is no such care taken of the souls of Southwark or Islington. The Victoria audiences may be the Alsatians of play-goers, and laugh, and weep, and hoot, in defiance of Law. They get their Jack Sheppards, unlicensed and unpaid for; but the strait-laced frequenters of the Adelphi and Olympic have the satisfaction of knowing that their Jack Sheppard has been licensed by a Deputy, for a certain amount of Her Majesty's money. There, the beauties of Tyburn are exhibited with a cum privilegio.
Will Lord Mahon's petition have the effect of altering this wickedness, this stupidity, this injustice and absurdity? We hope it may; but, we repeat it, we have little faith in the enthusiasm of Parliament. With the worthy gentlemen who compose it, the playhouse is become low and vulgar. Were they called upon to debate what should be the statute length of Cerito's petticoats, we should have greater hope of their activity, than when the subject involves the true interests of the English dramatist, and the real value of the English stage.
Lord Mahon's Petition
Punch's pessimism was fortunately not justified by the sequel, for in the following year, 1843, the Theatres Act abolished the monopoly of the patent theatres—which for more than a hundred years had confined the legitimate drama to Covent Garden, Drury Lane and the Haymarket—and thus inaugurated a policy of free trade.
Déjazet's London début in 1843 provoked the comment, applied by a later humorist to one of the plays of Aristophanes, that she was "as broad as she was long"; and the production of a ballet on Lady Macbeth in the same year prompted the really prophetic suggestion that the only way to get a five-act tragedy performed was to omit the whole of the dialogue and give the rôle of heroine to a première danseuse. As a matter of fact Taglioni appeared in Electra in 1845.
In 1844 Punch took a very gloomy view of the dramatic outlook; French dishes predominated, Shakespeare was "Cibberized," and comedy vulgarized at the Adelphi and the Olympic. Nor was he cheered by the activities of a society called the Syncretics, "whose boast it is that they can write tragedies which no company can act, and no audience can sit out"—a boast which might be triumphantly re-echoed by similar societies to-day. A Greek play, the Antigone, produced at Covent Garden in 1845 was an early harbinger of the fruitful movement which began at the end of the 'seventies. Punch's spirits, however, had already revived somewhat when "Shakespeare though banished from Drury Lane and Covent Garden found the snuggest asylum near the New River"—at Sadler's Wells under the enterprising management of Samuel Phelps and Mrs. Warner in 1844, and in the following year he notes that Shakespeare, expelled from England to make way for the ballet, had been welcomed in Paris in the person of Macready. The public knowledge of Shakespeare at the time was, according to Punch, confined to "elegant extracts."
A curious sidelight is thrown on the composition of theatrical programmes in the 'forties by the ironical regret expressed at the passing of the old school of comic song: "The old comic song was a description in lively verse of a murder or a suicide or some domestic affliction, and if sung at a minor theatre just after the half-price came in, never missed an encore." At the major theatres, and especially Drury Lane, the cast in spectacular plays was already reinforced by four-footed performers, and processions of animals through the streets were a familiar mode of theatrical advertisement. Managerial enterprise has always had its menagerial side. Foreign bipeds, however, were not always popular, and when Monte Cristo was produced at Drury Lane in 1848, with French performers, there was a patriotic hostile demonstration.
The Passing of Pantomimes
Judged by modern standards salaries were modest. Well-known actors are charged with extortion in demanding £60 a week, but it must be remembered that £60 was exactly all that Douglas Jerrold ever made out of his most popular and successful play—Black Eyed Susan. Those simple souls who lament the decadence of the harlequinade will be comforted to learn that as early as 1843 Punch deplores the triumph of scenery over fun, the supersession of Grimaldi by Stanfield; and he returns to his complaint in 1849 in "Christmas is not what it ought to be":—
Pantomime's quite on the wane,
Though vainly they try to enrich it,
By calling, again and again,
For "Hot Codlins" and "Tippetywitchet."
The stealing of poultry by clown
Has ceased irresistible sport to be,
If he swallowed a turkey it wouldn't go down;
Christmas is not what it ought to be.
The red-hot poker business has at any rate taken an unconscionably long time in dying, and it is not dead yet. But clowns, outside pantomime, have taken on a new lease of life thanks to Marceline and Grock. The present writer ventures to predict wonderful possibilities for harlequinade if revived and developed on the romantic and grotesque lines of the Russian ballet, to say nothing of the opportunities which it affords for satire. The craze for child actors and marionettes in 1852 led Punch to bestow an ironical commendation on the latter on the ground that they never squabbled in the greenroom.
Punch was all for clean plays, but he was no stickler for puritanism or prudery. In this same year of 1852 he indulges in well-deserved satire on the performances in Passion week. All theatres were supposed to be shut, with the result that while the legitimate drama was suppressed, acrobats or mountebanks of any sort could give entertainments. We may note that in 1853 Punch suggested that theatrical performances should begin at 8 instead of 7 p.m.; 6.30 p.m. is mentioned as the usual dinner hour. Besides the actors already noted Charles Mathews and Vestris, J. B. Buckstone and Paul Bedford are constantly mentioned and in the main with good will. The feud with Charles Kean was kept up to the end; Punch speaks of his "touchiness," and certainly spared no means of getting him on the raw. When Kean was made an F.S.A. in 1857 it was maliciously suggested that the initials stood for Fair Second-rate Actor. It was otherwise with Charles Kemble, that "first-rate actor of second-rate parts," as Macready styled the father of the gifted and delightful Fanny, and Adelaide the successful opera singer. After his retirement from the stage Kemble gave readings from Shakespeare at Willis's Rooms and elsewhere in 1844–45, and on his death in 1854, Punch paid him this graceful tribute:—
He linked us with a past of scenic art,
Larger and loftier than now is known;
Less mannered, it may be, our stage has grown,
Than when he played his part.
But where shall we now find, upon our scene,
The Gentleman in action, look and word,
Who wears his wit, as he would wear his sword,
As polished and as keen?
Come all who loved him: 'tis his passing bell:
Look your last look: cover the brave old face:
Kindly and gently bear him to his place—
Charles Kemble, fare thee well!
LABLACHE
The Reign of Italian Opera
A whole volume might be written on the glories, the splendours, and the absurdities of Italian opera in the 'forties and 'fifties as revealed, applauded, and criticized in the columns of Punch. We say Italian opera advisedly, because the domination of Italian composers and singers and of the Italian language was as yet practically unassailed. Germany, it is true, had already begun to knock at the door. Lord Mount Edgcumbe in his Reminiscences mentions the visit of a German operatic company in 1832. Staudigl, who "created" the title-rôle in Mendelssohn's Elijah when it was produced at Birmingham in 1846, is mentioned by Punch as singing in opera in London in 1841. Weber's Der Freischütz was given at the Haymarket in the summer of 1844. But the greater lights in the operatic firmament, judged by the test of fashionable patronage and indeed general popularity, were all Italian. The meteoric Malibran—Spanish