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Abstract

By 1854, when Samuel Phelps mounted what was to be the one major Pericles of the nineteenth century, his Sadler's Wells Theatre had already acquired reputation as a museum for the exhibition of curiosities.l During the previous ten seasons he had intrigued audiences and critics with his play selection, spicing his repertoire of traditional favorites with scattering of such Shakespearean exotica as All's Well That Ends Well, Antony and Cleopatra and Timon of Athens (along with an assortment of even lesserknown Elizabethan plays by Rowley, Fletcher and Webster). Phelps' motivation in introducing such plays was unimpeachable, springing from the same reformer's impulse which led him to abandon the heavily-revised acting editions of Shakespeare in favor of nearly uncut scripts: he simply wished to restore as much Shakespeare to the stage as possible. Yet critical reaction to his efforts was often markedly ambivalent. Following his 1851 production of All's Well That Ends Well, one reviewer perfectly captured the blend of highminded tolerance and grimacing distaste that characterized reviews of many of Sadler's Wells' dramatic curiosities, remarking: we have no more right to be astounded at finding some Elizabethan crudity within its precincts than at finding Buddhist idol in missionary collection.2