Dryden's marriage with the daughter of an earl, two or three years after the Restoration, secured his social position, and for more than fifteen years thereafter his life was outwardly successful. He first turned to the drama. In spite of the prohibitory Puritan law (above, p. 150), a facile writer, Sir William Davenant, had begun, cautiously, a few years before the Restoration, to produce operas and other works of dramatic nature; and the returning Court had brought from Paris a passion for the stage, which therefore offered the best and indeed the only field for remunerative literary effort. Accordingly, although Dryden himself frankly admitted that his talents were not especially adapted to writing plays, he proceeded to do so energetically, and continued at it, with diminishing productivity, nearly down to the end of his life, thirty-five years later. But his activity always found varied outlets. He secured a lucrative share in the profits of the King's Playhouse, one of the two theaters of the time which alone were allowed to present regular plays, and he held the mainly honorary positions of poet laureate and historiographer-royal. Later, like Chaucer, he was for a time collector of the customs of the port of London. He was not much disturbed by 'The Rehearsal,' a burlesque play brought out by the Duke of Buckingham and other wits to ridicule current dramas and dramatists, in which he figured as chief butt under the name 'Bayes' (poet laureate); and he took more than full revenge ten years later when in 'Absalom and Achitophel' he drew the portrait of Buckingham as Zimri. But in 1680 an outrage of which he was the victim, a brutal and unprovoked beating inflicted by ruffians in the employ of the Earl of Rochester, seems to mark a permanent change for the worse in his fortunes, a change not indeed to disaster but to a permanent condition of doubtful prosperity.