“At Drury Lane [theater] in January 1750 when the management proposed to repeat a play which the audience had driven from the stage the evening before, “the Audience . . . pull’d up the Benches, tore down the Kings Arms, and would have done more mischief if Mr. Lacy [David Garrick’s partner] had not gone into the pit, and talk’d to ’em, what they resented was giving out a piece again after they had damn’d it.’ The Blackamoor Washed White, a comic opera written by the notoriously quarrelsome and much-disliked journalist and cleric Henry Bate, suffered a similar fate in 1776. After four nights of opposition during which ‘numbers of the pit and boxes got upon the stage and blows passed between some of them’, [actor and manager David] Garrick was forced to withdraw the play.”

—John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century, 1997.