Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, "Drama" to "Dublin"

part in the amusements of bear-baiting and cock-fighting. On the other

hand, the demands of the stage and those of its patrons and of the public of the "Augustan" age, and of that which succeeded it, were, in general, fast bound by the trammels of a taste with which a revival of the poetic drama long remained irreconcilable. There is every reason to conclude that the art o...