Since Brian Cowan’s rereading of Steven Pincus’s work, the function of coffee-houses as sociable spaces par excellence of the second half of the seventeenth century (indeed since the opening of the first coffee-houses in Oxford in 1651, then London in 1652) has been greatly reevaluated and problematised. However disputed their historical role in the birth of the Habermasian “public sphere”, the association of coffee-houses with sedition and the birth of what would later become Whiggism seems to be confirmed, amongst other evidence, by King Charles II’s 1675 attempt, and indeed failure, to close down coffee-houses, which suggests the will to suppress them as an alternative arena of political debate. Whatever the reality of their organisation and the variety of their customers, the importance and plasticity of coffee-houses in representations, including on the comic stage, is indisputable. The rapid increase in the number of coffee-houses seems to have impressed the Restoration mind, if we are to judge by the number of broadsides, pamphlets and allusions available on coffee drinking. These provide a context, an interpretative framework for the further exploration of the symbolic readability of coffee-houses as a sociable space on stage.