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After an eighteen-year hiatus theatres reopened in London in 1660, following the restoration of King Charles II. While the stages, audiences and taste of this age were markedly different from those for which Shakespeare wrote, his works were an important part of the theatrical corpus of the later seventeenth century, along with others by Ben Jonson and John Fletcher. In his diary, Samuel Pepys records numerous performances of Shakespeare's plays in the first years after the Restoration, including productions of 1 Henry IV and The Merry Wives of Windsor within months of Charles II's return. From the 1660s through the end of the eighteenth century, Shakespeare's plays were a routine part of any theatre's offerings and made up a far larger proportion of the popular theatrical repertoire than they do today in London or New York. They appeared regularly every year, although not necessarily in a form that Shakespeare would have recognised. In particular, the Restoration staging of Shakespeare has become infamous for its creative reconfiguration of Shakespeare’s plays, in which some tragedies are given happy endings and others made more tragic, while characters are eliminated – or added – to conform to contemporary taste, and in which entire scenes and acts are omitted, replaced in some cases by new scenes and rewritten dialogue.
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