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Profits at Drury Lane, 1713–1716

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2009

Judith Milhous  and
Robert D. Hume
Judith Milhous
Affiliation:
Professor in the Ph.D. Program in Theatre at the CUNY Graduate Center.
Robert D. Hume
Affiliation:
Professor in the Department of English at Pennsylvania State University.
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Extract

Surviving records of early eighteenth-century London theatres include a number of account books recording daily receipts, but fewer than we would like. ‘Rich's Register’ gives us daily totals at Lincoln's Inn Fields from 1714 to 1723, and we have accounts in one form or another for a good many seasons at that theatre thereafter. Drury Lane is a different matter. Not until 1741–2 do we possess day-by-day totals for a season there. In view of the comparative paucity of information about receipts at Drury Lane, neglect of one of the few sources of financial information available to us seems odd indeed. The MS at issue was quoted in print as early as 1939, and is cited in The London Stage (under the wrong reference number) – but no one has ever printed or analysed more than a small sampling of the figures available.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 14 , Issue 3 , Autumn 1989 , pp. 241 - 255
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 1989

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References

Notes

1. The story is told in detail in Barker, Richard Hindry, Mr Cibber of Drury Lane (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1939), chap. 4Google Scholar. Many relevant documents are printed in Vice Chamberlain Coke's Theatrical Papers, 1706–1715, ed. Milhous, Judith and Hume, Robert D. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1982).Google Scholar

2. The suit and countersuit are P.R.O. C11/6/44 and C11/2342/26. Sir Thomas Gery's report – some seventeen pages of manuscript – is preserved in P.R.O. C38/335 (unpaginated). Doggett's answer to the countersuit gives details of profits between 4 October and 23 November 1713.

3. As far as we are aware, the Gery report was first discovered and used by Barker in his biography of Cibber (esp. pp. 96, 99, 105). Barker did not, however, do more than summarize the figures. Loftis, John commented briefly on them in Steele at Drury Lane (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1952), pp. 41–2Google Scholar. Loftis mistakenly cites ‘C33/335’, as does Avery, Emmett L. in The London Stage, 1660–1800, Part 2: 1700–1729 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1960), 1, 368Google Scholar. (Barker had referred to an older system of reference in the P.R.O.) The handling of this source in the London Stage is extremely puzzling. Avery quotes Barker for the season of 1714–15 (I, 327–8), but for 1715–16 he gives a few specific figures, citing ‘C33/335’ directly (I, 367–8). Whether Avery actually consulted C38/335 is not clear; if he did, he failed to utilize it fully.

4. Gery records dates on which accounts were declared, which are not always the same as performance dates. Except in cases of outright error, we have retained his dates. Thus 4 October 1713, a Sunday, was not a performance date, and the last actual performance of the 1714–15 season occurred on 10, not 13, June. We have recovered the first two profit declarations from Gery's prose summary, checked against Doggett's testimony in P.R.O. C11/2342/26.

5. There were no performances during Passion Week, 22–27 March.

6. We presume that this declaration consisted of profits made earlier but not distributed until the end of the season: Gery notes a contingency fund in his discussion of money in Doggett's hands.

7. Written as ‘seven’, but advertisements list seventeen performances.

8. The last three entries for 1714–15 come from Schedule 2. The sudden increase in the length of the accounting period in part reflects the confidence the triumvirate placed in the strength of the newly-granted patent.

9. The first six entries for 1715–16 come from Schedule 2. Schedule 3 begins with 4–10 February 1716 and also contains the entries for 1716–17.

10. There were no performances during Passion Week, 26–31 March.

11. An Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber, ed. Lowe, Robert W., 2 vols. (1889; rpt. New York: AMS, 1966), II, 139.Google Scholar

12. Here and in other such tables we have rounded all figures up or down to the nearest pound.

13. Cibber (II, 139) reports that each manager ‘had to his respective Share, clear of all Charges, one hundred and fifty’ pounds for 21 days in Oxford even after actor salaries were ‘doubled’ and £50 given ‘towards the Repair of St. Mary's Church’ – implying a further profit of some £450.

14. ‘Profit’ includes £316 disallowed as expense by Gery. On 3 February 1715/6 the managers started paying themselves and Steele £1 per day each ‘as tho’ they were all Actors on the Stage’.

15. ‘Profit’ includes £244 paid by the managers to themselves and Steele and disallowed by Gery. The figure for autumn 1716 does not include £202 ‘By money laid upp for Contingencyes’ and not yet expended.

16. Coke Papers, no. 138. The source is BL Add. MS 38,607 (Winston transcriptions of Coke MSS). In a sentence haunted by typographical errors, Avery states that ‘the company had as clear profits from the new license on 23 November 1713 to 18 June 1718 [recle 1714] the sum of £1250 9s’. (The London Stage, Pt. 2 [I, 307]). This misdates the license (issued 11 November); extends the term by four years; and downgrades the profits from £1,520 to £1,250.

