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And for these reasons, we have been inclined to underestimate the importance of Pepys’ diary. Francis Jeffrey, who wrote long ago about Pepys, evidently thought that he was an idle and unprofitable fellow and that the diary was too much given to mean and petty things. But in reality the diary is an historical mine. Even when Pepys plays upon the surface, he throws out facts that can be had nowhere else. No one would venture to write of Restoration life without digging through his pages. Pepys wrote in a confused shorthand, maybe against the eye of his wife, from whom he had reason to conceal his offenses. The papers lay undeciphered until 1825, when a partial publication was made. There were additions by subsequent editors until now it appears that the Wheatley text of 1893-1899 is final. But ever since 1825, the diary has been judged to be of high importance in the understanding of the first decade of the Restoration.

If some of the weightier parts are somewhat dry, there are places in which a lighter show of personality is coincident with real historical data. Foremost are the pages where Pepys goes to the theatre.

More than Charles II was restored in 1660. Among many things of more importance than this worthless King, the theatre was restored. Since the close of Elizabethan times it had been out of business. More than thirty years before, Puritanism had snuffed out its candles and driven its fiddlers to the streets. But Puritanism, in its turn, fell with the return of the Stuarts. Pepys is a chief witness as to what kind of theatre it was that was set up in London about the year 1660. It was far different from the Elizabethan theatre. It came in from the Bankside and the fields to the north of the city and lodged itself on the better streets and squares. It no longer patterned itself on the inn-yard, but was roofed against the rain. The time had been when the theatre was cousin to the bear-pit. They were ranged together on the Bankside and they sweat and smelled like congenial neighbors. But these days are past. Let Bartholomew Fair be as rowdy as it pleases, let acrobats and such loose fellows keep to Southwark, the theatre has risen in the world! It has put on a wig, as it were, it has tied a ribbon to itself and has become fashionable. And although it has taken on a few extra dissolute habits, they are of the genteelest kind and will make it feel at home in the upper circles.

But also the theatre introduced movable scenery. There is an attempt toward elaboration of stage effect. “To the King’s playhouse–” says Pepys, “a good scene of a town on fire.” Women take parts. An avalanche of new plays descends on it. Even the old plays that have survived are garbled to suit a change of taste.

But if you would really know what kind of theatre it was that sprang up with the Stuarts and what the audiences looked like and how they behaved, you must read Pepys. With but a moderate use of fancy, you can set out with him in his yellow coach for the King’s house in Drury Lane. Perhaps hunger nips you at the start. If so, you stop, as Pepys pleasantly puts it, for a “barrel of oysters.” Then, having dusted yourself of crumbs, you take the road again. Presently you come to Drury Lane. Other yellow coaches are before you. There is a show of foppery on the curb and an odor of smoking links. A powdered beauty minces to the door. Once past the doorkeeper, you hear the cries of the orange women going up and down the aisles. There is a shuffling of apprentices in the gallery. A dandy who lolls in a box with a silken leg across the rail, scrawls a message to an actress and sends it off by Orange Moll. Presently Castlemaine enters the royal box with the King. There is a craning of necks, for with her the King openly “do discover a great deal of familiarity.” In other boxes are other fine ladies wearing vizards to hold their modesty if the comedy is free. A board breaks in the ceiling of the gallery and dust falls in the men’s hair and the ladies’ necks, which, writes Pepys, “made good sport.” Or again, “A gentleman of good habit, sitting just before us, eating of some fruit in the midst of the play, did drop down as dead; being choked, but with much ado Orange Moll did thrust her finger down his throat and brought him to life again.” Or perhaps, “I sitting behind in a dark place, a lady spit backward upon me by a mistake, not seeing me, but after seeing her to be a very pretty lady, I was not troubled at it at all.”

At a change of scenes, Mrs. Knipp spies Pepys and comes to the pit door. He goes with her to the tiring-room. “To the women’s shift,” he writes, “where Nell was dressing herself, and was all unready, and is very pretty, prettier than I thought…. But to see how Nell cursed for having so few people in the pit, was pretty.”–“But Lord! their confidence! and how many men do hover about them as soon as they come off the stage, and how confident they are in their talk!” Or he is whispered a bit of gossip, how Castlemaine is much in love with Hart, an actor of the house. Then Pepys goes back into the pit and lays out a sixpence for an orange. As the play nears its end, footmen crowd forward at the doors. The epilogue is spoken. The fiddles squeak their last. There is a bawling outside for coaches.

“Would it fit your humor,” asks Mr. Pepys, when we have been handed to our seats, “would it fit your humor, if we go around to the Rose Tavern for some burnt wine and a breast of mutton off the spit? It’s sure that some brave company will fall in, and we can have a tune. We’ll not heed the bellman. We’ll sit late, for it will be a fine light moonshine morning.”