Little more than a year after Oliver Cromwell's death in September 1658, the English revolutionary regime had collapsed as a result of inner dissension and popular hostility. Early in 1660, General George Monck marched his troops from Scotland to London, reinstated to the Rump Parliament the members whose exclusion in 1648 earned it its name, commanded new elections, and quickly decided to restore the monarchy. These events, up to the calling of a free parliament, were promptly celebrated in the first Restoration comedy, John Tatham's The Rump (1660), which satirizes the selfish ambition of the Puritan grandees, and the lechery and parvenu pretentiousness of their wives. (Political insurgency was at this time commonly paired with female insubordination.) But, with the intervention of Monck, hierarchy is restored to a distracted society, many of the upstarts are demoted to street vendors, and a world turned upside is set to rights.

The Rump had many successors; for one of the principal subjects of early Restoration drama was the Restoration itself. For example, the first Restoration heroic play, the Earl of Orrery's The Generall (written in 1661), transparently reworks recent events, portraying a general (Clorimun) who turns against a usurper in order to restore a rightful king.