age in the second. In rehearsal, Hare struggled with playing the young romantic lead, and eventually, despite Gilbert's advice, he negotiated terms for leaving the company, and Coghlan took over his role. For some time Hare had planned to go into theatre management, and he secured the Court Theatre with W. H. Kendal as his silent partner. Kendal's wife, Madge, played the title role in Hare's first production, Coghlan's Lady Flora, on 18 March 1875, with her husband and Hare in the other leading roles. The production and acting were well received, but though the play was praised by The Era, other papers thought little of it. Hare hoped to continue the tradition of Robertson by fostering new English comedies, but he found that original works by Coghlan and Gilbert were less successful than Coghlan's English version of a French play, A Quiet Rubber, which opened on 8 January 1876, giving Hare one of his greatest successes. In the same year he also did good business with A Scrap of Paper, Palgrave Simpson's adaptation of a French comedy, and a revival of an older English comedy, New Men and Old Acres. As a manager Hare was known for his insistence on having plays attractively staged, well cast and performed exactly as he wanted. Occasionally he could be, in Wearing's phrase, "strict and peppery, and even sarcastic" at rehearsals, and Madge Kendal recounted a comically ferocious battle of wills between Hare and the equally intransigent Gilbert at a rehearsal of the latter's Broken Hearts in 1875. Hare did not appear in all his own productions; he was not in the cast of Broken Hearts, although one part was evidently written with him in mind; in one of the greatest successes of his management, Olivia (1878), W. G. Wills's adaptation of The Vicar of Wakefield, he chose not to play the vicar but cast William Terris to co-star with Ellen Terry. His management of the Court ended when his lease expired in 1879. His last presentation there was on 19 July of that year with Robertson's The Ladies' Battle, an adaptation of a French play. St James's Theatre: 1879–1888 Since its inception in 1835 the St James's, in an unfashionable part of the West End, had acquired a reputation as an unlucky theatre, and more money had been lost than made by successive managements. At the invitation of Lord Newry, the owner