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 pleaded guilty to the charge of having as a manager produced very costly ballets and spectacles.  At the same time he condemned the taste of the vulgar, avowed himself as really on the side of truth and justice, and compared himself to Henry IV. of France changing his religion in compliance with the wishes of his people!