ABSTRACT
The great theatrical move towards free trade was the 1843 Theatres Act. The most notorious clauses of the 1843 Act extended the Lord Chamberlain’s power to cover the ‘minor’ as well as the former patent theatres and to censure or ban outright any play ‘if it is fitting for the preservation of good manners, decorum or of the public peace so to do’. The plays of Knowles’s younger contemporary, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who attempted to bring a theatre regulation act to Parliament a decade before 1843, were probably even more popular. The new Lord Chamberlain, the Marquess of Conyngham, was no friend of the patent theatres and had a particular animosity towards Alfred Bunn. The Romantic theatre produced more excellent female than male actors. Other fine Romantic actresses included Mary Amelia Warner, nee Huddart, who was also a theatre manager, but before that, a famous Lady Macbeth, an attractive Portia and Macready’s Gertrude in Hamlet at Drury Lane in 1842.
