m encouraging. It was not quite so
black, indeed, as it had been in the late 'fifties and early 'sixties,
when the "legitimate" enterprises of Phelps at Sadler's Wells and
Charles Kean at the Princess's had failed to hold their ground, and when
modern comedy and drama were represented almost exclusively by
adaptations from the French. There had been a slight stirring of
originality in the series of comedies produced by T. W. Robertson at the
Prince of Wales's theatre, where, under the management of Bancroft
(q.v.) a new school of mounting and acting, minutely faithful (in theory
at any rate) to everyday reality, had come into existence. But the hopes
of a revival of English comedy seemed to have died with Robertson's
death. One of his followers, James Albery, possessed both imagination
and wit, but had not the strength of character to do justice to his
talent, and sank into a mere adapter. In the plays of another disciple,
H. J. Byron, the Robertsonian or "cup-and-saucer" school declined upon
sheer inanity. Of the numerous plays signed by Tom Taylor some were
original in substance, but all were cast in the machine-made French
mould. Wilkie Collins, in dramatizing some of his novels, produced
somewhat crude anticipations of the modern "problem play." The literary
talent of W. S. Gilbert displayed itself in a group of comedies both in
verse and prose; but Gilbert saw life from too peculiar an angle to
represent it otherwise than fantastically. The Robertsonian impulse
seemed to have died utterly away, leaving behind it only five or six
very insubstantial comedies and a subdued, unrhetorical method in
acting. This method the Bancrofts proceeded to apply, during the
'seventies, to revivals of stage classics, such as _The School for
Scandal_, _Money_ and _Masks and Faces_, and to adaptations from the
French of Sardou.

While the modern drama appeared to have relapsed into a comatose
condition, poetic and romantic drama was giving some signs of life. At
the Lyceum in 1871 Henry Irving had leapt into fame by means of his
performance of Mathias in _The Bells_, an adaptation from the French of
Erckmann-Chatrian. He followed this up by an admirably picturesque
performance of the title-part in _Charles I._ by W. G. Wills. In the
autumn of 1874 the great success of Irving's Hamlet was hailed as the
prelude to a revival of tragic acting. As a matter of fact, it was the
prelude to a long series of remarkable achievements in romantic