THE BRITISH LIBRARY PANIZZI LECTURES 2011
THE PUBLICATION OF PLAYS IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND:
PLAYWRIGHTS, PUBLISHERS, AND THE MARKET
Lecture III: Publishers, Collections, Illustrations
(Monday 31 October 2011)
Part I: Collections (Robert D. Hume)
Our third lecture is devoted to some very understudied subjects. Little enough has been
done with first editions of plays, but play catalogues, reprints of singletons, collected
works of playwrights (other than Shakespeare), multi-author collections, and serial
collections have mostly just been ignored. Cataloguing and studying reprints of no
textual authority has attracted few devotees. Granting the limited textual interest, we
believe that much can be learned about the world of play publication by going beyond
the first editions of new plays.
I. Play Catalogues and “Lives of the English Dramatick Poets”
How did booksellers and readers know what plays had been published? How could a
lover of plays learn what a playwright had written and obtain some biographical basics
and a sense of the author’s “character”? Well before plays were widely regarded as
“literature,” both booksellers and readers wanted to know what was out there. Carl
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Stratman’s standard checklist of such bio- and bibliographical aids runs to some 99
items, of which about forty are from the 17th and 18th centuries. SHOW SLIDE OF
SHORT LIST OF CATALOGUES
Archer’s Catalogue (1656): 622
Kirkman’s Catalogue (1661): 685
Langbaine, Account of the English Dramatick Poets (1691): 970
Mears, True and Exact Catalogue (1713): 1325
Jacob, Poetical Register (1719): 1439
Feales, True and Exact Catalogue (1732): 1737
Baker, Companion to the Play-House (1764): 2233
Reed, Biographia Dramatica (1782): 3507
Oulton, Barker’s Continuation of Egerton’s Theatrical Remembrancer (1801): 4819
Jones, Biographia Dramatica (1812): 6203
Lists are non-parallel: some mix plays with other literary forms; some include MSS and
others do not; some list lost play titles.
“Catalogues” are simply title lists (usually indicating author where known).
Archer’s catalogue of 1656 claims to be “An Exact and Perfect Catalogue of all the
Plays that were ever printed,” adding the signs and locations of two bookshops at
which “all these Plays” may be bought. Kirkman likewise says that “all” of the plays “you
may either buy or sell” at several specified bookshops. For the curious antiquary, such
lists must have been a godsend. William Mears published all sorts of books in the first
three decades of the 18th century, but issued several versions of his ever-expanding
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catalogue of plays and advertised his readiness to buy “old plays,” which he was clearly
trying to obtain for stock. SHOW SLIDE OF MEARS CATALOGUE.
“Lives and Characters” are a different kind of enterprise, though related. For a
reader eager to know who wrote what, or to learn something about a playwright, Gerard
Langbaine and his successors must have seemed a godsend. In 556 octavo pages
(plus a 20-page index and an 11-page Appendix of addenda and very recently
published plays) Lanbaine’s Account of the English Dramatick Poets supplies such
biographical information as he has been able to find, plus a brief description of each
play and whatever he has discovered about its sources, performance auspices, and
reception. Langbaine was a great source-hunter, famously determined to expose what
he regarded as “plagiaries,” among whom Dryden ranks as the most notable and the
most reviled. For its day, An Account is a remarkable piece of bibliographic compilation
and scholarship. A long string of successors built on Langbaine’s foundations, adding
later plays while filling holes and occasionally amplifying the accounts of earlier ones.
David Erskine Baker’s Companion to the Play-House (1764), expanded by Isaac Reed
in the Biographia Dramatica of 1782, and continued and amplified by Stephen Jones in
the 4-volume version of 1812, remain important sources for working theatre historians to
this day. What we see here is that by the 1650s there was already a tribe of
antiquarians and collectors desirous of information about plays and playwrights.
II. Reprints
(1) A really successful play (especially coming off exceptional success in its first
season) often gets reprinted several times in quick succession by the original publisher,
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usually in the same format. Sometimes type was kept standing, but often not.
Presumably the logic was that one cannot easily estimate total demand, and hence
resetting the thing was considered preferable to the possibility of being stuck with a
large stack of unsold copies. Really successful plays did tend, of course, to attract
generic “Printed for the Booksellers of London” sorts of piracy, which diluted the market.
For most of the early part of the period, reprints tend to be in the same format
(initially quarto; later octavo) and at the same price. By the 1720s, however, rather a lot
of duodecimo reprints start to appear, a trend that accelerates in the 1730s. Publishers
experimented with duodecimo as the original new-play format as early as circa 1715,
but the norm settled on octavo. Duodecimo reprints saved paper and thereby cut costs:
Dublin publishers strongly favored that format, which helped them sell (illicit) copies to
English dealers. The math is simple enough. If in the early-mid eighteenth century an
octavo 1s 6d play book has a present-day buying power value of somewhere between
£15 and £22.50, but you can sell the same play in duodecimo form for just 1s, that cuts
the price to £10-£15. Your profit margin is almost certainly smaller, but (a) you can
probably sell more copies at the lower price, and (b) you can appeal to potential
customers who are prepared to pay the lower price but are strongly resistant to the
higher one.
Bettesworth 16 page catalogue (1726): good example of range of old plays on
offer. 90 singletons at 1s each. Collected reprints of established playwrights, usually at
3s per volume. Behn in 4 vols. at 12s. Farquhar in 2 at 6s. Dryden in six for £1.
Tradeoff: buyer gets 4 or 5 plays per volume (so there is a per-play discount), but 12s is
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not chump change, and £1 is more than a week’s total budget for about 85% of the
families in England and Wales.
Mid 1730s: different market. In 1735 Tonson and Feales (surprising
combination) issue “A Catalogue of the Beautiful editions of the Plays, with Red Titles
and handsome Frontispieces, in the Order they have been Published … at six-pence
each.” 97 titles; none earlier than the 1660s. Mostly repertory standards (Recruiting
Officer, Beaux Stratagem) or minor plays by big names (Dryden’s Wild Gallant, Cibber’s
Ximena). Fewer than ten from last fifteen years, but they do include Steele’s Conscious
Lovers (1722) and Lillo’s London Merchant (1731)—both much-reprinted best sellers.
Issuing a mass-market reprint at 6d probably made sense.
More and more names appear in the imprints. Author collections clearly sold.
Even a bad play with no appeal of its own (Wycherley’s Gentleman Dancing Master)
had some value as part of The Plays of William Wycherley. A bookseller with a bit of
capital to invest could do far worse than pick up fractional shares in titles that would
bring in driblets of income over time—what actors in television commercials today call
“residuals.”
III. Collections
Collections not devoted to single authors have attracted singularly little scholarly
attention. From the standpoint of textual authority such collections are essentially
valueless. There is no evidence of authorial participation in any of them, and most were
done in a fairly slovenly way. From the standpoint of publishers, however, they were
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potentially very profitable and hence hugely important. From a present-day perspective,
their importance has to do with canonicity. They represent value judgments of their
time, and they also contribute powerfully to canon formation. They were widely
available, relatively cheap, and unquestionably influential—on the public and on later
publishers of collections.
