Ere
The flaming chariot of Phoebus mounts
The vaults of Heaven, Rinaldo will be dead.
_Mar._ Oh, horror piled on horror!
Lo, the moon----
And so on. The result was called--and I think rightly--"a tragedy."
The alternative to these tragedies was a farce, in which everybody
went to an inn and was mistaken for somebody else (causing great fun
and amusement), the heat and burden of the evening resting upon a
humorous man-servant called _Trickett_ (or something good like that).
And whether the superior people of the day said that English Drama was
dead, I do not know; but they may be excused for having thought that,
if it wasn't dead, it ought to have been.
Fortunately we are doing better than that to-day. But we are not doing
as well as we should be, and the reason generally given is that we
have not enough theatres. No doubt we have many more theatres than we
had a hundred years ago, even if you only count those which confine
themselves to plays without music, but the mass-effect of all these
music-hall-theatres is to make many people think and say that English
Drama is (once more) dead.
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