The Struggle For A Free Stage In London PDF Download

Excerpt from The Struggle for a Free Stage in London On the 22d of August, 1843, royal sanction was given to the Theatre Regulation Bill, depriving the two patent theatres - Drury Lane and Covent Garden - of the monopoly they had possessed, for nearly two centuries, of playing Shakespeare and the national drama, and extending the privilege to the minor, or independent, theatres which had sprung up and multiplied in London in spite of the "inviolable rights" of the patentees. The monopoly had been bolstered up by special legislation, revivals of vagrant acts, chicanery, and evasions of every sort, in the face of a growing public demand for an unrestricted stage for the regular drama. The subject of this volume is the story of the long struggle to free London of the theatrical monopoly, a struggle which began almost within the lifetime of the second Charles himself, and culminated in the parliamentary act of 1843. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.