A playbill is a broadside (a single sheet printed only on one side) issued by a theatre for a given performance on a certain date, containing information identifying the plays and other pieces and the performers and others concerned, along with other information useful or interesting to the audience. The earliest surviving playbills date from the years following the Restoration of King Charles II to the English throne in 1660. Playbills were normally printed and issued on the day of performance and made available in the theatre, though bills for benefits might be printed as much as ten days in advance to assist beneficiaries in attracting audiences and selling tickets. The history of playbill printing remains to be written, but evidence such as press figures and perfecting errors (see playbills for 16 December and 27 December 1760; 1, 5, 14, 15, 17 January; 2 February, 23 February, 11 April, 1761) provide important evidence for future study.

Among the great range of documents associated with the eighteenth-century English theatre, playbills are undoubtedly the single most valuable source for knowledge about theatrical activity and practice in the period. Without them, we would be reduced to making hopeful deductions and inferences from other kinds of records and documents (notices in newspapers, letters, prompters' notes, actors' contracts, illustrations of actors in character, and so on), resulting largely in fortuitous but fragmentary information leading to vague generalization and summary. With them, we can document with great confidence exactly what was performed for an audience on a given night at a given theatre; beyond that, we can form a detailed understanding of the nature and character of the theatre of the age. And by reading surviving texts of plays and afterpieces identified in the bills (some of which exist only in manuscript copies preserved by the official censor), and correlating the information to be found in other kinds of documents, we may derive a much more full and concrete sense, not only of the theatre itself and the impact of its performances upon assembled audiences, but of the relationship between the fictive reality presented on stage and actual contemporary life.

Playbills have the unique and double advantage of having been issued nightly, for every performance, and of presenting in systematic ways a great deal of useful information. A bill may include most or all of the following items (not necessarily in the order mentioned): the name of the theatre where the performance takes place; the day and date of performance (sometimes omitting the year); the time of commencement of performance and, sometimes, the time when the doors of the theatre will be opened; the title or titles of the piece or pieces to be performed; the names of the performers (usually only the surnames, and sometimes only the names of the chief performers); the names of the characters they play (sometimes only the chief characters); the title of, performer(s) of, or other identifying information about entr'acte or other incidental performance; information about the special character of the performance (most often, a benefit or a command performance); information about special attractions; indications of special circumstances, conditions, opportunities, or limitations; information about venues for tickets; instructions to audiences (or their servants or coachmen); announcements of future performances; endorsements; rarely if ever in this period, the name and address of the printer of the bill.

The most important and frequent omission of information in playbills is undoubtedly the name of the authors (or composers, or devisers) of the plays, musical pieces, pantomimes, and other entertainment whose titles, along with the names of performers, make up the most important category of information on the bill. Following the lead of contemporary playbills themselves, The London Stage 1660-1800, a comprehensive daily calendar of performances for the period, does not provide the names of authors in its entries. It is nevertheless possible to determine the authorship of plays in the bills by consulting the indexes to the five parts of The London Stage or, alternatively, Schneider's Index to The London Stage 1660-1800, comprised of a single alphabetical sequence listing all plays by a given author along with titles cross-referenced to the author.

The Playbill and the Problem of Nomenclature

The question may arise, what are the effective limits of the term "playbill"? An example from the beginning of Garrick's London career provides a convenient means of testing these limits. Garrick made his London debut as "a Gentleman" at Goodman's Fields Theatre on 19 October 1741. Preserved in the Folger Library are two documents, the first glued to the back of the second, that provide information about the event. The first is a small-format announcement about the width of a newspaper column, but clearly not a clipping from a newspaper, since the document is blank on either side of the vertical rules delineating the column of print. It has the appearance of a proof, though it seems unlikely that that is what it is. Dated 19 October 1741, this document, whose text is formatted in block paragraphs (i.e., not laid out in discrete centered lines, like playbills), provides many details about the performances at the theatre in Ayliff Street, Goodman's Fields, on this night. The document announces "a Concert of Vocal and Instrumental Music" presented in two parts. Between the parts will be performed "an Historical Play called the Life and Death of King Richard the Third." It further explains: "The part of King Richard by a Gentleman (who never appeared on any stage)."