Collections come in many kinds, serial and otherwise. We will treat them in three
groups: Early Collections, Specialist Collections, and General Series. We must
distinguish between multi-play, multi-volume sets (whether nonce collections or
purpose-published) and singletons that could also be packaged in multi-play volumes
with a general title page supplied.
THE COLLECTION PIONEER
The first general play collection—an extremely important and influential one—has
been mostly ignored or sneered at. The reason is obvious: it was published at the
Hague by the noted pirate, T. Johnson. Johnson’s decision was to issue an extensive
serial collection that could be sold as singletons OR bound into multi-play volumes—the
first of two transformative innovations that were to alter the whole landscape of play
publication in England. Between 1710 and 1712 Johnson published new editions of
forty English plays. These were not just slipshod reprintings: as Brian McMullin has
demonstrated, Johnson (or someone acting for him) did a surprisingly careful job of
textual editing, making necessary corrections and emending the texts in intelligent
ways.
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Johnson’s business plan was to produce singletons and then gather them into ten
volumes, each containing four plays. The ten volumes are numbered, but only the first
and last announce contents on the title pages. Others merely carry the general title (A
Collection of the Best English Plays, a volume number, and an imprint which sometimes
says “Printed for T. Johnson, Bookseller at the Hague” (with or without a year), and
sometimes says something like “London: Printed for the Company of Booksellers”
(usually without a date). In 1712 Johnson published a small blurb, plus a list of plays
already published, and a list of plays planned for the future. He announced “A Choice
Collection, of all the best English Plays, neatly & correctly printed in small Volumes fit
for the pocket, & sold by T. Johnson, Bookseller at the Hague.”
Johnson was, we believe the immediate inspiration for shifting over from quarto
singletons to octavo. He names the playwrights in his lists, and states a price for each
play, in all cases either “6” or “8” without specifying the currency. We guess he means
English pence. If true, Johnson represented formidable competition. Quartos he was
competing against cost 1s (and sometimes 1/6). This made Johnson’s price no more
than half or two-thirds of the going rate.
One wonders what inspired Johnson to embark upon wholesale piracy of English
plays, and how he got away with it. A possible impetus for starting these activities in
1710 is the passage of the Copyright Act of that year. Competition from English
booksellers ready to undercut the copyholders price was much less likely after the
passage of the act: the pirates were vulnerable to legal action by the copyholder,
whereas T. Johnson was not. His expenses did not include payment for copy, and as
the London price wars of the 1730s were to prove, one could certainly make a small
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profit off a 6d retail price for a playbook. As for getting away with it, we would guess
first that Johnson was happy to sell to booksellers well away from central London, and
that when he sold to London dealers he did so in quantities small enough to make legal
action against them hardly worth the bother. This is, however, mere speculation.
What we know for fact is that he pirated upwards of sixty plays over a period of
about two decades; that he sold enough that he had to reprint quite a few of the plays;
and that there are a surprising number of his editions to be found in the ESTC copy
location lists.
Johnson was definitely anxious to publish current versions. His original list of forty
plays included eight Shakespeare titles. Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello, 1 Henry IV, and
Merry Wives have texts taken off the 1709 Tonson edition. But adapted plays in the
repertory are given in that version. The Tempest is given as “altered by Sr. Will.
Davenant & Mr. Dryden”; The Merchant of Venice is included as The Jew of Venice,
altered & improved by Mr. Granville” (1701). The further list of “Other Plays now
printing, or proposed to be printed, to make this Collection complete” includes Timon of
Athens, “altered by Shadwell”; King Lear, “altered by Tate”; Troilus and Cressida,
“altered by Dryden.”
The list of proposed addenda is as current as Charles Shadwell’s The Fair
Quaker of Deal (1710). The supplementary list runs to almost a hundred additional
plays, only about twenty of which T. Johnson ever actually published. The original forty,
the eight “Shakespeare” titles aside, are entirely from the period 1660-1707. The longer
list is still heavy on the likes of Dryden, Otway, Lee, Rowe, Shadwell, Wycherley, and
Southerne, but of necessity expands its parameters to include plays by Aphra Behn,
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Mrs Trotter, Mrs Manley, Susanna Centlivre, and other lesser lights. Pre-1642 plays are
almost entirely represented by just three playwrights: Shakespeare (three of the four in
adapted form), with nine from the Beaumont/Fletcher canon, plus six of Ben Jonson. T.
Johnson goes outside the active repertory, but beyond the “Triumvirate of Wit” (meaning
Shakespeare, Jonson, and Beaumont-and-Fletcher) it is almost one hundred percent a
modern canon. Very different from Dodsley’s coll. of “Old English Plays”(1744)
At what price T. Johnson sold his four-play composite volumes we do not know.
Assuming the listed prices to be English pence, forty singletons at those prices would
total about 23s—not that much less than the 1709 and 1714 illustrated Tonson editions
of Shakespeare’s plays in six volumes. Of course at 1s each, the total would come to
40s (£2). Looking at the price from that perspective, Johnson was offering the forty
plays at very nearly a 50 per cent discount as against normal English retail price.
SPECIALTY COLLECTIONS
What we are considering under this heading come in several quite different forms, but
they are markedly different in concept from either what are essentially nonce
assemblages of single titles available separately OR long series containing broad
coverage of lengthy periods in British drama history.
Some specialty collections are produced in one installment; others, like the big
series, are issued bit by bit, sometimes on a strict schedule, sometimes much more
erratically. Serial publication, the booksellers discovered, was a good way to inveigle
people into buying items they would not otherwise have sprung for. Or as Roy Wiles
says, “One way of multiplying the number of cash sales was to bring the same
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customers back repeatedly by publishing a cumulative series of little books, each one
low in price but collectively amounting to something.”
One could always, of course, buy (say) the quartos of Lee’s tragedies and have
them bound together. Or an enterprising bookseller could print a general title page and
bind old stock together as a Collected Plays or Works, filling in gaps with reprints as
necessary. Otway appeared this way with a title page dated 1692, as did Shadwell in
1693 and Dryden in 1695. These are nonce collections in the traditional sense of the
term.
A major shift in commercial practice occurred in the 1730s. Wiles observes that
“What is notable in the development of playbook publishing in the 1730s is that plays by
various restoration and other dramatists began to appear at regular intervals, once a
month or once a week.”
In 1732 John Watts brought out an eight volume duodecimo edition of a Select
Collection of Moliere’s Comedies in French and English, publishing one each month at a
price of 2/6. At that date very few buyers of books indulged in a £2 product, but
breaking the investment up into eight installments made the purchase much more
thinkable as well as affordable. Even so, anything priced at 2/6 had to be aimed at a
pretty small market. Unsurprisingly, Shakespeare was to be the bone of contention
that moved London publishers into mass-market competition.
