[Sidenote: _English Plays and Foreign Players_]
To go back to 1893, the three plays which _Punch_ specially singled out for approval were _Charley's Aunt_, _Becket_ and _The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_. The nearest approach to criticism is to be found in the notice of the first-named piece, in which, while admitting that Penley was "inimitably and irresistibly funny" throughout two hours of "all but continuous merriment," the writer lays his finger on a real blot--the intrusion of cheap sentimentality. Tennyson's _Becket_ is pronounced a great and genuine success, both for Irving and the author, who had treated the story "with a free hand, a poetic touch and a liberal mind." The opening sentences of the notice, however, illustrate _Punch's_ insuperable inclination to succumb to frivolity. "_Becket_ has beaten the record": and he goes on to speculate how Thomas à Becket would have beaten _The Record_ if that paper had existed in his time and had ventured to criticize him.
_The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_ might be too strong meat for the young person, but it "marked an epoch in our dramatic annals," it was "every inch a play," and revealed in Mrs. Patrick Campbell an actress of exceptional gifts. There is a delightful burlesque of Ibsen in "Pill Doctor Herdal," but _Punch_ did not leave well alone, and in another number furiously denounced _The Master Builder_ (which he had read but not seen). "Of all the weak-kneed, wandering, effeminate, unwholesome, immoral, dashed rot (to quote Lord Arthur Pomeroy in _The Pantomime Rehearsal_) this is the weak-kneed-est," and so on in the superlative degree with all the other epithets of abuse. This was the year in which Madame Duse made her London _début_, but _Punch_ did not get beyond a few puns on her name. The visit of Got, Mlle. Reichemberg and other representatives of the Comédie Française is treated less cavalierly, and the rumoured reconciliation of Gilbert and Sullivan suggests the possibilities of a new "Savoy Peace"--"the Reunion of Arts." Sarah Bernhardt, Yvette Guilbert and Réjane were the three bright particular foreign stars in 1894. Sarah Bernhardt was, as we know, an old flame of the susceptible _Punch_, and though he found _Ize l_ the reverse of exhilarating, homage was paid to the golden voice of the heroine in a graceful cartoon of "Sarah Chrysostoma." Réjane in _Madame Sans-Gêne_ comes in for high but not unqualified praise. She was perfect in the last act, but overdid the _canaillerie_ of her farce in earlier passages, or at least _Punch_ thought so. His tribute to Yvette Guilbert, "the Queen of the 'Café Concert,'" killed two birds with one stone, for it took the form of a very neat and witty adaptation of her famous song, "Les Vierges," at the expense of the "unco' guid" of Glasgow, whose Puritanism had recently aroused the protest of Sir Frederic Leighton and other Academicians:--