SOURCE: Trefman, Simon. “Foote's Establishment: The Golden Age, 1770-1774.” In Sam. Foote, Comedian, 1720-1777, pp. 189-223. New York: New York University Press, 1971.

In the following essay, Trefman discusses Foote's most successful and productive period as a playwright and theater manager.

Foote's theatre was becoming a summer institution, and he was even more popular than before his accident. Far from being a handicap, the false leg became the object of many of Foote's jokes, and the limp was accepted as part of the act. Tate Wilkinson, now a minor monarch of strolling players, found that he could no longer imitate his master as in the past. Once, when acting Major Sturgeon in Foote's manner, Wilkinson was hissed off the stage by the audience because he did not play the role with a limp.¹ Even the historian Gibbon valued Foote's contributions that so enlivened the traditional dullness of a London...