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.
[Footnote 30: Madame Lafarge (1816-52) achieved a sinister immortality by the famous poisoning case which bears her name, "one of the most obscure in the annals of French justice" (Larousse). After being imprisoned for twelve years she was released and died in 1852.]
_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."