_Punch's_ pessimism was fortunately not justified by the sequel, for in the following year, 1843, the Theatres Act abolished the monopoly of the patent theatres--which for more than a hundred years had confined the legitimate drama to Covent Garden, Drury Lane and the Haymarket--and thus inaugurated a policy of free trade. Déjazet's London _début_ in 1843 provoked the comment, applied by a later humorist to one of the plays of Aristophanes, that she was "as broad as she was long"; and the production of a ballet on Lady Macbeth in the same year prompted the really prophetic suggestion that the only way to get a five-act tragedy performed was to omit the whole of the dialogue and give the _rôle_ of heroine to a _première danseuse_. As a matter of fact Taglioni appeared in _Electra_ in 1845. In 1844 _Punch_ took a very gloomy view of the dramatic outlook; French dishes predominated, Shakespeare was "Cibberized," and comedy vulgarized at the Adelphi and the Olympic. Nor was he cheered by the activities of a society called the Syncretics, "whose boast it is that they can write tragedies which no company can act, and no audience can sit out"--a boast which might be triumphantly re-echoed by similar societies to-day. A Greek play, the _Antigone_, produced at Covent Garden in 1845 was an early harbinger of the fruitful movement which began at the end of the 'seventies. _Punch's_ spirits, however, had already revived somewhat when "Shakespeare though banished from Drury Lane and Covent Garden found the snuggest asylum near the New River"--at Sadler's Wells under the enterprising management of Samuel Phelps and Mrs. Warner in 1844, and in the following year he notes that Shakespeare, expelled from England to make way for the ballet, had been welcomed in Paris in the person of Macready. The public knowledge of Shakespeare at the time was, according to _Punch_, confined to "elegant extracts." A curious sidelight is thrown on the composition of theatrical programmes in the 'forties by the ironical regret expressed at the passing of the old school of comic song: "The old comic song was a description in lively verse of a murder or a suicide or some domestic affliction, and if sung at a minor theatre just after the half-price came in, never missed an encore." At the major theatres, and especially Drury Lane, the cast in spectacular plays was already reinforced by four-footed performers, and processions of animals through the streets were a familiar mode of theatrical advertisement. Managerial enterprise has always had its menagerial side. Foreign bipeds, however, were not always popular, and when _Monte Cristo_ was produced at Drury Lane in 1848, with French performers, there was a patriotic hostile demonstration. [Sidenote: _The Passing of Pantomimes_]