The theatrical conditions governing the reign of Queen Anne were not very different from those of the Restoration. There was a general complaint, as there has been ever since, that operas and spectacles were crowding the serious drama out of favor, but there was still abundant opportunity to see many of the best plays of the Elizabethan and Restoration periods. Of tragedies, we find in a single season, 1703-04, "Hamlet," "Othello," "Julius Cæsar," and alterations of "Macbeth," "Lear," "Richard III," "Timon," and "Titus Andronicus," Shirley's "Traitor," and Beaumont and Fletcher's "Maid's Tragedy," "Valentinian," and "A King and No King," "The Loyal Subject," and other of their tragicomedies. "Henry VIII," "Rollo," "Bonduca," and "Philaster" were performed within the next few years. Of Restoration tragedies, Banks's "Unhappy Favorite" and Lee's "Rival Queens" were perhaps the most popular, and other plays of Banks, Lee, Otway, Dryden, Congreve, and Southerne were acted yearly. A number of the heroic plays also still kept the stage, including Howard's "Indian Queen," Dryden's "Conquest of Granada," "Indian Emperor," and "Aureng Zebe." Throughout the century both the London and the provincial theatres presented each year a large number of old plays, including many of these already mentioned. The Elizabethan tragedies, except Shakespeare's, and the heroic plays gradually disappeared from the regular repertoire, but Shakespeare's tragedies steadily gained in popularity, and "The Unhappy Favorite" (rewritten as "The Earl of Essex"), "The Orphan," "Venice Preserved," "Oronooko," "The Fatal Marriage" (altered as "Isabella"), "All for Love," and "The Mourning Bride" maintained their places into the nineteenth century. Tragedy thus had its permanent representatives in this group of stock plays, to which newcomers gained admission only by marked success on the stage. To these stock plays no writer of the eighteenth century made more notable additions than Nicholas Rowe, the first editor of Shakespeare, whose work began the century, borrowed much from his predecessors, and yet introduced most of the changes which distinguish the eighteenth century type of tragedy from that of the Restoration or Elizabethan period. His first play was followed by four other tragedies by 1707, and, after an interval of seven years, by "Jane Shore" (1714) and "Lady Jane Grey" (1715). Of the first five, three are of little interest except as representing common variations of the prevailing type. They all relate love stories of rivalry and intrigue among heroic personages, and all observe the French proprieties in structure. "The Ambitious Stepmother," like so many predecessors and successors, places the scene in an oriental court; "Ulysses" more daringly invades Homeric territory; and "The Royal Convert" turns to early English history, a field which literary patriotism was appropriating for tragedy.