The Tonson-Walker Shakespeare Price War
One good reason for Tonson publishing edition after edition of Shakespeare (with
significantly different apparatus) was the firm’s determination to claim and defend sole
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ownership of copyright. The 1710 Copyright Act granted only fourteen years’ exclusive
right for new books (and 21 for books already in print), but as Dugas points out, the
Tonson strategy was to put out new editions, claiming that the editorial work and
introductions constituted “new work,” and that the whole edition was therefore protected
under the act. Tonson issued very few editions of single Shakespeare plays, and none
that were not just reprints of plays already in print as singletons. Given that the claim to
copyright was essentially spurious (as of 1732 anyone who bought a Fourth Folio could
edit and reprint it entirely legally) there was obviously an opportunity for any publisher
willing to take on a rich, powerful, well-connected firm—what Andrew Murphy calls “the
Tonson cartel.”
The challenger who emerged was Robert Walker, who in 1734 began to publish a
complete edition of Shakespeare, play by play, charging just 4d each—a 66% discount
on the standard 1s price of a play. Not only was the price spectacularly competitive, but
Walker was making readily available a lot of plays that had never been available except
in expensive collected editions (about one-third of the canon). The cumulative price of
the whole of the proposed Walker edition would be 14s 4d, which is slightly less than
half the price of the 30s price of the cheapest of Tonson’s editions.
Tonson offered to pay Walker not to publish Shakespeare; then threatened to drag
him into extended and expensive Chancery proceedings. Finding Walker obdurate,
Tonson announced his own series of singletons, with a retail price of just 3d, and
rushed thousands of copies into print. Tonson was ordering print runs of as many as
10,000 copies of each play—in other words, flooding the market with cheap goods. At
the height of the price war Tonson dropped his wholesale price as low as 1d per play.
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The Tonson firm has to have been losing money, but it was big and rich and prepared to
burn some cash in defense of what had been a profitable monopoly. Ultimately Walker
had to cave. Tonson’s ally Feales bought up Walker’s stock; Tonson removed its cheap
copies from the market and returned the standard retail price for a play to a shilling. For
the moment, Big Business had its way—But Shakespeare’s public standing benefitted
immeasurably from the exposure that the price war brought him.
Publishers continued to prefer complete editions with fancy apparatus and a steep
price. The principal editions (most of them octavo) are as follows: SHOW SLIDE OF
PRINCIPAL SHAKESPEARE EDITIONS
1. Tonson (1709), with editorial matter by Nicholas Rowe. 6 vols. 30s.
2. Tonson (1723-25), edited by Alexander Pope. 6 vols. 5-7 guineas [105s or
more].
3. Tonson (1733), edited by Lewis Theobald. 7 vols. 2 guineas (3 guineas on fine
paper).
4. Tonson (1765), edited by Samuel Johnson. 8 vols. £1 5s to subscribers.
5. Bathurst (1773), edited by Johnson with improvements by George Steevens.
10 vols. £3 “neatly bound.” Third edition 1785 “revised and augmented
by the Editor of Dodsley’s Collection of Old Plays [Isaac Reed], “Price £3
in Boards.”
6. Rivington (1790), ed. Edmond Malone. 11 vols. £3 17s in boards. “Collated
verbatim with the most authentick Copies, and revised; with the
Corrections and Illustrations of Various Commentators; to which are
added, Notes.
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Between 1739 and 1773 (when Bell began to issue his major serial collections) no fewer
than nineteen complete or substantially complete multi-volume editions of Shakespeare
were published (or issued in new editions) in London. Four appeared in Dublin; seven
in Edinburgh; and eight in other cities. By mid-century the market demand for
Shakespeare was phenomenal, especially when you consider the prices.
General Series
The great pioneer in the serial and collected publication of English drama was of course
the distinguished pirate, Thomas Johnson, whose Collection of the best English Plays
(1710-1712) has already been discussed. It was a bargain and it was a success.
The next major serial collection was issued by William Feales in 1731 and 1732. It
was published in three parts, totaling twenty volumes and sixty plays for a total of £3 7s
6d. The price per play for the three parts works out to just about 10d each, which was a
one-sixth discount on a shilling price. Feales sold singletons of all these plays; he was
a drama specialist who kept a huge stock (duly listed in his 1732 catalogue).
Feales
appears to have designed his collection very much along the model supplied by
Johnson. SHOW SLIDE OF CANON
John Bell’s famous Shakespeare and his British Theatre of the 1770s was a new
version of an established publisher’s ploy. The eight collections we have tabulated here
are what we regard as the most interesting. A glance at the top of the Table
demonstrates the degree to which the heart of Johnson’s canon was adopted by his
successors. All of the eight series charted contain some oddities and outliers, but one
has to be struck by the degree to which the heart of the canon of English drama is
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based in the selection T. Johnson made for his pioneering series. One is not surprised
that Bell should have all of T. Johnson’s top twenty-three plays, since Bell’s collection is
much the largest at 109 titles. But looking at the 1741 Feales collection, the 1741
Walker, Lownds in 1762, and Martin and Wotherspoon in 1768, one discovers a very
high degree of correlation between their contents and T. Johnson’s top fifteen.
Looking at some of the principal collections and comparing their contents, one
sees very clearly that T. Johnson was the father of serial play publication in English (if
not in England).
SHOW SLIDE OF COLLECTION FEATURES.
Major series and collections from T. Johnson to Bell
Publisher and date
volumes
no. of plays
available singly?
price
price per play
T. Johnson 1710-30
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57
yes
6d-8d each
6d-8d
Feales 1731-32
20
58
yes
£3 7s 6d
ca. 10d
Wellington 1736
8
30
no
£1 7s 6d
11d
Feales 1736
10
41
yes
£1 5s
7.3d
Lownds 1760-62
8
40
no
£1 1s
6.3d
Bell 1776
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109
yes
6d each
6d
Two fundamentally different marketing strategies are evident here. Strategy 1 is
founded on serial publication of singletons (at a relatively low price) which can then be
bound as multi-play volumes with numbered collection title pages. This can be done at
bargain rates, as Feales (1736) and Lownds chose to do. Strategy 2 is based on the
presumption that selling fewer copies of relatively pricey multi-play volumes will be far
more profitable on a per-unit basis. This was what Wellington did in 1736, as did Martin
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& Wotherspoon in their Edinburgh 12-volume set in 1768. Wellington’s price is only a
penny below the standard 1s price for singletons.
Money could be made at the lower price, with or without a series. J. Osborn, for
example, made quite a lot of singletons available at a flat 6d price in the 1740s. The
sixty titles he advertised in 1742 run from repertory staples like The Beaux Stratagem,
Richard III, and The Chances to obscurities long out of the repertory like The Massacre
of Paris and The Wives Excuse.
Any publisher could print old plays cheaply and probably make a modest profit.