The second document is a broadside the usual size of a playbill of the period. The printer of this document has laid out the same information appearing on the newspaper-column-size announcement in the usual playbill format. The information appears to be, word for word, exactly the same as that provided in the small-format announcement; there are a few differences in punctuation. At the top of the document is printed "The Play Bill that announced the first appearance of Mr. Garrick." The clear intention behind the printing of this document is to present a facsimile of an original playbill, close enough in format, layout, and type font and size to represent the characteristic features of an actual bill.

The first document is quite clearly not a playbill, though it would appear to serve the same function. Is the second document a playbill? It makes a point of saying it is, explicitly. But playbills, to be playbills, do not have to say they are playbills; they simply are playbills, instantly recognizable as such. Moreover, any document that declares itself a playbill will immediately be suspected of not being one. (One is reminded of the painting by Maigret of a pipe, captioned "This is not a pipe.") And yet this document has the look of a real playbill and provides information of just the sort that an audience would expect to find on a bill. Is it then a "playbill," in some extended or metaphorical, or perhaps virtual sense, if not actually a playbill? We may decide to call this second document a facsimile playbill. Yet, if we do, we must confront the fact that this facsimile bill provides exactly the same information as does the first, newspaper-format document. Does that make the first document a "playbill," in some figurative sense, though not an actual bill?

We have asserted that a playbill is a broadside identifiable by the kinds of information it provides, but in grappling with these two documents containing information about Garrick's London debut we come squarely up against the question of content versus format. When is a playbill a playbill, and when is it an announcement, a facsimile, or something else? If we had the original manuscript draft that served as copy text for the Goodman's Fields playbill, would we designate that manuscript a playbill also? Or would that be, by analogy, a "manuscript playbill" despite the oxymoronic locution?

Although they do not always convey as much information as a playbill does, advertisements of performances carried in newspapers comprise a valuable adjunct to playbills. And, where a playbill is not extant for a given performance, an advertisement offers information perhaps otherwise unavailable. The compilers of The London Stage 1660-1800 calendar depended on newspaper advertisements to a great extent to supplement or, sometimes, to corroborate information gleaned from playbills. In the period before Garrick's time, for which playbills less frequently survive, advertisements are a more important resource than they are for the age of Garrick. Although their format is sometimes that of a playbill, however, newspaper advertisements lack the authority and the cachet of the primary document recording a performance event, partly because a newspaper advertisement must be prepared more (though perhaps not much more) in advance and therefore cannot reflect, as a playbill can, last-minute alterations of information intended for playhouse audiences and not, like advertisements, for potential playgoers among the general reading public. Notwithstanding the lesser authority of advertisements, the residue of such documents is very large. Entire scrapbooks and boxes of such ads occur not infrequently, and they turn up in many an extra-illustrated volume (see, for example, W.b.481, p. 125). To attempt to come to terms with such a voluminous amount of ancillary material is beyond the scope of this project.

It appears that our basic definition of a playbill must be qualified to include, first of all, an indication of format as well as of content. It is important to be quite specific about format; the term "broadside" by itself may not be enough. Can we solve the problem by saying that a playbill is a broadside of a certain size? But then how do we deal with the fact that not all broadsides intended as playbills have the same measurements? Some are larger or smaller than others. If they are of a sufficiently large size, do they become posters instead of playbills? Of course, there does seem to be a standard size for playbills issued by major London theatres in any given span of years in the eighteenth century. Still, this size is sometimes departed from on special occasions, and in any case, as time moves on, playbills become larger, more detailed and cumbersome affairs, finally reaching a zenith a century later in the double-fold, large format playbills, almost as long as their arms, issued by Charles Kean to audiences at the Princess's Theatre in Oxford Street in the decade beginning in 1850.

