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The Social Life of the Performer on the Yorkshire Circuit, 1766–1785

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 September 2009

Extract

In the second half of the eighteenth century many members of English provincial theatre companies acquired a high level of social acceptability. Influential citizens ranging from the aristocracy to the military and from the high sheriff to members of various social and civic clubs began to lend their patronage to country theatre performances and to particular performers. “So they became quite respectable members of local society … [and their] old reputations as shiftless and untrustworthy fitted only the poorest members of the profession.”

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 1984

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References

NOTES

1 Price, Cecil, Theatre in the Age of Garrick (Totowa, New Jersey, 1973), p. 194.Google Scholar

2 Mathews, Anne, Memoirs of Charles Mathews, Comedian (London, 1838), I, 275–76.Google Scholar

3 Wilkinson, Tate, The Wandering Patentee (York, 1795), I, 178.Google Scholar

4 Mathews, , I, 280.Google Scholar

5 Wilkinson, , III, 84.Google Scholar

6 Mathews, , I, 279.Google Scholar

7 Wilkinson, , II, 75.Google Scholar

8 Mathews, , I, 279–80.Google Scholar

9 Mathews, , I, 281–82.Google Scholar

10 The collection of Tate Wilkinson's playbills for the Yorkshire Circuit is currently housed in the York Minster Library, York, England.

11 Troubridge, Vincent St., The Benefit System in the British Theatre (London, 1967), p. 33.Google Scholar

12 Inchbald, Elizabeth, The Ladies' Own Memorandum-Book Or, Daily Pocket Journal, For the Year 1780 (Folger Shakespeare Library, MS.).Google Scholar

13 The Yorkshire Stage, 1766–1803, ed. Fitzsimmons, Linda and McDonald, Arthur W., is forthcoming from The Scarecrow Press.Google Scholar