ABSTRACT
The Leicester Chronicle reported some nasty trouble during a performance of King Lear at the Theatre Royal, Leicester, in October 1841. The cause of the disturbance seems to have been the disappointment felt by the audience on the cheapest, gallery benches at the poor performance given by Charles Dillon in the role of Lear. Working-class audiences wanted bold performances; they were out of tune with the sentimentality which was increasingly popular with middle-class theatergoers. Between 1840 and 1870 the proportion of Shakespeare and other classic drama in the repertoire of Birmingham's popular Theatre Royal increased from fifteen to thirty percent. Shakespeare's apparently humble origins and lack of university education marked him out for radicals as a man of the people. The 1864 stand-off at Primrose Hill was perhaps the last moment when the working people's claim to ownership of Shakespeare was physically challenged by their rulers.