17. See Milhous, Judith, ‘The First Production of Rowe's Jane Shore’, Theatre Journal, 38 (1986), 309–321.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

18. For the 6 December 1712 agreement with Collier, see P.R.O. LC 7/3, fols. 127–8 (printed in the Coke Papers, pp. 213–4)Google Scholar; for the ‘opera subsidy’ agreement of 17 04 1712Google Scholar, see P.R.O. LC 7/3, fol. 126 (printed in the Coke Papers, p. 185).Google Scholar

19. P.R.O. LC 5/156, p. 31 (18 October 1714).

20. The patent is P.R.O. C66/3501, no. 13 (19 January 1714/5). On the new agreement, see Cibber, , Apology, II, 171–175.Google Scholar

21. By the terms of co-partnership with Owen Swiney, Wilks had a salary of £200 plus £50 ‘for his extrodinary [sic] care in the rehearsalls’, and Gibber and Doggett had £200 each. They all got clear benefits in March. See P.R.O. C8/621/30. A list of salaries Swiney proposed to pay his company in 1709–10 has Wilks, Gibber, and Doggett £50 lower; Estcourt at £150; Mills, Johnson, and Mrs Old-field at £100. Of 30 named actors and actresses, 16 had salaries of £60 or less, and 12 had £40 or less. See the Coke Papers, no. 81. All the principal actors, and some of the lesser ones, also received benefits. In P.R.O. C10/45O/1 Letitia Cross recites a contract signed on 11 May 1709 for £100 per annum, plus a benefit at £40 charges, and she reports that her 1709 benefit had netted her £160. Cibber tells us that at about this time Mrs Oldfield's salary was increased to £200 plus ‘a Benefit clear of all Charges’ – granted to compensate her for Doggett's insistence on excluding her from the group of managers (Apology, II, 69–71)Google Scholar. Unless Oldfield was able to sell many of her benefit tickets substantially above normal prices, her income would have been no more than about £350 per annum. Few performers beyond the principals could have totalled £200.

22. Coke Papers, nos. 120, 121Google Scholar; and Cibber, , Apology, II, 140–50.Google Scholar

23. Apology, II, 172.Google Scholar

24. Apology, II, 169.Google Scholar

25. Apology, II, 175Google Scholar. The costumes were specially advertised, and the production was harshly attacked by Dennis. See The Critical Works of John Dennis, a vols., ed. Hooker, Edward Niles (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1939–1943), II, 162–5.Google Scholar

26. Loftis, , pp. 42, 87.Google Scholar

27. Folger MS W.a. 32.

28. For example, he reports LIF's non-benefit income in 1714–15 as ‘£4,625, an average of £77 nightly [recte £57 by Avery's figures]. The correct figures are £4,465 and an average of £54 per night.

29. ‘John Rich and the Reopening of Lincoln's Inn Fields', Theatre Notebook, 42 (1988), 23–34.Google Scholar

30. John Rich does not appear to have inherited much in the way of scenery and costumes from his father. A costume inventory in BL T.C. 38 has been printed by Rosenfeld, Sybil, ‘The Wardrobes of Lincoln's Inn Fields and Covent Garden’, Theatre Notebook, 5 (1950), 15–19Google Scholar. A related inventory is preserved in P.R.O. C11/2346/4 (Heming vs. Rich), printed by Milhous, Judith, ‘An Inventory of the Theatrical Possessions of Christopher Rich, 1715’, du Verbe au Geste: Mélanges en l' honneur de Pierre Danchin (Nancy: Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 1986), pp. 147–52Google Scholar. In Michaelmas Term 1714 Rich's sons sued the triumvirate for scenery belonging to their late father that they claimed had been illegally retained at Drury Lane. See Barker, , p. 83Google Scholar (discussing the triumvirate's countersuit, P.R.O. C11/225/50).

31. Shane's assumptions include an investment of £1000 in scenery and costumes to be amortized in the first season. Documenting incident charges and investment in new productions at either theatre is all but impossible until the middle of the century. Extant bills and receipts for Drury Lane allow us to document about £600 in expenses beyond salaries during 1715–16 (about £3 9s per day), but what percentage this was of the total there is no way to determine. For a complete list of all such bills known to us, see Judith Milhous and Hume, Robert D., A Register of English Theatrical Documents, 1660–1737 forthcoming from Southern Illinois Univ. Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

32. In these calculations we have again rounded to the nearest pound.

33. On the actor-benefit as a phenomenon reflecting hard times and short-paid salaries, see Hume, Robert D., ‘The Origins of the Actor Benefit in London’, Theatre Research International, 9 (1984), 99–111.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

34. We lack figures for a forty-fourth benefit, Bullock Sr.'s on 28 March.

35. The Correspondence of Richard Steele, ed. Blanchard, Rae (1941; rpt. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968). p. 353.Google Scholar

36. Steele's 1/4 share was first calculated by Loftis (pp. 92–93) from rather confusing figures preserved in BL Add. MS 5145C, fols. 109, 138, and 140. We suspect that the figure for 1721–22 may reflect an incomplete total, and the figure for 1722–23 is higher than the £708 8s 2d for which Steele signed a receipt on 18 June 1723 (reported by Aitken, George A. from lawsuit testimony in The Life of Richard Steele, 2 vols. [1889; rpt. New York: Haskell House, 1968], II, 307)Google Scholar. But despite these uncertainties, we may be certain that Steele was making an average of more than £700 per annum from Drury Lane at this time. In a proposal of 23 April 1724 for the payment of Steele's debts, his ‘annual income of the Playhouse’ is said to be rated ‘at less than its real value (in calling it 700l. per annum)’ (BL Add. MS 5145C, fols. 132–4).

37. This item requires explanation. On 23 September 1721 Wilks, Cibber, and Booth signed an order paying themselves £1 135 4d each (or a total of £5) per acting day in consideration of their ‘Daily attendance Management & Acting’ (Trinity College, Cambridge, MS Collum H28[1]). Over a two-hundred day acting season this added a thousand pounds to costs deducted before profits were shared with Steele. The deduction appears to have commenced on 28January 1720 (P.R.O. C11/2416/49) and was formally authorized at the beginning of each season thereafter. It was upheld in court on 11 July 1728. See discussions of the case in Aitken, , II, 303–17Google Scholar, and in Loftis, , pp. 56, 214–5, and 228–9.Google Scholar