A droll is a short, funny performance that began in England during the Puritan Interregnum, a time when there was no king. When theaters were closed, actors could not perform plays as they usually did. To earn money, they borrowed scenes from famous Elizabethan plays, added dancing and other entertainment, and performed these shows, sometimes without permission. The stories in drolls often focused on physical comedy or clever dialogue.

Francis Kirkman’s book, The Wits, or Sport Upon Sport (1662), includes twenty-seven drolls. Three of these were adapted from Shakespeare’s plays: Bottom the Weaver from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the gravedigger scene from Hamlet, and a group of scenes involving Falstaff called The Bouncing Knight. Another droll used a subplot from John Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan, which tells the story of a greedy wine seller tricked by a foolish man.

Almost half of the drolls in Kirkman’s book were based on plays by Beaumont and Fletcher. Examples include Forc’d Valour (from The Humorous Lieutenant), The Stallion (from The Custom of the Country), and the taunting of Pharamond from Philaster. The popularity of Beaumont and Fletcher’s work in this collection shows that their plays would later become central to theater during the early Restoration period. One droll, The Lame Commonwealth from The Beggar’s Bush, includes extra dialogue, suggesting it was taken from a performance script. A character named Clause, the King of the Beggars in this scene, also appears in later writings, such as the memoirs of Bampfylde Moore Carew, who called himself the King of the Beggars.

Actor Robert Cox was likely the most famous performer of drolls.