ABSTRACT
The 1737 Theatre Licensing Act changed the nature of the British theatre utterly. Women participated in the culture: they walked about freely, they joined in mixed coffee house debates and were novelists, essayists, historians, translators, literary critics, biographers and of course theatre managers, actresses and playwrights. The redesigned Covent Garden, as well as many provincial theatres of the period, was designed in pseudo-Grecian Palladian style. The theatre itself, which should have been a leading player in the public consciousness, was shackled by the 1737 Act. The British theatre’s foremost practitioner between 1740 and his retirement in 1777 was David Garrick. Meanwhile, and perhaps unsurprisingly, the public which had filled up to six theatres in London before 1737, often found other amusements. People in the second half of the eighteenth century regarded the theatre as a public place for argument, laughter, and scandalmongering, assertion of rights, eating and drinking, defiance of authority, flirting, and fixing sexual assignations.
