The best known date in French theatre history between the seventeenth and the twentieth centuries is surely February 25, 1830. On that night and for weeks thereafter, the opposing schools of classicism and romanticism clashed openly and bitterly at the Comédie-Française over Victor Hugo's new play, Hernani. To gain some idea of the significance of the struggle, one must remember that for a century and a half the strict formulae of the grand siècle had dominated the stage, that before the romantics no serious dramatist had dared to challenge the quasi-divinity of Racine and Corneille. Their works served as the unquestioned examples for later dramatists, whose tragedies were expected to follow those of the masters not only in the famous three unities, but in every detail of construction, down to the proper placement of pauses within the rigidly controlled poetic line, the alexandrin. Sterile imitations were the almost inevitable result, leading by the beginning of the nineteenth century to the lifeless neoclassic epics of such now mercifully forgotten dramatists as Antoine Vincent Arnault and Luce de Lancival.

During the early years of Elizabeth's reign, the theatre was dominated by boy companies:

Out of seventy-eight rewards for Court performances between 1558 and 1576, twenty-one went to the Paul's boys, fifteen to the royal chapels, and ten to schoolboys, making a total of forty-six, as against only thirty-two paid to adult companies.

Still regarded by many as little more than vagrants, most actors in nineteenth-century America had no sense of economic security; many were continually on the edge of abject poverty, others victims of excessive drink. These difficulties produced countless emotionally charged confrontations between actors and managers all over the nation, much like the one between William Duffy and John Hamilton in Albany, New York.

The importance of the afterpiece in David Garrick's managerial scheme is generally acknowledged, though most grant too casually, perhaps, that the “English Roscius” was also a practical and clever theatrical entrepreneur. He understood the popular taste and, even as he attempted to improve that taste, he catered to it for obvious financial reasons. Had a Londoner visited Drury Lane on the night of 3 October 1768, therefore, and dutifully witnessed the “prisons, racks, and death” of The Earl of Warwick, Dr. Thomas Francklin's patriotic exercise in pseudo-istorical, blank verse tragedy, he would have been rewarded with the premiere of The Padlock, a delightful afterpiece by Isaac Bickerstaffe and Charles Dibdin.

Back in London I devoted myself to playgoing, the crowning experience of which was seeing Forbes-Robertson as Hamlet at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane: a noble actor in a noble role at a noble theatre—and, as I remember it, a production without gimmicks or recondite interpretations of the text. Before returning to the States I wished to see all kinds and conditions of English theatre, and after visits to the West End, I sought Suburbia.