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Excerpt from The Contemporary Drama of England
The situation of the theatre before the correcting Act may best be shown by distinguishing between its legal and actual status. Before 1843 only three theatres in England were legally empowered to play the legitimate national drama, Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, Congreve, Otway, and others of the old dramatists. These theatres were Drury Lane and Covent Garden, which existed by patent granted by Charles II at the opening of the theatres in 1662, and the Little Theatre in the Haymarket which lived under a renewable license, first granted in 1766 to Samuel Foote. These theatres were known as the majors. As they had a monopoly of legitimate plays, all other theatres, known as minors, were limited to concerts, farces, and variety entertainments. Serious efforts were made by law to distinguish between the legitimate play and the play to be produced by minors, and it was finally decreed that plays for the minors should be only those plays that had musical accompaniment.
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