How could one do better than that? The resolution of the Donaldson v. Becket
copyright case in 1774 (however little publishers wanted to accept the death of
perpetual copyright) certainly implied that reprinting might be freely attempted on a
grander scale than had hitherto been tried. What would confer “added value” (as
professors of Business now say) to what had become a very standard product?
Illustrations had been experimented with, particularly by Feales in 1736: his ads boast
that the books are “Adorn’d with Frontispieces of the principal Incidents in each Play.”
However that series had not flourished, and good illustrations were an expensive
nuisance to procure, though not terribly costly to print.
Was there a good strategy to adopt? John Bell saw some possibilities. There
were three keys to his strategy. First, he would do serial publication, stringing many
many volumes out over time. This way people would not have to bust their budgets to
purchase a big ticket item. Second, he would add an illustration to each play, depicting
an explicit point in the action indicated with a quotation from the text, And the picture
would be a recognizable likeness of a popular actor or actress—this was the “value
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added.” Third, he would keep the price down to 6d (flossy illustration notwithstanding)
and trust that a higher volume of sales would offset his increased expenses. Bell’s
heavy emphasis on action illustrations involving particular scenes with real performers is
the second great innovation in eighteenth century play publication, and so we need now
to turn to the subject of illustrations.
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Part II: Illustrations in Eighteenth-Century English Playbooks (Judith Milhous)
[SHOW Venice Preserv’d]
For much of their history, ordinary playbooks in England lacked illustrations. We have
seen that play publication after 1660 took nearly a decade to rebound and longer to
become reasonably prosperous. Given the dearth of artists in England after the Civil
War, illustrating play books would have been difficult, even if it had been the previous
norm. Artists’ confidence, and patronage, took time to return. Here we would like to
sketch a history of play illustration, then talk at length about the most exciting shift in the
field, which took place in the last quarter of the century, the linking of playbook
illustrations to current theatre.
Historical Overview
Because there was not a tradition of illustrating plays, the possibility languished until
very late in the seventeenth century. Although there are a few early ventures such as
Elkanah Settle’s Empress of Morocco of 1673, a discernible tradition only developed
when Jacob Tonson the Elder decided to embellish the collected works of great English
authors in his list. The defining moment with regard to plays was the 1709 Tonson
edition of Rowe’s Shakespeare. Each play was illustrated; but many were not in the
active theatre repertory: thus the pictures had to be fabricated by the artists. They set
the action within solid walls and doors, not painted scenery. They portrayed idealized
characters, not living actors. [SHOW Rowe Henry VIII] Even for Tonson, illustrations
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never became automatic: they were a special attraction. Nor did other publishers copy
him extensively. A turning point for the inclusion of pictures came in the 1730s, when
Jacob Tonson the Younger and William Feales began to issue the plays known
collectively as The English Theatre, each of which, whether old or relatively new, had an
illustration. [SHOW Rival Queens 1734] A receipt from G. Van der Gucht in the British
Library shows that Feales paid the artist two guineas a plate “for Designing & Engraving
twelve plates for Lees plays” in The Dramatick Works of 1734. These pictures followed
the pattern of the Rowe Shakespeare in being artists’ conceptions, not related to
theatrical production. [SHOW Walker & Tonson HVIIs] Another part of a pattern was
also evolving: imitation. The single-author and multi-author collections continued to use
the 1730s designs until the 1770s. No wonder that, as originality became more
desirable, book illustration fell into some disrepute.
The chief early attempts we know of to connect pictures to the theatre were not a
long-term success. [SHOW Musical Entertainer] The Bickham Musical Entertainer
vignettes of 1737-38 grace music, as do the two sets of illustrations for John Hippisley’s
after-piece Flora. Neither was continued or imitated. Gravelot did much for the overall
quality of English book illustration, but his lovely little 1737 set of songs seems to be as
close as he got to connecting pictures with theatre. [SHOW Laguerre Flora] His
student Laguerre was also an actor and even played the comic servant Hob in Flora.
Yet his 1740 pictorial version is played against an ever-shifting background that cannot
be regarded as showing actual stage settings. (The costumes are probably more
accurate.)
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Despite the campaign by William Feales to get at least the plays in The English
Theatre collection illustrated in the Tonson tradition, most new plays continued to
appear without such accoutrements. One exception is The London Merchant by
George Lillo (1731). [SHOW London Merchant pictures] It sold so well that John
Gray, who published it, added a frontispiece of the murder very early and by 1734 had
replaced that with a picture meant to represent Millwood and Barnwell on the way to
execution. This astonishingly popular play makes a telling example for two reasons.
One can argue that the first frontispiece at least echoes stage practice, but the scene
the second depicts was cut from the original production and would have been difficult to
stage under eighteenth-century conventions. As late as 1770, Thomas Lowndes
continued to publish versions of the latter picture, and it is a measure of his
expectations of play illustration: pictures had always been reserved for exceptionally
popular plays. Moreover, such illustrations as were in use were those that had “always”
appeared with those plays. In this regard, the booktrade was stuck in a rut. But in the
autumn of 1775, John Bell challenged his colleagues’ complacency.
John Bell’s 1775 Innovation
Starting in the early 1770s, Bell had published inexpensive Shakespeare texts with the
omissions and additions from current theatrical versions marked; known as the “acting”
Shakespeares, the texts provoked derision from his competitors. In September 1775,
Bell announced another edition, in which the plays would, for the first time, [SHOW
Barrys in Tamerlane] be “embellished with an original Engraving of some Favourite
Performer, taken from the life, on purpose for this plan, representing their most
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distinguished excellence in their respective parts of the Drama.” [SHOW more typical
single figures] All this without costing a penny more than the cheapest editions of the
time, 6d—though a larger, shilling version would also be available on better paper. He
soon expanded this plan to the hundred plays offered as Bell’s British Theatre, of which
re-issues and new editions were published chaotically through the end of the century.
The lower end of the price range suggests that Bell had found that he could sell enough
copies to cover the costs of illustration. Nor did he neglect the upper reaches of the
market: as the series expanded, he advertised binding services to match customers’
libraries and even specially-built traveling cases, so that one need never be without
Bell’s British Theatre, in town or in the country. In 1998, Kalman Burnim and Philip
Highfill published a valuable catalogue of the illustrations for all Bell’s theatre-related
series, but they left open a number of questions we would like to take up here, about the
purpose of the initial series and how it was executed. Bell’s design put the actor in a
spotlight, as it were (even if lighting technology could not yet do that). The artistic
quality of the images is not always as high as it might be, and art historians have paid
more attention to the more elaborate pictures that graced the later editions. However,
we are going to concentrate on the first illustrated editions, because they set the pattern
for the rest.
“The rest” include not only Bell’s efforts but those of the competitors he stung into
action. Thomas Lowndes, of the 1760 English Theatre collection, headed a consortium
that grew to include more than two dozen publishers. [SHOW Lowndes Jane Shore]
They developed the New English Theatre, which claimed to offer texts “as the Authors
wrote them, and not mutilated by Prompters,” yet with theatrical excisions marked.
