This thesis explores Shakespeare's Restoration afterlife, claiming that a succession dispute known as the Exclusion Crisis (1678-1682) helped to rescue his plays from obscurity. In addition to exploring what the Crisis can tell us about Shakespeare's authorial afterlife the thesis contends that the ten Shakespeare alterations produced between 1678 and 1682 provide insights not only into the politics of the period, but more specifically into the problematic implications of the ‘rape rhetoric' circulating in the late 1670s and early 1680s.