Turning to the theatre, "Scriblerus" attacks all three major companies of the 1741-42 London season. He first introduces the two patented theatres, Drury Lane and Covent Garden, as rivals only in that debased dramatic form the pantomime. "The angry _Quack_" (p. 25) is John Weaver, dancing master at Drury Lane and author of _Anatomical and Mechanical Lectures upon Dancing_ (1721), who claimed for himself[7] the credit of having originated pantomime upon the English stage. Weaver's _Orpheus and Eurydice_ at Drury Lane (1718) was hardly noticed, whereas John Rich had more recently bestowed "an ORPHEUS on the Town" (p. 25) to very different effect. Rich's _Orpheus and Eurydice: With the Metamorphoses of Harlequin_ had opened on 12 February 1740 at Covent Garden, where he was manager. With Rich himself as Harlequin, it was a wild success that season--remaining a regular and highly popular afterpiece through the 1741-42 season and later. What _The Scribleriad_ tells us of "_Ambivius Turpio_, the Stage 'Squire" (p. 26) suggests that he is to be identified with Charles Fleetwood, Esq.,[8] the wealthy, inexperienced amateur who managed Drury Lane (this even though the original Ambivius Turpio was an actor, while Fleetwood, apparently, was not). All managers were frequently involved in disputes over actors' pay, but Fleetwood's were the most notorious. It was the Drury Lane company that included "the contending POLLYS" (p. 27)--Mrs. Cibber and Mrs. Clive who had bitterly quarrelled in 1736 over who should play that role in _The Beggar's Opera_. Fleetwood, like Rich, gave a play for the benefit of Shakespeare's monument in Westminster Abbey.[9] What little that Fleetwood knew of management he might well have learned from his one-time under-manager Theophilus Cibber, the "young PTOLOMY" (p. 27) who, of course, had derived his knowledge from his "great Sire alone." The third theatre attacked in _The Scribleriad_ is Goodman's Fields. Its manager, Henry Giffard, had no patent, but contrived to evade the Licensing Act by the subterfuge of charging admission to a concert in two parts and then offering, "gratis" in the interval, a regular full-length play and afterpiece. The "City Wrath" (p. 26) arose from the fact that the theatre was inside the City boundaries and was thought to encourage vice; indeed, Sir John Barnard and his fellow aldermen managed to prevent it opening for the 1742-43 season and thereafter. Allusions in the poem are to the theatre's highly successful 1741-42 season when Garrick sprang to fame as Cibber's Richard III and also played Tate's King Lear. On page 26 "Scriblerus" sneers at Garrick's small stature,[10] and refers to the impropriety of including the figure of Cato in the décor at Goodman's Fields.