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By late 1676, the predominant character of comedy was clearly darkening, as dramatists reacted with various kinds of moral earnestness to George Etherege's morally dispassionate portrayal of Dorimant's sexual Machiavellism. Sex comedy became largely critical of the faithless male, and often very pessimistic in its portrayal of human sexuality. The transformation of drama was soon accentuated by the grave political crisis that began in September 1678, with Titus Oates's first allegations of a popish conspiracy to murder the King and initiate a general rebellion. The crisis produced a drama that was often heavily politicized, though not always in predictable ways, since several leading dramatists changed tack according to the fluctuating fortunes of the Exclusionist cause. The genre chiefly affected was tragedy, but in some of the comic work of Thomas Otway, Aphra Behn, and John Dryden growing concern with painful and unresolvable sexual dilemmas became a means for glancing at more comprehensive dilemmas of order.

By 1676, the festive comedy of the early Restoration had given way to darker treatments of human desire. In serious drama, the heroic idealism of Earl of Orrery — the object of such festive plays as The Comical Revenge — had all but disappeared, though John Dryden, Thomas Otway, and Nathaniel Lee had continued to use the old genres and subjects to criticize the ideals formerly associated with them. However, by the end of 1676, all three had abandoned the heroic play, though minor writers protracted the genre into 1678, chiefly in the form of Siege, Conquest, and Destruction plays. One late exercise in the heroic mode that did not follow the Conquest pattern was Charles Davenant's rhymed opera Circe, the last operatic spectacular until Dryden's Albion and Albanius.

In November 1682 the ailing King's Company merged with the more adventurously and expertly managed Duke's, and for the next thirteen years the London stage became a monopoly. The absence of commercial rivalry induced an unenterprising reliance upon stock plays, and new plays for a while became scarce and unadventurous. Most comedies, for example, are farcical or lightweight, and in the period up to the end of the 1688 season only four plays (Nathaniel Lee's The Princess of Cleve, Thomas Otway's The Atheist, Aphra Behn's The Lucky Chance, and Charles Sedley's Bellamira) provide a serious and exploratory treatment of human sexuality. The Tory triumph turned hitherto ambivalent dramatists into partisans and thereby assisted the decline of tragedy. With The Duke of Guise and Constantine the Great, John Dryden and Lee make their last, and least distinguished, contributions to Exclusion Crisis drama.

The changing nature of London’s commercial theatres was seen in the increasing involvement of singers, dancers, and spectacular effects. Many playwrights including Dryden, Wycherley, and Behn were adapting earlier plays by Shakespeare and Molière. New playwrights including Nathaniel Lee and Thomas Otway relied on sensational violence and effects in their tragedies and created the proto-types for the ‘she-tragedies’ offering spectacles of female suffering.