Researching the history of entertainment buildings
Buildings created purely to house amusements are a luxury. Only wealthy civilizations can invest heavily in them. We may guess that at first people simply took advantage of natural topography - any flat area with banks around it for spectators to sit on would make a good outdoor arena for racing, sports and displays. Add seats and external walls and you have the amphitheatres of Ancient Greece and Rome. Make it smaller and roof it over and you have an indoor theatre, such as the Odeon of Agrippa, built in Athens in the first century BC.
In
the Middle Ages entertainment was offered in the halls of great men, or in the
open. In the 16th century travelling players performed in great houses, guildhalls, college halls, inns of court and innyards. The Vagabonds Act (1572) obliged such companies
in England and Wales to seek royal or aristocratic patronage, which drew them
to London. Since the City of London banned theatres in 1574, they sprang up
outside the City boundaries. The Theatre, the Curtain, the Rose, the Swan, and the Globe
followed the pattern of the improvised innyard theatre. Each had a circular or
hexagonal structure containing two or three galleries with an unroofed space in
the middle. That made good use of natural light, but left players and audience
at the mercy of the weather.
So the indoor theatre had its advantages. The first of these was Blackfriars - the converted refectory of a former friary. It was owned by the Burbage family, who had built The Theatre and then dismantled it to build the Globe. In the Jacobean period, Shakespeare and Burbage staged plays at the Globe in summer and Blackfriars in winter. Until recently it was thought that there were no English playhouses outside London in Shakespeare's day, but the mass of research for Records of Early English Drama has uncovered evidence of short-lived Jacobean theatres in Bristol, Preston and York (see sources below).
The London playhouses were closed in 1642 by Puritans. Dublin's first theatre, opened in 1637, did not survive Cromwellian government either. When the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 revived drama in London and Dublin, the new theatres followed European trends begun in Italy. Restoration theatres were fully roofed and had tiers of boxes for the upper classes. Theatres had to be licensed to perform the full range of drama, which has left a useful paper trail for researchers (see sources below.) The first letters patent issued by Charles II for theatre companies gave a monopoly in London to the theatres now known as the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane and Theatre Royal, Covent Garden.
More purpose-built theatres sprang up in provincial towns in the 18th
century. The Bath
theatres were among the first. During the spa bathing season Bath was
pulsating with nobility and gentry looking for entertainment. The Georgian
period also saw the rise of other places of amusement for the leisured classes.
By the 1770s all but the smallest English towns had assembly
rooms for balls and concerts. Pleasure gardens
charged an entry fee and offered music and food in a pleasant setting. The most
famous were Vauxhall and Ranelagh in London, but most of the
bigger provincial towns had at least one.
The coming of the railways made seaside holidays popular. With the rise of seaside resort came the building of piers, as well as theatres and ballrooms for the middle and working classes who were discovering the pleasures of a holiday.
Music-halls also catered to the working classes. They developed out of the singing rooms built onto pubs in the 1830s and 1840s. By the 1860s they were dotted around London and northern English towns. Chains of music-halls grew up. Moss Empires was formed in 1899 by a merger of three such chains and owned or built Empire variety theatres all over Scotland, Wales and London and northern England.
The motion picture had a yet wider appeal. Films could be shown in existing theatres, town halls or other venues, but as they became a truly mass entertainment, buildings were designed especially for them - movie theatres or cinemas. From 1913 lavish 'picture palaces' sprang up across the US. Other countries were swift to follow suit. One of the best known chains in Britain is the Odeon, founded by Oscar Deutsch in 1930 and owned by J. Arthur Rank 1942-2000.
Studies and gazetteers
- Bainbridge, C.,Pavilions on the Sea: a history of the seaside pleasure pier (1986). Includes gazetteer of surviving British piers.
- Beauvert, T., Opera Houses of the World (1996).
- Eyles, A., ABC: The First Name in Entertainment (1993).
- Eyles, A., Gaumont British Cinemas (1996).
- Eyles, A., Odeon Cinemas 1: Oscar Deutsch Entertains Our Nation (2002).
- Girouard, M., The English Town (1990).
- Gray, R., Cinemas in Britain (1996). Includes lists of statutorily listed cinemas and other important surviving cinemas in Britain.
- Howard, D., London Theatres and Music Halls 1850-1950 (1970). A sourced directory.