21
Although many publishers became involved, Lowndes continued to supervise the plates
for the series; hence our designation, the “Lowndes consortium.” Their series followed
a more conservative style of illustration, which affected later Bell series. They were
Bell’s only serious rivals. [SHOW Wenman, Theatrical Magazine ] J. Wenman and
William Oxlade throve on the competition, but they never put out as many illustrated
plays as the other firms, [SHOW Oxlade illustrations] and their pictures were
deplorable. Altogether, illustrated plays caused much ferment in this patch of the
London book trade for the rest of the century.
Although the Lowndes consortium dropped out of after completing sixty plays,
Bell expanded to a hundred and then into later editions. This overreaching, in
combination with his other ventures, led to his being declared a bankrupt in 1793 and
again in 1797. The plates illustrating his various editions have some utility for theatre
historians, though in exactly what ways is open to debate. While recognizing caveats,
we believe more can be gotten out of the pictures than has been so far, though here we
can only talk about the process that generated the first series.
Producing the Bell’s Illustrations
Burnim and Highfill are right when they say that “No complete rationale for Bell’s
choices of actors, roles, or scenes to be depicted can now be offered,” but more can be
deduced about the first series than they allow. Their catalogue is arranged by actor in
two alphabetical lists, which puts focus on the individual actor. A chronology of
copyright dates on the illustrations and issue dates for the plays, supplemented by
excerpts from Bell’s compulsive advertising, shows the material from a very different
22
angle. We will talk first about Bell’s announced aims. We will turn next to the hierarchy
of the theatre and how Bell and other publishers meshed with it. Then we will take up
the procedure for getting recognizable engravings lined up for a demanding publication
schedule. That leads to discussion of the choices of actors, characters, and moments
to portray, which requires consideration of some of the people involved. And finally we
will take up the benefits of the pattern worked out for the Bell illustrations.
Bell’s Aims
Appended to the announcement of the 1775 Shakespeare was a series of statements
on “The propriety of introducing [his] Works to the perusal of Youth, in their public and
private course of education,” celebrity endorsements culled from the works of “the most
respectable of authorities.” The appeal to education is reduced, but not altogether lost,
in the announcement of Bell’s British Theatre a year later. In addition to a volume
frontispiece, he burbles, “Each Play will be assisted with Dramatic Characters, in some
spirited Scene; painted from life by permission of the Principal Performers.” An
“Advertisement” in vol. 1 repeats the “Design of the Work” and explains that “The Plays
are printed from the most approved copies, with the last emendations; the passages
omitted at the Theatres are distinguished by inverted Commas . . . and those which are
added in the performance are printed in Italics; so that classical, theatrical, and general
readers, may be equally gratified.” (In fact, added passages are minimal, but excisions
are routinely marked.) Bell was conscious of serving many audiences. The education
theme returns when he points out that “A Subscriber may render himself master of the
23
Drama of his Country, at periodical leisure, and digest its beauties with convenient
deliberation” (4). About the pictures, he says,
It has often justly been lamented, that the grace of the actor lived no longer than
the Attitude, Breath, and Motion that presented them.—Picture alone can afford
any remedy to this unhappy circumstance. The animated figures accompanying
the Drama, will aid the audiences of the present excellent performers to recall at
any time during life, the pleasures they have received. . . . The Publisher,
therefore, cannot help fondly imagining that the work now proposed will grow in
value with the present age, and gratify the just curiosity of those to come (4-5).
He was looking to a long-term heritage, of which the pictures were an essential part.
The New English Theatre paid Bell the compliment of imitating his format in most
respects, though not in style of illustration. To get pictures made involved bringing very
different institutions together.
Mixing Hierarchies
The eighteenth-century English theatre was a strongly hierarchical and traditional
institution. [SHOW theatre statistics] The law limited performance to two patent
companies, Drury Lane and Covent Garden, which, in the years when these pictures
were issued, were open an average of 182 nights between September and June. On
those nights the ninety-four or so performers might be called upon to do any one of fiftytwo main pieces plus any one of thirty after pieces. (These counts do not include the
orchestra or staff.) The patentees had absolute authority over the companies; their
permission was essential for the project. However, they doubtless delegated
24
negotiations and any actual work to their prompters. Bell’s several enterprises—
publishing books and newspapers, book selling, print selling, housing a lending library—
also involved hierarchies. [SHOW theatre/publisher comparison] The sheer scale of
his engagements means that he cannot have made all decisions connected with these
pictures; he has to have help. For convenience, however, we will use Bell’s name to
stand for his institution, since only one of his lieutenants is identifiable, and what he did
is not certain. Someone—possibly that lieutenant, Francis Gentleman, or a lower
functionary—needed to take the projected copy text to the theatre, mark excisions and
additions, and collect a recent cast list. Bell set up a demanding publication schedule,
which neither his artists nor his printers were able to meet. He wanted to issue a play a
week. In the end, the average comes out to one about every eleven or twelve days, still
a grueling pace.
A line or two from a (usually) identified act and scene are supplied with most of
the actor images in Bell’s series. The play quotations on the actor plates have
heretofore been largely ignored by scholars and are often trimmed when the plates are
reproduced. Yet study shows that the poses of the actors are not just vaguely related to
the quotations: for someone who knows the plays, they give the figure context within the
plot, though we admit that some actors embodied the moment better than others. The
quotations were not chosen at random or mechanically, but selected with dramaturgical
expertise. They come almost equally from the five acts normal for main pieces at the
time. Climactic moments in Act V claim an inevitable majority, but the lines are as likely
to refer to Act III and IV complications; and [SHOW Moody Teague, introductory
moment] not a few plates show introductory moments from Acts I and II. [SHOW
25
charm] In some cases, the lines are so brief as to be almost irrelevant: the point was
the charm of the actor.
The lines could not be chosen until decisions had been made as to what
character was to be portrayed and what actor was to embody the character, and those
were many-faceted problems which required in-put from several people. In the series
as a whole, a balance was found between male and female performers that cannot be
accidental. [SHOW table of numbers] Although thirty-four men appear, versus only
twenty-four women, the picture totals are the same: seventy-five of each. The two
theatres were represented fairly, if not so equally. The essential helpers acknowledged
on individual title pages were the prompters, William Hopkins at Drury Lane and James
Wild at Covent Garden. Hopkins was featured much more often: Drury Lane was the
chief contributor, though casts for many plays include both theatres, and a Covent
Garden actor sometimes illustrates a text that allegedly follows the Drury Lane
production. [SHOW Quick from CG + DL title page] Crossovers of this sort
acknowledged the importance of both theatres.
The Burnim-Highfill catalog systematically provides the dates on which actors
first played these roles, or, alternatively, notes that they did not play them in London.
