As a reflector of contemporary values, the theatre creates its own distorting filters which derive from the day-to-day compromises that the transmission of a text to an on-stage performance imposes: the talent and physique of the actors, the management's estimate of what will ‘go’ with the public, the personality of the prime-mover (chief actor, actor-manager, or modern director) which colours that estimate. This was particularly the case in the mid 1830s when those who thought at all seriously about the drama's power to comment on real life saw themselves as a noble rear-guard ranged bravely against the commercial savvy of a man like Alfred Bunn, manager of Covent Garden. And no occasion more sharply illumines the social and stylistic limits within which a playwright had to work than the moment when William Charles Macready entered the fashionable portals of Edward Bulwer's chambers in the Albany on 23 February 1836.