‘If there is an occasion on which I loathe a theatre more than ever’, Shaw wrote to Henry Arthur Jones, ‘it is on a first night.’ Shaw had a general antipathy to footlights and greasepaint and to the whole paraphernalia of the theatre; but it is surprising how many dramatists of the nineteenth century seemed to share his prejudice, though not necessarily for the same reason. Audiences were fractious and unpredictable, frequently inattentive, sometimes dominated by claques, occasionally even given to rioting (as notably at Covent Garden in 1809 and Drury Lane in 1848), and by ancint custom and privilege possessed and not infrequently exercised the power, most terrifying to authors, of damning a new play on its first night. In the course of the century audiences tended to become less volatile and more refined, at least in the more fashionable theatres outside the East End – though there were still disturbances and the police were sometimes needed to keep order. As late as 1880 not only was the Haymarket affected by rowdy protest (over the abolition of the pit) but at the Vaudeville, during the premiére of Albery's Jacks and Jills, when what appeared to be organised opposition constantly interrupted the play, the author had to appear at the footlights and ‘with gesticulations of menace and defiance’ appeal for calm. The trend, however, was for first nights to become ever grander affairs as the occasion for the assembly of men and women of consequence and fashion.