As might have been expected, the dissolution of the Rump Parliament let loose a flood of political literature, squibs, satires and lampoons. Such works as _The famous Tragedie of the Life and Death of Mrs. Rump ... as it was presented on a burning stage at Westminster, the 29th of May, 1660_ (4to, 1660), are of course valueless save from a purely historical interest. A large number of songs and ballads were brought together and published in two parts, 1662, reprint 1874. This collection (_The Rump_), sometimes witty, sometimes angry, sometimes obscene, is weighty evidence of the loathing inspired by the republicans and their misrule, but it is of so personal and topical a nature that the allusions would hardly be understood by any one who had not made a very close and extended study of those critical months. THEATRICAL HISTORY. _The Roundheads; or, The Good Old Cause_ was produced at the Duke’s Theatre in 1682. They were unsettled and hazardous times. The country was convulsed by the judicial murders and horrors which followed in the train of the pseudo-Popish Plot engineered by the abominable Gates and his accomplices. King and Parliament were at hopeless variance. The air was charged with strife, internecine hatreds and unrest. In such an atmosphere and in such circumstances politics could not but make themselves keenly felt upon the stage. The actors were indeed ‘abstracts and brief chronicles of the time’, and the theatre became a very Armageddon for the poets. As _A Lenten Prologue refus’d by the Players_ (1682) puts it:— ’Plots and Parties give new matter birth And State distractions serve you here for mirth! ....... The Stage, like old Rump Pulpits, is become The scene of News, a furious Party’s drum.’ Produced on 4 December, 1682, Dryden and Lee’s excellent Tragedy, _The Duke of Guise_, which the Whigs vainly tried to suppress, created a furore. Crowne’s _City Politics_ (1683) is a crushing satire, caricaturing Oates, Stephen College, old Sergeant Maynard and their faction with rare skill. Southerne’s _Loyal Brother_ (1682), eulogizes the Duke of York; the scope of D’Urfey’s _Sir Barnaby Whigg_ (1681), can be told by its title, indeed the prologue says of the author:— ’That he shall know both parties now he glories, By hisses th’ Whigs, and by their claps the Tories.’ His _Royalist_ (1682) follows in the same track. Even those plays which were entirely non-political are inevitably prefaced with a mordant prologue or wound up by an epilogue that has party venom and mustard in its tail. 336 It would be surprising if so popular a writer as Mrs. Behn had not put a political play on the stage at such a juncture, and we find her well to the fore with _The Roundheads_, which she followed up in the same year with _The City Heiress_, another openly topical comedy.