Through their great actors, Kemble, Kean, and later Macready, they maintained Shakespearean drama and a few of the old stock plays; but they were forced for the rest of the time to resort to melodrama, spectacle, or pantomime. The minors, though they now became more daring in their invasions of legitimate drama, naturally continued the kind of entertainments at which they had succeeded and to which they had forced the great theatres to succumb. The long struggle for a free stage was now nearing its end; the patent theatres were maintained with increasing difficulty; the minors prospered. With the death of Kean in 1833, a great prop of the patent theatres fell; and though the agitation for parliamentary reform in that year failed, and the final legislation against theatrical monopoly was not passed until 1847, the great theatres ceased to determine the history of the drama. Macready's two periods of management, 1837-39 and 1841-43, were the final efforts to restore the old régime that had maintained tragedy since the Restoration. The "illegitimate" drama that triumphed in the theatres comprised a wide range of entertainments, mostly farcical in their dramatic elements. Toward the end of the eighteenth century the rage for dumb show and musical additions invaded the regular drama. Even Kotzebue had to be decked out with songs and choruses. Moreover, a peculiar species of the illegitimate drama developed in the plays of Andrews, Dibdin, Reynolds, Boaden, and Colman the younger that served as a half substitute for tragedy. This species seems to have been mainly due to the ingenuity of George Colman. Those of his plays verging on tragedy, of which "The Battle of Hexham" (1789), "The Surrender of Calais" (1791), "The Mountaineers" (1793), and "The Iron Chest" (1796) are the chief, are lively medleys of tragedy, comedy, opera, and farce. In each a tragic story is told in blank verse, audaciously Shakespearean, and this is mixed with broad comedy or farce in prose. There is a bustling action with shifting scenes, much spectacle, many songs, solos, duets, or choruses, for which a crowd of soldiers, monks, beggars, foresters, or the like, is always within call. "The Surrender of Calais" tells the story of Queen Philippa's mercy; "The Iron Chest" is a dramatization of "Caleb Williams"; "The Battle of Hexham" is a sort of musicalized chronicle history, presenting the adventures of Adeline in search of her husband, who turns out to be a captain of a band of robbers and the rescuer of Queen Margaret and the prince after the battle of Hexham. "The Mountaineers," suggested by a story in "Don Quixote," finds its land of romance in Spain, where a Christian prisoner elopes with the daughter of his Moorish jailer, accompanied by a stage Irishman as _gracioso_; and this group, when recaptured, are rescued by Octavian, a half-mad tragic soliloquizer, who also recovers his long-lost love, and was thought to be extremely impressive when impersonated by Kemble.