Articles

1. Staging Their Own Sucecss: Three Women Pioneers of Provincial Theatre in Brecon

   Jayne Gold

   Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century theatre management was overwhelmingly controlled by men in ownership and management positions and was reliant on male-dominated financial backing from banks and donors. Yet when examining the stories of women theatre managers, scholarship has uncovered a “tradition of women taking charge – in various capacities – of this cultural industry, despite tremendous odds” (Davis 115). Tracy Davis’s “Female managers, lessees and proprietors of the British stage (to 1914)” lists some 330 names of women operating across the United Kingdom during the long nineteenth century. Women within these roles often relied upon links through marriage or family to gain traction in the industry (Bratton 153; Crochunis 581). In the eighteenth- and early-nineteenth centuries their numbers were still relatively low. Yet as the theatre industry grew across the nineteenth century, and opportunities amplified, an increasing number of women were able to take up managerial responsibilities (Davis).

2. Establishing Sheridan: A New Historiography of Sheridan's The Duenna in the 1770s

   James Peate

   Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s comic opera The Duenna was one of the most successful theatrical works of the eighteenth century. Despite this success, neither its importance for the historiography of the author nor its prevalence in the London theatre culture of the 1770s have been discussed at length. Through examining letters, archives, and newspapers, this article explores the lasting cultural impact The Duenna had on late eighteenth-century London. Adapted and parodied in the 1770s and staged regularly into the 1780s, The Duenna left an indelible mark on the culture of the capital. The Duenna not only displays Sheridan’s growth as a writer, but the development of an important symbiotic relationship between Sheridan and the press – one that would lead him to be Whig press manager in the 1780s. Moreover, the commercial success, which Sheridan deliberately cultivated, directly enabled his purchase of the Drury Lane theatre, an essential cornerstone to his political career as well as the long-term cultural influence he held as owner.

3. Black People, "Moroccos", "Ladies of Quality", and "Mr. Hogarth:" Diversity in the Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre Audience, 1726-29

   David Worrall

   This essay examines a manuscript cash receipt book for Lincoln’s Inn Field’s Theatre, 1726–29 (Thr 22 Houghton Library), at that time managed by John Rich and covering the period of the first performances of John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera (1728). Although other cash books exist for Lincoln’s Inn Fields, this one is unique in recording, nightly, the names and identities of individuals who had attended yet whose financial admission status had yet to be determined (including those who refused to pay, of which there were many). This cashbook reveals the active executive role played by Lady Martha Skipwith, wife of one of the co-owners of the theatre’s royal patent. It also reveals the presence of Black people in the audience, including on the first night of The Beggar’s Opera and, subject to corroboration, the first Black person to watch Othello. There were also embassy parties of Moroccans, British parties of royalty with large entourages and many titled families with both Jacobite and Hanoverian backgrounds. There were many servants but also a deaf/mute person, lots of children (not always linked to adults) and visits by the painter William Hogarth and his friend Dougal Cuthbert, at that time involved in a controversy about the death of a prison inmate. Ominously, years before the 1737 Theatre Act, the book also records the visits of Robert Walpole, his deputy Prime Minister, the Lord Chamberlain and two prison/police officials.