UNPRECEDENTED SUCCESS
AS MilEFPA!
Wlnrh will be Performed every Evening until further notice-
circus and theatre took place: the
entertainment was simultaneously a spectacle
on horseback and a dramatized play with plot
and characters.
But the presence of theatrical elements
within the circus is only part of the story;
reciprocally, the nineteenth-century theatre
- even in the foremost playhouses of the
land -- was deeply coloured by types of
entertainment which we associate today more
with circus than with drama. The root cause
of this interfusion of forms was the legal
position of dramatic performance in
Britain.10) The Theatre Regulation Act of
1737 restricted perfomance of "legitimate", or
spoken, drama to the two Patent houses,
Covent Garden and Drury Lane, and although
the privilege of staging drama was gradually
extended to other theatres, the law, as
interpreted and modified over the next two
centuries, effectively prevented most
theatres in the land from putting on plays
which relied on spoken dialogue. In practice
this situation forced the minor theatres to
develop alternative forms of entertainment,
and the inventiveness with which they
combined music, dance, scenic splendour,
pageantry, costuming, and other sorts of
spectacle made them hugely popular. Indeed,
the Patent houses found that they had to
mount comparable attractions in order to
compete for audiences. In 1823 Ducrow took
his stud to Covent Garden, and in the 1838-
39 season he shared top billing at Drury
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