The final question, then, to which the previous chapter and indeed the whole book, leads, is: what part did these theatre managements, in which women were leaders or equal partners, play in the formation of the stage as it is in London today? How might the history of the drama, between the select committees of 1832 and 1866, be reconceived in the context of the development of the West End that I have suggested here?

To ask the question in this form is to refocus attention on the abjected commercial performance culture that has been almost universally despised. The mid-nineteenth-century drama has been generally understood, not only in the wake of Modernism but also by the literary leaders of taste in its own time, to have been in deep darkness, waiting for a new dawn that did not appear until Ibsen was translated. But I am telling a different story, one that takes more account of the vigour and indeed the experimentation and innovation of that mid-century performance culture. Its leading edge was not Shakespeare, despite the committee men's obsessions, nor the beginnings of a minor kind of realism, the ‘cup and saucer’ drama that has been retrospectively discovered as a precursor to Naturalism. The stage was not a pale equivalent of the dominant realist novel that was developing in the 1840–60s. It was rather, I would argue, the beginning of contemporary theatre, expressed in music, excitement, visual delight and comedy. It offers an opposite and equal response to the pressures of the Real – not by mirroring it with a constrictive ‘realism’, but by defying those limits, while still taking hold of the moment; by theatricality, exuberance and excess, in fantasy and burlesque.