ike Edmund's very
words:

Why bastard? wherefore base?
When my dimensions are as well compact,
My mind as generous and my shape as true,
As honest madam's issue? Why brand they us
With base? with baseness? with bastardy? base, base?
Legitimate Edgar, I must have your land;
Our father's love is to the bastard Edmund
As to the legitimate: fine word "legitimate."

The antagonism between the two forms of entertainment is by no means
of to-day merely. Shakespeare noted with an air of regret that
"inexplicable dumb shows and noise" enjoyed public admiration in his
day, and, centuries before, the audiences of the ancient actors
underwent reduction by reason of the rival performances of the
dancers, mimes, and mountebanks of the period. The Roman people began
in time to care less for the comedians than for the mimes. Some of
these had the art to represent an entire play, such as the "Hercules
Furens," to the delight and astonishment of the spectators. Augustus
is said to have reconciled the Romans to many severe imposts by
recalling their favourite mime and dancer, Pylades, who had been
banished for pointing with his finger at a spectator who had offended
him. The "dumb shows" referred to by Hamlet, however, were not so much
distinct entertainments as excrescences upon the regular performances
of the theatre, interpolations to win the applause of the groundlings.
Pantomime proper was a development of ballet; the result of an
endeavour to connect one dance with another by means of a slight
string of story. In England systematised entertainments of dancing and
singing were brought upon the English stage by Davenant, "to check,"
we are told, "the superiority enjoyed by the royal comedians in their
exhibition of the regular drama." English singing, however, had
declined in public favour when the taste for Italian opera arose here
about the close of the seventeenth century, and dancing became then
the only feasible counter-attraction to the regular drama. The first
ballets were produced at small cost; but by-and-by the managers
increased more and more their expenditure on account of the dancers,
until the rival theatres were compared to candidates at an election,
competing in bribery to secure "a majority of the multitude." Cibber,
while defending himself against Pope's attack upon him in "The
Dunciad," admitted that he had not virtue enough to starve by opposing
the public, and