- Leacroft, R. The Development of The English Playhouse (1973).
- Keenan, S., Travelling Players in Shakespeare's England (2002).
- Kenrick, J., Musical Theatre: A History (2008).
- Mackintosh, I., Architecture, Actor and Audience (1993).
- Mawson, C. and Riding, R., British Seaside Piers (2008). Gazetteer with bibliography.
- Mellor, G.J., The Northern Music Hall (1970).
- Morash, C., A History of the Irish Theatre 1601-2000 (2002).
- Pevsner, N., A History of Building Types (1976) gives the wider European context.
- Shelley, H., Inns and Taverns of Old London (1909), Part IV: Pleasure Gardens of Old London.
- The Theatres Trust maintains an online database of architectural and historic records of assembly rooms, music halls, theatres and opera houses across the UK.
- Wood, C.F., Walking Over the Waves: Quintessential British Seaside Piers (2008).
Primary sources
- Records
of Early English Drama (covering England and Wales before 1642),
25 vols. (1979-2005).
- James Winston, The Theatric Tourist (1805; facsimile British Library 2008). Has aquatints of 23 provincial theatres and one in London.
- Britton, J. and A. Pugin, Illustrations of the Public Buildings of London, 2 vols. (1825-28) includes the London theatres. 2nd edn. with additional material by W.H. Leeds (1838) available for download via Google Books.
- Rogers, H.A., Views of the Pleasure Gardens of London (1896): a collection of images and contemporary sources.
- Wroth, W.W. and A. E., The London Pleasure Gardens of the Eighteenth Century (1896).
- Guidebooks: exist from the 18th century for London and major resorts and describe theatres, assembly rooms, pleasure gardens (often with engravings).
- Images: search collections in local libraries, art galleries. These were popular subjects for artists. Postcards are a good source for seaside piers (The National Piers Society provides a selection online) and pleasure gardens. Some of the sources below may be illustrated.
- Licenses: playhouses were licensed by local JPs or by the Crown. See National Archives LC7: Lord Chamberlain's Department: Theatres 1660-1901, including ground plans and elevations c. 1870-1900.
- Diaries and memoirs: diaries were often kept by the leisured classes and are a good source for theatres, assembly rooms, concert halls. Theatrical memoirs by actors and managers from the late 18th century onwards provide a profusion of hilarious anecdotes.
- Playbills, advertisements in local newspapers: give a detailed picture of the building's use. They may have been collected by an aficionado in a scrap book, perhaps deposited in a local library. The British Library holds a large collection of Victorian playbills, in the Evanion Collection of Ephemera: and has put online a large selection.
Collections
- Bath Central Library Theatrical Collection: Large collection relating to the Theatre Royal, Bath, including 6,050 playbills and programmes for 1772-1891 and about 500 press notices for the 1920s to 1971.
- Bristol Record Office: Records of Theatre Royal, Bristol, spanning the 17th to 20th centuries.
- Bristol University: includes the archives of the London Old Vic.
- The Canadian Centre for Architecture holds the Edward Craig Theatre Collection: books and ephemera documenting stage design and theatre history in Italy, France, Germany and England from the 17th through the 20th centuries. The 700 ephemeral documents - engravings, photographs, broadsides, cuttings - focus on London theatres.
- Cinema Theatre Association holds an archive including architect George Coles' collection of plans and photograph albums.
- The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., USA has a large collection which focuses on Shakespeare and his time, and on theatre history. Some material is available online.
- Linen Hall Library: holds theatrical material from Northern Ireland.
- Plymouth Library holds a large collection of playbills, photographs and programmes relating to Plymouth theatres from the 18th century onwards, digitised on Flickr as Plymouth Theatre History.
- Theatre Trust Resource Centre, 22 Charing Cross Road, houses its Theatre Archives.
- University of Kent at Canterbury: Theatre Collections: Victorian and Edwardian periods.
- University of Glasgow: The Scottish Theatre Archive.
- The Victoria and Albert Museum Theatre Collections. Objects from its collections such as prints, posters, and paintings are included in the V&A's online catalogue, some with digitised images.
Societies
- The National Piers Society has online lists of surviving and lost piers, with historic images.
- The Society for Theatre Research: publishes Theatre Notebook: A Journal of the History and Technique of the British Theatre. Content list online.