The two issues which most exercised those dramatists called as witnesses before the 1832 Select Committee were the notorious patent theatre monopoly and the want of a system of dramatic copyright protection. The first was resolved through the establishment of free trade by the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843 but the second, though it was the subject of immediate legislation in 1833 and again in 1842, proved much more resistant to remedy. Nineteenth-century dramatic copyright was regulated not only by Acts of Parliament but through case law, which seemed to confuse an already exasperatingly muddled issue and in some ways to work against the interests of dramatic authors.

For effective copyright protection, the drama requires a formula which covers not merely the words on the page but the representation of that text in public performance on the stage. Drama and literature in the nineteenth century shared a common ancestor in the copyright legislation enacted in 1709 (8 Ann. c. 19), which granted protection for published works for fourteen years, extended by a similar number if the author was still alive at the end of the first period. Over a century later this term was revised in 1814 (54Geo. IIIc. 156), when authors were provided with twenty-eight years' protection from the date of publication or for life (whichever was the longer). Under both statutes the drama was subsumed under the general provisions for published works; and the disastrous omission as far as the playwright was concerned was that in neither case was any recognition given to dramatic performance.