ABSTRACT
First published in The News, I, 26 May 1805, p. 14. This review of the previous week’s productions at Covent Garden is followed by a review of Drury Lane’s productions for the same week. Hunt returns here to a topic that preoccupied him throughout his early period of drama reviewing: the aesthetic failings and social ills of child acting, a new entertainment vogue largely inspired by the mercurial career of the subject of this review, Master Betty (see below, n. 1). For Hunt’s other comments on this phenomenon, see above, p. 5, and below, pp. 11–13. See also the Theatricals section of The News for 24 November, 1805, p. 222; 12 January 1806, pp. 278–9; 4 May 1806, p. 406.
