The good lady, after setting forth the sins of the people of the province, says: “You have no masquerades nor music gardens to entertain you, neither are theatrical entertainments frequent among you,” which implies that they took place sometimes. May her shade grant pardon for the use of her book in an article on the play-house. But Sophia Hume exhorted in vain, for the “Gazette,” in its issue for October 3, 1754, contains this rather contradictory advertisement: “At the New Theatre on Monday next, (by a company of comedians from London,) a tragedy called the ‘Fair Penitent.’ Tickets to be had of Mr. John Remington and at the printer’s. Price, stage box 50s.; front and side boxes, 40s.; pitt, 30s., and gallery, 20s.” The “Gazette” dramatic reporter says of the play: “Last Monday evening the New Theatre in this town was opened, when a company of comedians performed the tragedy called the ‘Fair Penitent,’ much to the satisfaction of the audience.” The theatrical history of Charleston from this time on, however, is familiar.[19] In the paucity of information about the drama in America at this early period, it may be admissible to refer to what fiction has attempted respecting it in a novel by John Esten Cooke, entitled “The Virginia Comedians,” in which he describes the Williamsburg theater, and the representation in it of a play of Shakespeare’s. As Shakespeare expressed it, “imagination bodies forth the form of things unknown,” and men of genius, like Sir Walter Scott and the elder Dumas, could, in the exercise of this faculty, represent scenes and incidents of the past more vividly and apparently as truthfully as can be derived from the scant material usually left for the historian--an illustration of which will be found in Dumas’s account of the trial and execution of Charles I., in his sequel to “The Three Musketeers,” “Twenty Years After”; and in Scott’s novels there are many like illustrations. “This history,” says Fielding, in the preface to his celebrated novel which he calls “The History of Tom Jones,” “differs from other histories in this, that in other histories nothing is true but the names, whilst in this everything is true but the names”; and the author of “The Virginia Comedians,” though not ranking with the great masters of fiction that have been referred to, appears to have been well informed respecting Colonial Virginia, and may be accepted as having given what is probably a fair picture of a night in the Williamsburg theater during the Colonial period.[20]