the time the theatres were closed in 1642.