However, the more germane question turns out to be how recently the actor had played
the role, which in this series correlates actor and role much more closely than Burnim
and Highfill recognized. Besides facilitating access to promptbooks, the prompters
maintained extensive records of who had played what when, information that was pretty
obscure in some cases. They also had broad knowledge of the repertory and should
have been able to suggest actors and passages that might be illustrated. For example,
26
once a decision had been made not to illustrate Hamlet with the elderly Garrick, a
logical character to consider instead was Ophelia; but recent performers of that role
were an undistinguished lot. Who but the prompter would remember that Jane
Lessingham had borrowed Ophelia for her benefit night in 1772? [SHOW Lessingham
Ophelia.] (Someone else who might have remembered was the Covent Garden
manager Thomas Harris, whose mistress she was.) The principle is that the actors did
not volunteer: they were chosen by management or at least with the approval of
management. We cannot emphasize too strongly that, if one looks, there is usually a
close connection between an actor and a role.
A large number of actors eventually appeared in these pictures, but most were
used only once or twice. [SHOW balance of men and women] A few were portrayed
more often, five of them in as many as seven or more images: clearly, the intention was
to trade on their prominence. Some names on the list are obvious—Garrick, for one—
but not all, no matter how hierarchical the business was. Elizabeth Hartley of Covent
Garden appeared as often as Garrick, though she was at best a limited actress.
However, she was considered so classically beautiful that people came to the theatre
just to watch her, largely oblivious to her performance. She brought the added caché of
having been painted by Reynolds and other major artists. An absence should also be
noted: at least half of each company was never represented, including all dancers and
most singers. In this round, portrayal was a carefully meted-out privilege. Bell almost
certainly reviewed the lists for final approval, but he did nothing to interfere with the
hierarchy of the theatre. Later on, there was slippage on both sides in this regard.
27
In their catalogue, Burnim and Highfill are too ready to emphasize that “nearly
one-third” of the total portraits “present actors in roles that they did not play.” That
percentage takes in all the series, through 1797; in the first, the figure for roles not
played is only 19%. Moreover, Bell knew from the start that some such cases would
arise, since not all of Shakespeare was in the active repertory. We believe that Bell
consciously used the plates as a means to help bridge the gap, encouraging the reader
to imagine a known actor performing the quotation. For instance, since 1759, no
London theatre had performed Antony and Cleopatra, but on 17 December 1772,
Elizabeth Younge, later Pope, appeared as Cleopatra in Dryden’s All for Love. Many
potential buyers would have seen Miss Younge in one or more of her many roles, and
some might remember her in the Dryden. [SHOW Cleopatras] She was thus the
logical person to illustrate Shakespeare’s play; and indeed, when Bell did yet another
Shakespeare in 1785, she was again chosen to portray the Egyptian queen. This is
only one example of what we call a “cognate” role. The principle was to link what
readers knew the actor could do to a play they had not seen.
We sense limited contact between the two institutions. We have found no
evidence that, for example, the single plays or pictures, let alone the bound volumes,
were for sale at Drury Lane and Covent Garden, though they would have seemed
plausible venues. In one instance, only five months into the publication of Bell’s British
Theatre, an effort was made to coordinate the debut of a new actress in a play long out
of the repertory with the publication of that play in the series. [SHOW Ward, Royal
Convert] Unfortunately, the production was not a success, and we have yet to identify
other attempts at coordination. (Curiously, a 1794 volume of Bell’s British Theatre uses
28
the same actress, although the play was never performed after the abortive 1776
revival; so that one is a largely or even entirely invented picture.) With regard to
process, there were bound to be on-going logistical problems and a certain amount of
theatre politics always at play. We will take up such complications in the book, but here
must stay with process.
Making the Pictures
In his most expansive promotional mode, Bell asserts that “each print is a perfect
speaking picture, which could only be copied from nature, improved by art, and
executed throughout in so elegant a stile by artists of real excellence.” This encomium
acknowledges the ideals of the age: to become art, initial sketches needed to be
improved. Bell emphasizes that his prints have been made with the permission and
cooperation of the principal performers. He even asserts that “The performers are
perfectly satisfied with the justice done to their respective characters, and have kindly
promised to afford the Artists . . . every assistance which may be necessary to produce
a perfect work.” (Cases exist in which that assertion may be challenged, but for the
most part the actors were probably content.)
What can we deduce about how the pictures were made? Five artists
contributed drawings to the Shakespeare. For the second part of the series, there were
apparently contract difficulties. Bell settled on James Roberts, who had drawn all the
women in the Shakespeare series—and was a twenty-two year old student at the Royal
Academy when the first of his pictures came out. Given his age and the pressures of
the publication schedule, we believe that most of Roberts’s contact with actors has to
29
have occurred at the theatre, rather than at an isolated studio they would have had to
seek out. (And how many art students his age had studios?) During the season, all
actors came to the theatre regularly for rehearsals or risked fines; and there
management could encourage cooperation. Looked at as a body, the pictures suggest
that Roberts often needed to sketch quickly, but that he had at least some cooperation
from most subjects as to stance and gesture. He favored profiles, which are faster to
get down than full-face portraits, and most of his heads are plausibly attached to their
bodies. Even if many of the compositions are formulaic, the varied gestures are almost
all appropriate and are often restrained, even subtle, compared to some in later series.
Roberts would no doubt have made his finished paintings elsewhere. He did take
considerable liberties with ages and body types. [SHOW ages 18 to 48] Of the thirteen
actresses he drew most often, the youngest was 18, the oldest 48, but the range is hard
to detect from the pictures: they all live in an eternal prime. Roberts was capable of
portraying older women, [SHOW Mrs Hopkins, Volumnia] as the picture of the
prompter’s wife, Mrs Hopkins shows, but most of his subjects were younger, by editorial
choice. Nor can we take the myriad tiny waists as accurate, since they vary from image
to image of the same actress. They represent an artistic, theatrical, and cultural ideal.
[SHOW tiny waists.]
Roberts did not generally trace and re-use the profiles. In most cases, he drew a
new face, hair-do (such hair-dos!), and a slightly different gesture for each picture.
Indeed, his nine versions of Elizabeth Younge/Pope look different enough that they
seem to portray at least two different women. [SHOW two of Younge/Pope]
Nevertheless, the faces, however variable, were much more recognizable than those
30
offered by the competition, an important selling point. The New English Theatre tried to
rejuvenate the old system of artist-created scenes, and its illustrations often show
multiple characters in extensive, if non-theatrical, environments. However, seldom is
more than one of them named, even in a two-person scene where the other half of the
duo is known; and some of them are so idealized as to be unrecognizable: Garrick loses
twenty years and twenty pounds. The unnamed characters are often quite sketchily
rendered, and this stinginess with credit seems to us a serious conceptual failure.
