 Parliament hoped that this would civilize the audiences and lead to more literate playwrighting—instead, it created an explosion of music halls, comedies and sensationalist melodramas.Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron were the most important literary dramatists of their time (although Shelley's plays were not performed until later in the century).Shakespeare was enormously popular, and began to be performed with texts closer to the original, as the drastic rewriting of 17th and 18th century performing versions for the theatre were gradually removed over the first half of the century.