Censure is impartially bestowed on home-made and imported specimens of the Newgate drama—Jack Sheppard and Madame Lafarge.[30] Of the latter we read that besides being revolting it was "disgusting and filthy." The play is compared, to its great disadvantage, with The Beggar's Opera, which is defended as being "real satire and not wallowing in vice." George Stephens's tragedy Martinuzzi comes in for frequent ridicule, though the chief rôles were taken by Phelps and Mrs. Warner, and the ridicule seems to have been well deserved. On what grounds Stephens gained a place in the D.N.B. is not evident, as his dramas soon died beyond all possibilities of resurrection. Lord Mahon's "petition" to Parliament on behalf of the drama in the year 1842 met with Punch's support. It amounted to this, that Parliament in the bounty of its wisdom would permit what were then called the minor theatres to play the very best dramas they could obtain; as it was they were only open to the very worst. Douglas Jerrold writing under his signature of "Q" then develops the argument:—
Virtue, decency, loyalty, and a bundle of other excellences, are only valuable in Westminster. In that city of light and goodness, the Lord Chamberlain deputes some holy man to read all plays ere they are permitted to be produced before a Westminster audience. There 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,