The reign of King Charles I did not officially end until 30 January 1649, when he was beheaded by the parliamentarian forces led by Generals Cromwell and Fairfax on a public scaffold erected, with tragic irony, in front of the Banqueting House, the Whitehall building he himself had some years earlier commissioned from the architect Inigo Jones. The poet Andrew Marvell 's ‘An Horatian Ode Upon Cromwell 's Return from Ireland’ describes the world-shattering event thus:

Civil war in England had broken out some seven years earlier, and it is more usually this date – 1642 – that is taken to mark the end of the so-called Caroline era that had begun with Charles's accession to the English throne upon the death of his father, James I, in 1625. Our focus in this book is on drama written during this reign – 1625–42 – by four of the period's most eminent public theatre dramatists: Philip Massinger, John Ford, James Shirley, and Richard Brome. Their dramatic ‘reign’ is generally held to have ended in 1642 with the outbreak of military hostilities between supporters of the king (the so-called royalists, or ‘Cavaliers’) and parliament (the roundheads, or Puritans), and the attendant closure of the public theatres in London that same year.

‘Cromwell and the Puritans’ – a problematic category in itself – are often charged with responsibility for that closure, but the historical truth is rather more complex. The Puritans were, after all, scarcely in control in 1642 when Charles was still officially monarch of the realm. Moreover, the theatres were only closed for one season in the first instance, and more for reasons of public safety in wartime than because of any anti-theatrical political or theological ideology. It is true to say that the theatres were in London and that the city was itself ostensibly Parliamentarian and Puritan in its sympathies, and it is a fact that, subsequently, a number of the London playhouses were physically dismantled, timber by timber, by forces sympathetic to Cromwell.