[SHOW Conscious Lovers] For Steele’s Conscious Lovers, in their first volume, they
provided an elaborate neoclassical house interior in which to display Mrs Abington as
the maid Phillis. Her inamorato Tom lurks further upstage, unidentified and
unrecognizable, with a hand to his mouth, obscuring it, though the character belonged
to Thomas King, no negligible actor and soon to create Sir Peter Teazle to Abington’s
Lady Teazle in the premiere of The School for Scandal. The backgrounds are all artistgenerated and of no use to theatre historians: the impulse was to do one portrait in a
fabricated environment.
The question of how accurately Roberts portrayed costume in the Bell series
requires some discussion. In the spring of 1776, an exasperated reviewer took the
theatre managements to task for “their false plan of dressing the actor instead of the
character,” which was still the normal procedure. Established actors could demand
dress allowances or more costumes, but the expectation was that everyone would
modify one of several basic sets of garments, [SHOW Inchbald ] as Elizabeth
Inchbald’s diaries constantly remark on her doing; as Jane Lessingham did for Ophelia;
and [SHOW Ophelia/All’s Well] as Maria Macklin apparently did for All’s Well. Those
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decorations are removable. As Roberts varied profiles, so he varied hairdos and
dresses, but decoration often appears more important to him than reportage. We may
question whether all tragedy queens’ gowns were really more elaborate than those in
portraits of Queen Charlotte. In this respect, the crude drawings Wenman published in
his theatrical magazine offer a useful comparison, the dresses being much simpler and
more plausibly constructed. [SHOW 2 Touchstones] In a few cases we have a check
on Roberts’s accuracy. [SHOW 2 Merry Wives] The Merry Wives costume on Mrs
Bulkley is recognizably the same as Ashton 685 in the Garrick Club, albeit on the other
merry wife. However, many costumes are manifestly inaccurate: they have too many
layers, attached often asymmetrically and in no relation to known dress-making
practice. Furthermore, their elaborate decoration is integral, not modifiable. [SHOW
Mourning Bride] In the illustration to Congreve’s Mourning Bride, Elizabeth
Younge/Pope clenches her jaw as she proclaims that her chains make her “look with
loathing” on herself—you can hear her teeth grind—but the skirt of her costume makes
no sense in dressmaker’s terms. Roberts indulged his artistic license.
[SHOW strong characterizations] Some actors appear to have entered into the
spirit of the project more than others, either by giving the artist more time or by being
prepared to offer him an appropriate characterization immediately. [SHOW Macklin
Shylock.] Charles Macklin shows the intensity that continued to draw audiences to
witness his iconic Shylock more than thirty years after he first played the role. [SHOW
Mrs Barry Constance] So vivid did Mrs Barry make the last exit of Constance in King
John that one report says the audience was too stunned to applaud her, an
extraordinary occurrence. Nineteenth-century theatre historian James Boaden
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acknowledged that he wrote with an array of actors’ pictures before him, thereby
fulfilling Bell’s hope that they would “gratify the just curiosity” of later generations. In the
case of the blander portraits, we suspect that Roberts drew the actor, not the character,
and we have to ask what he was offered by the sitter. [SHOW bland actors.] These
people seem concerned not to distort their features: not even to smile, let alone laugh;
not to frown, let alone rage. Overall, we are inclined to trust the faces and the gestures,
but hold reservations about some aspects of the costumes and the bodies in them.
We know disappointingly little about how much all this picture-making cost and
have seen no figures in previous scholarship. What did the cost structure, price, and
print run of a volume in Bell’s 1776 British Theatre series look like? We offer a
speculative reconstruction from limited and sometimes contradictory evidence, but we
hope it bears some resemblance to historical actuality. Bell sold these plays in three
ways: as singletons on plain paper for 6d; as singletons on larger, nicer paper for 1s;
and in sets of five with a group title page at a price varyingly announced as 2s 6d and
3s. He advertised volumes on their own “sowed at 5s per Volume, on Royal Paper, with
beautiful Proof Impressions of the Dramatic Characters … or 3s per Volume sewed,
printed on fine small Paper; if bound the price will be higher in proportion to the
elegance of the binding; Specimens of which, in the greatest variety, may be seen at the
Publisher’s.” Thus Bell was selling both the singletons and the bound volumes at
different price levels (and different again for custom binding).
What did each play cost Bell to produce? A 1795 lawsuit proves that at that time
Cawthorn, who had taken over Bell’s British Theatre after Bell was declared bankrupt,
was paying 10 guineas to get a drawing engraved. We have no other records of
33
manufacturing costs or print runs as such. We do have two sweeping generalities from
earlier advertisements. In 1778, twelve volumes of the rival New English Theatre were
advertised in a Chester newspaper for 36s bound, “With seventy-two ornamental
engravings, many of them done at Twenty Guineas a Plate, and the Whole at the
Expence of Two Thousand six Hundred and Fifty Pounds.” The seventy-two engravings
comprise one for each of the sixty plays, plus twelve for the volume frontispieces. Sixty
plays at a total cost of £2650 amounts to an average of about £44 per play. Later the
same spring, Bell announced that his “whole work” of 100 plays, “which has been
conducted at the expence of £5000,” was now printed and ready to bind.
Taking this report at face value, how many copies would Bell have needed to
sell, at various prices, in order to cover his direct costs? No records of sales figures or
dealer discounts survive. We will make the assumption that he netted 4.5d on the
sixpenny copies; 9d on the one-shilling copies. For the five-play collection volumes, we
will assume that he actually collected about 35d on average for volumes that sold at 3s
and 5s. On a shared-cost basis, that would represent income of 7d for each play in
those volumes. [SHOW break-even point] Assuming these figures to be somewhere
in the right vicinity, Bell would have needed to sell (say) 1400 of the cheap singletons,
300 of the more expensive ones, and 200 of the five-play collections in order to
generate a net in the vicinity of £43. In order to collect £50 he would have needed to
sell, respectively, 1600, 350, and 250. Somewhere in this vicinity, he would probably
have gone into the black on each of the five plays in one volume. The proportions are
entirely a matter of guesswork. Selling a lot of 5s copies would greatly reduce the
number needed to reach the break-even point. Selling fewer 3s and 5s copies would
34
mean many more cheap copies to be peddled. Almost without question, singletons of
particular titles sold at very different rates. Depending on the proportions of cheap and
expensive copies sold, the break-even point would probably have been somewhere
between 2000 and 2500. (If his ₤5000 cost claim was inflated, we are all to seek.)
We have no idea what Bell’s overheads amounted to, or if and how he assigned
liability for overheads to particular plays or collected volumes of plays. Nobody
advertised more frequently or at more length than Bell, both in and out of London. For
part of this time, he was among the owners of the Morning Post and later of the World,
but his bill for publicity, even discounted, must have been steep. How many more
copies of singletons and collections he needed to sell in order to cover ancillary as well
as direct costs we simply cannot say.
Who Benefitted from This Interaction?
