The opening decade of the nineteenth century was the least happy in Sheridan's career. He broke away from his old colleagues in Parliament at one period and was separated from his wife for a time. Yet while certain compensations were offered to him in his political and personal life, his association with Drury Lane Theatre was marked by particular ill-fortune. The truth is that at this time his negligence and procrastination over many years brought his playhouse to the edge of ruin.

Certain historians delight in pinpointing moments of change, the intersection of trends that mirror social progress. Charts are drawn to establish the point in time when ascending television viewing crosses descending newspaper circulation, or where rising city surpasses falling rural population. Dramatic history is rarely the product of such simplistic trends, but perhaps such a nexus may be cited in London in the spring of 1820. On 17 May of that year, William Charles Macready opened in Sheridan Knowles's Virginius at Covent Garden. It was a great success and established Macready as the leading actor in England, confirming the supremacy of a new style based on “domesticity” and “humanity.” On 29 May 1820, Edmund Kean opened at Drury Lane in another version of the Virginius story and failed completely. This was Kean's first London defeat and started him on a ten-year slide to oblivion, a slide which took much of romantic acting and dramaturgy with him.

“She is full of strength and grace, and though cold in surface there is burning Etna beneath”—this was Helen Faucit in 1849, as described by Mrs. Mary Coleridge. Perhaps the graphic words were meant for Helen Faucit as a person, but, if so, they apply equally well to her acting style in its maturity, a style that was distinguished alike by power and charm, by passionate “nature” and classical “art.”

Both historically and critically, in one important area our view of Victorian drama and theatre closely parallels that of the Victorian theatre historian and critic. We tend to regard that history as fully expressed by the cumulative record of the middle-class West End theatre and the middle-class West End drama. Drury Lane, Covent Garden, the Adelphi, the Olympic, the St. James's, the Haymarket, the Princess's, the Strand, the Lyceum—these are the theatres that always appear in our books and articles; and Taylor, Buckstone, Boucicault, Robertson, Maddison Morton, and Pinero the dramatists we always write about. The representative Victorian commentator upon the theatre, drama critic or historian, did the same. In 1866 Henry Morley stated categorically: “In our provinces and colonies the form of entertainment will be, as it now is, mainly determined by the example of the eight or nine theatres in or near the West end of London, of which I hold the performances to be worth serious attention.” And in Morley's Journal of a London Playgoer, a selection of his dramatic criticism from 1851 to 1866, there is no evidence that Morley paid serious attention, or any attention at all, to theatres outside this magic circle.

In 1879, many years after his initial success in the burletta, James Robinson Planché recalled how the renewed popularity of Kane O'Hara's Midas at the Haymarket in 1825, with the piquant Madame Vestris featured as Apollo, had moved him to write a similar play. He recalled, too, that, despite the fact that his works in burlesque and melodrama had been well received at the patent theatres, he could not persuade any manager, of either a major or minor house, “to accept my classical bantling.” The young playwright put away his manuscript and busied himself with a variety of successful works, opera and melodrama and farce. It was only on meeting Madame Vestris one day late in 1830 and learning that this outstanding actress, now without a permanent means of support, had conceived the idea of opening her own theatre on the site of the little Pavilion in Wych Street which Elliston had formerly occupied, that Planché resurrected his early manuscript and offered it to her for the initial presentation at the new Royal Olympic Theatre. She accepted, and Olympic Revels was performed on 3 January 1831. It was a most successful play in what was to become a most successful playhouse.

“L'Étang danced with nobility and precision, while Pécourt took all kinds of parts with grace, precision and lightness.” So P. Rameau delineated the qualities desired of a dancer in his Maître à danser (1725). Across the channel, John Weaver wrote in his Anatomical and Mechanical Lectures upon Dancing (1721) that Hester Santlow was “the most agreeable, the most correct Performer in the World.” The ballerina of the romantic period still pleased audiences with her grace, but no longer with her nobility. As the stately declamation of Kemble gave way to the exuberance of Kean, the style of theatrical dancing changed in somewhat similar fashion. In order to cope, the critics had to alter their standards and find a new set of adjectives to deal with the values of the new dance.

As every historian of the period is aware, the nineteenth-century English theatre offers a seemingly inexhaustible mine for research. So many actors, managers, playwrights, designers, critics, theatres—major, minor, and provincial—were active during the century that no one could possibly be expected to keep track of all of them, let alone know them all in any depth. To a large extent this cause for perpetual rejoicing by doctoral students and their grateful supervisors is due to the awesome amount of theatrical reportage during the century—some 550 periodicals alone covering the performing arts, according to the latest edition of Stratman, not to mention all the newspapers and other publications that regularly devoted columns to theatrical matters. Then, too, the period abounds in memoirs and biographies; there is an astonishing amount of iconographic material; while the great collections of ephemera and theatricalia at such places as the British Museum, the Bodleian, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and Harvard have preserved for us an immense treasure trove of playbills, prints, diatribes against hated rivals, illicit love letters, locks of hair, even the shoemaker's lasts for the boots of a reigning star—items invaluable to prospectors after theatrical truth. Add to this the data that can be found in archives, and what it all comes to is a staggering mass of information.

In his “Defence of Nineteenth-Century English Drama,” Michael R. Booth could confidently declare, “I am not preaching to my friends but to my enemies, and am resolved to do so unaided in this particular sermon.” I envy Professor Booth's easy task of separating friends from foes, for as a bibliographer and textual editor, I am faced with the dilemma of so many others in this field: the lines of demarcation are blurred or often nonexistent; friend and enemy are frequently one and the same. I find it unlikely that anyone to whom these remarks are addressed questions the value of nineteenth-century theatre and drama as legitimate scholarly pursuits, but I am equally confident that some—as is proportionally true in the entire community of literary scholars—have not the slightest concern for the precise and accurate transcription of the words and their forms that make up the extant theatrical texts. If these remarks sound somewhat defensive, I make no apology, for while it is probably true that “theatre scholars are not generally given to engaging in polemics,” the sad fact is that bibliographers and textual critics often are (or are forced to), thanks to the recalcitrance or shortsightedness of what seems a majority of scholars of literature and theatre. So while Professor Booth could cheerfully face his enemies “unaided,” I feel no shame in having at my back a small but valiant army of textual scholars ready to assist in defending the value of preparing authoritative critical editions—if and when they feel a work or body of works worth editing at all.