Playbills

The ‘bill of the play’ was first printed as a broadside in the late-seventeenth century and was used as the main theatre advertisement. The equivalent of a theatre poster and programme, it was issued daily and was usually dated and printed on one side – a practice that continued until about 1860. About ‘quarto’ size, it grew larger – to a double sheet, in order to accommodate grandiose descriptions of the show, with puns, names of actors and roles, scene-painters, patronage, ticket prices, booking agents and other ‘marketing’ messages. These samples are from the seasons of 1827 and 1828 at The Theatre, Beverley. They contain wide-ranging typographical styles and record rich programming - a rounded portrait of theatre management in Samuel Butler's northern circuit theatres:

Beverley playbills from The Laughing Audience collection. The Theatre, Beverley was often managed by Samuel W. Butler (1803-1845).     Like the Theatre Royal at Richmond this was one of his circuit theatres, with Northallerton, Ripon, Thirsk, Ulverston, Whitby, Kendal and Harrogate.                                   Samuel W Butler (1803-1845) as Walder the Avenger   See also, Thomas Sheppard, The Evolution of the Drama in Hull and District, Hull, A. Brown, 1927.     THE READING OF THE PLAYBILL Playbills are the essence of theatrical antiquarianism. They are the solid, comfortable, substantive stuff of theatre history. Long ago they have been extracted and calendared, charted and published, in many substantial volumes from which one may learn exactly how many times each Theatre Royal gave A School for Scandal or A New way to Pay Old Debts, where and when a vanished host of performers made their London debuts and in which roles they appeared. From them we know the companies, the plays, the thousand performances of Hamlet and the evanescent appearance of farces that did not make it to author's benefit on the third night. The body of theatre history hangs upon these bones; its face, its gestures are familiar to us from these types and borders. A real theatre historian can tell from the evolution of the types and the changing appearance of the royal arms what period any bill belongs to, and not only at the legitimate London houses, for their style reverberates through the announcements of the provincial and minor stages, only slightly lag of their brothers. In every metropolitan and provincial library, local record office and private collection lie the enticing bundles of bills: pasted into leather-bound volumes as they are at the Garrick Club, or enclosed in acid-free envelopes; meticulously electronically catalogued, or ignorantly summed up on old index cards. However provided, they make the true researcher light up with desire. This is the real stuff: the man in the pit electrified by Kean, enticed by Jordan, awed by Siddons or thundered at by Forrest, held this flimsy page in his hand, on the very night that it records. It is from this source, more than any other, perhaps, that our conviction that we feel we know what happened in the theatrical past ultimately stems. Jacky Bratton, New Readings in Theatre History, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 38-39.

For recent discussion of playbills and archives, including the Tate Wilkinson collection held at York Minster Library, see Jane Moody, ‘Playbills Under House Arrest’, Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, London, Birkbeck University of London, Issue 8: Victorian Theatricalities, April 2009, at this link.

See also Linda Fitzsimmons and Arthur W McDonald, The Yorkshire Stage 1766-1803, A Calendar of Plays, Together with Cast Lists for Tate Wilkinson's Circuit of Theatres....., Metuchen, N.J., and London, Scarecrow Press, 1989.