The theatres gained on-going publicity from the series, even if the one obvious
attempt to manipulate play publication to their advantage backfired. The actors gained
publicity and eventual commemoration. One of Bell’s inspirations was the portfolio
called Dramatic Characters of 1770 and 1773, which had a strongly backward-looking
slant: it celebrated Garrick’s career, then ending. Most of the actors in Bell plates had
years of performance ahead of them. However, a few pictures were immediately
commemorative: [SHOW Susanna Maria Cibber] to illustrate the most anthologized
play of all, Otway’s The Orphan, Bell chose a picture of Susanna Maria Cibber, dead for
ten years; and Garrick retired before half the series was published. Over time, of
course, all the pictures would become memorial, as Bell had recognized in the
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Advertisement of 1776. Indeed, four of the actors portrayed died before the series was
complete, and Garrick the next year. One impetus behind Bell’s new Shakespeare
edition of 1785 and the series in the 1790s can be traced to fashion. In many plays,
actors wore modern dress, and after a shift to simpler fashions took place in the 1780s,
those plays called out for more up-to-date pictures. [SHOW Inchbald] A new
generation of actors also needed recognition, most notably Mrs Siddons and the
Kemble family.
We have no solid documentation of the benefits to Bell, but the extent of imitation
by Lowndes and others suggests that the idea of an actor-illustrated series was worth
pursuing. Bell kept expanding: he advertised the Shakespeare prints for sale as a
portfolio as soon as they were complete, “fine Proof Impressions” at 10s. 6d. loose, or
12s. “neatly done up in Marble Paper,” or 36s. “coloured from Nature;” he issued some
theatrical portraits unattached to plays. He was also willing to learn from his
competitors. His portraits always focused on single actors, but the 1785 Shakespeare
had two illustrations per play. The portraits gained environments, newer fashions, and
the impression of movement; and there was also a fictionalized, multi-character
illustration. For the 1790s series he employed Samuel De Wilde, whose fine theatre
portraits are among the gems in the Garrick Club, though in truth some of his
illustrations are as formulaic as anything Roberts ever did. As usual, for the later series
Bell was cagey about announcing the total number of plays he meant to publish, but he
did say that future numbers would include “such Classical Modern Plays as have not
been included in any former Collection,” which, along with the double illustration, was
what we have called the value added to this edition. Declared bankrupt early in 1793,
36
Bell recognized that his editions would “never be done again in the same Admirable
Manner,” even as he tried cutting prices in half . He had definitively lost control of his
series by 8 October 1795, when there were more than forty plates yet to appear.
Change was not one-sided. With the passing years, theatre underwent some
shifts too. Garrick gave way to the irresponsible Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and Drury
Lane lost its experienced prompter in 1780. Covent Garden was more stable, but
remained less important. In later series, actors got chosen who earlier on would never
have been considered, which is fortunate for theatre historians but was not necessarily
good for the health of Bell’s enterprise. Theatres put noticeably less effort into
maintaining the classic repertory in the last twenty years of the century, which left some
plays in the collection looking increasingly dated.
Bell’s original plan was innovative enough to make a considerable stir. If he had
known when to stop, he might have been better off, but he seems always to have
worked on the principle of more being better. The second round of Bell’s British Theatre
eventually grew to 150 plays, including, as promised, a number of admirable “modern
classics” such as She Stoops to Conquer. The inflation roller-coaster of the 1790s
cannot have helped a paper-dependent business that was not under very good control
before the economy began to suffer. Even 6d is hard to spare when the rate of inflation
is 6%, rising to 15.70%. Though obliged to give up the series and his shop, the British
Library, Bell stayed active for another twenty-five years. His prediction that future series
would be different came true: the collections edited by Elizabeth Inchbald in the new
century lacked illustrations and featured moralized critical commentary. Bell’s pictures
looked forward to the fan-club photographs of stars generated by Hollywood studios in
37
the 1940s and 50s—and they encouraged the production of many non-series
engravings of actors in the 1780s and 90s. Because of Bell, we can picture late
eighteenth-century performers immensely better than we can earlier generations. For
that, theatre historians are grateful.
Finale: Robert D. Hume
In the course of our three lectures we have more skimmed the surface than plumbed
the depths of a large and complicated subject. The for-print version will be dense and
heavily documented. Right now we want to conclude by highlighting four points.
First, we want to underline the importance of “publication right” passing from
theatre company to playwright in the later seventeenth century. The impetus towards
solo authorship was clear by the 1630s, but establishing the author’s right to publish
was vital if plays were to be regarded as “literature,” which they very definitely were not
at the outset of the 17th century. 1690 is a long way from 1590 in this respect.
Second point. Plays inevitably reflect change in theatrical practice. The 1737
Licensing Act enforced the patent theatre duopoly, under which the creation of
monstrously large theatres became inevitable. They were a lot better suited to musicals
and visual display than to subtle spoken drama. The nearly 1500 plays whose
publication we have studied across nearly a century and a half tell a story of
increasingly serious, literary drama whose thought content and literary quality decline
significantly in the second half of the 18th century.
Third point. Publication proves to be much more important to a playwright’s
earnings than we would ever have guessed. The blunt truth is that after 1700 the patent
38
theatres did not stage enough new plays to keep a roof over the playwright’s head and
food on the table. Hardly anyone managed to get a play staged every year for even a
few years. Fielding did in the 1730s, as did Bickerstaff in the 1760s. At the end of the
century John O’Keeffe, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Frederick Reynolds supported
themselves by playwriting. Very occasionally, a playwright hit the jackpot: Gay got
nearly £500 from his theatre benefits for The Beggar’s Opera in 1728. With luck, a
playwright might make quite a lot of money from a particular play, but basically what one
could not earn from playwriting was a living. How much did sale of copyright matter?
We guessed when we started our investigation that publication contributed no more
than 10% of a playwright’s earnings—and we were quite wrong. Payments from
publishers to playwrights vary wildly, but quite consistently, on average, right across the
century they amount to about one-third of what a writer earned from his or her play.
Fourth point. Playwrights were on average far better paid by publishers than
novelists. By the later eighteenth century, playwrights could expect 100 guineas for a
mainpiece and 40 or 50 for an afterpiece. A few novelists made killings (Fielding got
£600 for Tom Jones in 1749), but Lownds was paying £5 to £10 per novel in the 1760s;
the Minerva Press seems to have been paying from £5 to £20 in the 1790s; the
Robinson copyright agreements have a broad range but average around £25. (No doubt
the large numbers of novels by women is explained by the miserable rate of pay: there
were few jobs open to educated women, and they had to take what they could get.)
Novels were long; usually multi-volume; and every bit as expensive as the multi-volume
sets of a playwright’s Collected Works. Print runs for novels were often only 750
copies, and rarely more than a thousand. Until the 1790s single plays almost never
39
cost more than 1/6; most novels cost at least 3s a volume, making a 3-volume
duodecimo novel at least six times as expensive as a play. New plays were a gamble,
but successful ones could sell in the thousands and they could be added to profitable
collections—which is, no doubt, why publishers were willing to pay premium prices for
playscripts.
Robert D. Hume and Judith Milhous
The British Library