themselves by votes every fourteenth day under the supervision of the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts. This rule was quite chaotic, and the voting is described as capricious and temperamental: "The male actors arguing with each other, one of the ladies voting yes because another lady voted no, others of them counting their buttons and letting fate decide", and in 1803, the actors themselves asked for the system to be replaced by a director. The Royal Dramatic Theatre was located in the old premises at Bollhuset during its first years, but in 1792, the old building was deemed to be to run down, and 1 November 1793, the theatre was opened in the Palace of Makalös, also called Arsenalen, where the theatre was to be located for the next thirty years; it was now often commonly called the Arsenal Theatre. In 1798, the theatres and operas of Stockholm were united by a royal monopoly, and the "Two Stages" ruled uncontested over the city for over forty years. 19th and 20th century In 1825, the old Palace building of the theatre caught fire and burned down in the middle of a performance. The theatre was now located in the same building as the Opera, an arrangement that was to continue for almost forty years. The middle of the 19th century was to mean changes both within and without the theatre. In 1834, the actors, infuriated by a new system that replaced their percent of the theatre income by a set salary, went on strike, knowing they had succeeded with a similar action against an unpopular director in 1828. This time, however, the strike was broken by the government, which gave some of them raised salaries and fired the others with pensions. The fired actors founded a theatre company that performed all around town, and in 1842, the theatre monopoly was broken and a second theatre was founded in Stockholm; by the 1850s, there were several theatres in the city, and the Royal Dramatic Theatre experienced heavy competition, especially from the Svenska teatern (Swedish Theatre). There was much criticism about the sharing of localities between the opera and the theatre, as the localities of the Opera were built for singing and considered unsuitable for spoken drama. In 1863, the Royal Dramatic Theatre purchased the playhouse of an old rival theatre, Mindre teatern, and moved the theatre to it. Here the Royal Dramatic