When the public theatres reopened after the Restoration, they inherited the dramaturgy of the court masque, not the dramaturgy of the Globe. Some of the folks who had assisted in producing Caroline court masques in the early 1630s were still around in the 1650s to help to devise a people's entertainment—for example, Inigo Jones's last chief assistant, John Webb, designed the set for Davenant's The Siege of Rhodes (1656), by some accounts the first English opera and the first occasion when female actors appeared on the English public stage. On the other hand, the texts of court masques were obviously unsuitable for a popular theatre, so the producers needed either to commission new plays or to find old plays that looked good inside a proscenium arch and lent themselves to a coed stage equipped with scenic machinery. The Tempest, for example, with its embedded masque of Ceres and Juno (and its embedded antimasque of Ariel as Harpy), could fairly easily be adapted to the needs of such a theatre: it was a simple task, for example, to change the last act into a large masque in which classical gods calm the water preparatory to a sea voyage—indeed, this version has an attractive symmetry in that it begins with a spectacle of a storm and ends with the spectacle of a counter-storm, a tranquilizing of all weather. But The Tempest of the Restoration achieves this at the expense of making Prospero a sovereign who never drowns his book or breaks his staff, who retains his magical power to control the elements, as if the whole play were a masque designed to project the glory of authority. In other words, the parts of the play that modern audiences may enjoy the most—the valedictory, self-dismissive parts—were sacrificed to make the play more spectacular.

A Midsummer Night's Dream was infinitely more difficult to adapt to the new conditions. Elaborate stage machinery and cunningly painted backdrops are not an aid to A Midsummer Night's Dream but a hindrance to it: as we have seen, it's the ideal play for a minimalist stage, in which the characters seem to be making up the play as they go along.