Christopher's son, William Beeston the second, was his father's coadjutor at Drury Lane, and succeeded him in his high managerial office there. The son encountered difficulties with the Government through an alleged insult to the King in one of the pieces that he produced, and he had to retire from the Cockpit to a smaller theatre in Salisbury Court. Until his death he retained the respect of the play-going and the literature-loving public, and his son George, whom he brought up to the stage, carried on the family repute to a later generation. William Beeston had no liking for dissolute society, and the open vice of Charles the Second's Court pained him. He lived in old age much in seclusion, but by a congenial circle he was always warmly welcomed for the freshness and enthusiasm of his talk about the poets who flourished in his youth. "Divers times (in my hearing)," one of his auditors, Francis Kirkman, an ardent collector, reader, and publisher of old plays, wrote to him in 1652--"Divers times (in my hearing), to the admiration of the whole company you have most judiciously discoursed of Poesie." In the judgment of Kirkman, his friend, the old actor, was "the happiest interpreter and judg of our English stage-Playes this Nation ever produced; which the Poets and Actors these times cannot (without ingratitude) deny; for I have heard the chief, and most ingenious of them, acknowledg their Fames and Profits essentially sprung from your instructions, judgment, and fancy." Few who heard Beeston talk failed, Kirkman continues, to subscribe "to his opinion that no Nation could glory in such Playes" as those that came from the pens of the great Elizabethans, Shakespeare, Fletcher, and Ben Jonson. "Glorious John Dryden" shared in the general enthusiasm for the veteran Beeston, and bestowed on him the title of "the chronicle of the stage"; while John Aubrey, the honest antiquary and gossip, who had in his disorderly brain the makings of a Boswell, sought Beeston's personal acquaintance about 1660, in order to "take from him the lives of the old English Poets."