A Vindication of the Rights of Men of the French Revolution and the debates that it provoked in Britain. In a lively and sometimes vicious pamphlet war, now referred to as the "Revolution Controversy", which lasted from 1789 until the end of 1795, British political commentators argued over the validity of monarchy. One scholar has called this debate "perhaps the last real discussion of the fundamentals of politics in [Britain]". The power of popular agitation in revolutionary France, demonstrated in events such as the Tennis Court Oath and the storming of the Bastille in 1789, reinvigorated the British reform movement, which had been largely moribund for a
Gibbon's Tennis Court France: converting tennis courts into theatres. Killigrew's remodelled Gibbon's Tennis Court opened first, on 8 November 1660, just two months after being given permission by the Crown. The design was similar to the earlier Elizabethan-era "private" theatres, such as the theatre in Blackfriars: a stage devoid of scenery facing a bench-filled pit on the auditorium floor and surrounded by one or two levels of U-shaped galleries. Not long after the opening, on 20 November, avid theatre-goer Samuel Pepys attended his first performance at Vere Street: …Mr. Shepley and I to the new Play-house near Lincoln’s-Inn-Fields (which was formerly Gibbon’s tennis-court),