and 1690s barely broke even or were economic disasters for their respective theatre companies. Parody Even after the King's Company got their new well-appointed playhouse in Drury Lane in 1674, they could not take full advantage of it, as they lacked the capital to mount competitive spectaculars. Instead, they attempted to simultaneously capitalize on Duke's most successful mid-1670s offerings by mounting several burlesques or parodies of them, written by Thomas Duffett. The records for the mid-1670s are particularly incomplete, and neither exact dates nor the public reaction to Duffett's pieces are known, but the printed versions have proved highly amusing to modern critics. The first of them, The Empress of Morocco, simultaneously caricatured Settle's Empress of Morocco and the sumptuous new Dorset Garden production of Davenant's Macbeth adaptation, with Duffett's three witches flying in over the pit on brooms at the high point of the action, followed by the descent of Hecate over the Stage "in a glorious chariot, adorned with pictures of hell and devils, and made of a large wicker basket". The Mock Tempest improves on the shower of fire over the audience in the Dorset Garden pseudo-Shakespearean tempest scene with a rain of "fire, apples, nuts". 1680s: Political spectacular During the political unrest of 1678–84 with the Popish Plot and the Exclusion Crisis, there was little investment in spectaculars. In 1682, the companies merged, making Dorset Garden's technical resources available to Dryden, who rapidly overcame his principled objection to the superficiality of "spectacle" and "empty operas". The display of machinery and extravagant visuals that he went on to write, Albion and Albanius (1684–85), is quoted in the "Introductory" section, with the cave of Proteus rising out of the sea. Here is Juno in her flying peacock machine: The Clouds divide, and JUNO appears in a Machine drawn by Peacocks; while a Symphony is playing, it moves gently forward, and as it descends, it opens and discovers the Tail of the Peacock, which is so large, that it almost fills the opening of the Stage between Scene and Scene. Unusual visual allegory in this Tory panegyric of Charles II and the House of Stuart includes a figure representing the radical Whig leader Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury "with fiend's wings, and snakes twisted round his body; he is encompassed by several fanatical rebellious heads, who suck poison from him, which runs out of a tap in his