Meanwhile, during and since the period when Sir Henry Irving filled the supreme place among producers of Shakespeare on the stage, the simple method of Shakespearean production has been given no serious chance. The anticipation of its pecuniary failure has not been put in satisfactory conditions to any practical test. The last time that it was put to a sound practical test it did not fail. While Irving was a boy, Phelps at Sadler's Wells Theatre gave, in well-considered conditions, the simple method a trial. Phelps's playhouse was situated in the unfashionable neighbourhood of Islington. But the prophets of evil, who were no greater strangers to Phelps's generation than they are to our own, were themselves confuted by his experience. V On the 27th of May 1844 Phelps, a most intelligent actor and a serious student of Shakespeare, opened the long-disused Sadler's Wells Theatre in partnership with Mrs Warner, a capable actress, whose rendering of Imogen went near perfection. Their design was inspired by "the hope," they wrote in an unassuming address, "of eventually rendering Sadler's Wells what a theatre ought to be--a place for justly representing the works of our great dramatic poets." This hope they went far to realise. The first play that they produced was _Macbeth_. Phelps continued to control Sadler's Wells Theatre for more than eighteen years. During that period he produced, together with many other English plays of classical repute, no fewer than thirty-one of the thirty-seven great dramas which came from Shakespeare's pen. In his first season, besides _Macbeth_ he set forth _Hamlet_, _King John_, _Henry VIII._, _The Merchant of Venice_, _Othello_, and _Richard III._ To these he added in the course of his second season, _Julius Caesar_, _King Lear_, and _The Winter's Tale_. _Henry IV._, part I., _Measure for Measure_, _Romeo and Juliet_, and _The Tempest_ followed in his third season; _As You Like It_, _Cymbeline_, _The Merry Wives of Windsor_, and _Twelfth Night_, in his fourth. Each succeeding season saw further additions to the Shakespearean repertory, until only six Shakespearean dramas were left unrepresented, viz.--_Richard II._, the three parts of _Henry VI._, _Troilus and Cressida_, and _Titus Andronicus_. Of these, one alone, _Richard II._, is really actable.