Post-Renaissance
After theatres re-opened with the start of the Restoration era, the bed trick made sporadic appearances in plays by Elkanah Settle and Aphra Behn, and perhaps reached its culmination in Sir Francis Fane's Love in the Dark (1675); but in time it passed out of fashion in drama.
Modern critics, readers, and audience members tend to find the bed trick highly artificial and lacking in credibility (though scholar Marliss Desens cites one alleged real-life instance of its employment in Shakespeare's era).
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