ingly.
He resented the manager's habit of doubling the price of the seats,
and he was irritated by the frequent want of adequate rehearsal.

Pepys's theatrical experience began with the reopening of theatres
after the severe penalty of suppression, which the Civil Wars and the
Commonwealth imposed on them for nearly eighteen years. His playgoing
diary thus became an invaluable record of a new birth of theatrical
life in London. When, in the summer of 1660, General Monk occupied
London for the restored King, Charles II., three of the old theatres
were still standing empty. These were soon put into repair, and
applied anew to theatrical uses, although only two of them seem to
have been open at any one time. The three houses were the Red Bull,
dating from Elizabeth's reign, in St John's Street, Clerkenwell, where
Pepys saw Marlowe's _Faustus_; Salisbury Court, Whitefriars, off Fleet
Street; and the Old Cockpit in Drury Lane, both of which were of more
recent origin. To all these theatres Pepys paid early visits. But the
Cockpit in Drury Lane, was the scene of some of his most stirring
experiences. There he saw his first play, Beaumont and Fletcher's
_Loyal Subject_; and there, too, he saw his first play by Shakespeare,
_Othello_.

But these three theatres were in decay, and new and sumptuous
buildings soon took their places. One of the new playhouses was in
Portugal Row, Lincoln's Inn Fields; the other, on the site of the
present Drury Lane Theatre, was the first of the many playhouses that
sprang up there. It is to these two theatres--Lincoln's Inn Fields and
Drury Lane--that Pepys in his diary most often refers. He calls each
of them by many different names, and the unwary reader might infer
that London was very richly supplied with playhouses in Pepys's day.
But public theatres in active work at this period of our history were
not permitted by the authorities to exceed two. "The Opera" and "the
Duke's House" are merely Pepys's alternative designations of the
Lincoln's Inn Field's Theatre; while "the Theatre," "Theatre Royal,"
and "the King's House," are the varying titles which he bestows on the
Drury Lane Theatre.[15]

[Footnote 15: At the restoration of King Charles II., no more than two
companies of actors received licenses to perform in public. One of
these companies was directed by Sir William D'Avenant, Shakespeare's
reputed godson, and was under the patronage of the King's brother, the
Duke of York. The other