Sometime at the end of the seventeenth century, George Villiers, the second Duke of Buckingham, wrote a play which he called The Restauration: Or, Right will take Place. A Tragicomedy (February 1683). Since the beheading of the English monarch Charles I in 1649, the idea of “Restoration” had obsessed English playwrights – the theme permeates Restoration drama. Not coincidentally, Buckingham's title includes the designation “A Tragicomedy.” To an experienced reader of seventeenth-century drama, the plot of The Restauration sounds very familiar. A usurping king harasses a dispossessed prince, Philander, whose countrymen are waiting to take arms in his defense. A foreign prince has just arrived to marry the princess and thus becomes heir to the throne.