Considering these factors, we may need to fall back on a more phenomenological understanding of what a playbill is, defining it by its intention and use, rather than solely in terms of its format and content. The very fact that a document of this kind is given out to members of a theatre audience in the theatre is finally what differentiates it from other, similar documents. And yet, when we return to the newspaper-column-like document, our puzzlement may also return, at least a little. For we might ask ourselves, is this document as it survives something that might have been given to audiences at the Goodman's Fields theatre on that eventful night of 19 October? And, just supposing it were, is the fact that the information it contains is printed like newspaper articles, in block paragraphs, the only thing that prevents this document from finally being called a playbill? Or do we want to say that, despite its format, it is by intention a playbill, if our surmise about its being handed to Goodman's Fields audiences is on the mark? Is it therefore a virtual playbill, if not an actual one?

Finally, we must rest content with an approximate, or "fuzzy," definition of a playbill that includes recognizable combinations of features: format, size, layout of text, informational content, historical period, implicit intention, and place of issue. If these features are present, to an estimable degree, and if they coalesce into a coherent document, then we may use the term playbill with reasonable confidence.

What is a duplicate playbill? What is a variant playbill?

Duplicates. In the common-sensical way of thinking, a duplicate playbill is any bill for a given performance (i.e., at a given theatre on a given date) of which more than one copy is known; for purposes of the Finding Guide we restrict that knowledge to Folger holdings. Once a bill has been identified, any other bill or bills that turn up are commonly considered a "duplicate." Yet, by the same token, the first bill is of course as much a duplicate as any other, since it is of no significance which bill turned up first. When G. W. Stone Jr. was preparing Part 4 of The London Stage 1660-1800 calendar, he examined a large number of Folger bills; where he found more than one bill for a given performance, he often identified the others as duplicates. Such annotations as "duplicate in loose bills" (with his initials "gws" appended) frequently occur.

Variants. It is apparently not on record how extensively the compilers of the London Stage calendar were able to compare duplicates to determine whether any variant information occurred in them. All the same, it is in the very nature of playbills that variants can and do occur. Playbills were usually printed on the day of performance, using as copytext a manuscript bill provided by the stage manager (see, for example, ART Vol d45, p. 162, a manuscript bill for a Drury Lane performance of Congreve's The Double Dealer, Friday, 29 October [1756]). Sometimes in the course of the day the information provided earlier had to be changed, perhaps because of the indisposition of a performer. The name of a substitute performer might need to be inserted, or, less frequently, even the play itself might have to be changed, requiring additional new information about the cast. Bills already printed before the change was made might be used anyway since paper was expensive and time was in short supply. Hence the presence of variant information in playbills that on first inspection might be perceived as identical. Playbills with different press figures indicate that they were printed from different formes, usually with very minor variants.

The printing of playbills could occur much earlier than the day of performance, however, in the case of benefit bills. The actor or actress (or other theatre functionary) whose benefit it was took care to enlist willing colleagues well in advance to perform on his or her behalf, and took care also to have bills printed up before hand, sometimes as early as ten or twelve days before the event, for circulation among potential playgoers in order to secure a large house and thereby maximize the proceeds of the benefit.

A fine example of advance bill printing occurs in the case of two bills in the Craven Collection of playbills (No. 242037). On a single broadside, two Drury Lane bills appear, one for "This present Thursday, the 2d of March, 1769" and another dated "On Tuesday, the 14th of March, 1769," the latter a benefit bill for King and evidently printed twelve days in advance.

Benefit bills were tailored especially to the needs of the beneficiary; and in any case, despite the best intentions of all, by the actual date of performance the information might well have changed. As a result, a benefit bill (less authoritative by reason of its clear precedence) is often at variance with a bill for the same performance printed on the day.

Consequently, variance among bills for a given performance may be small-scale or large-scale. Two bills as yet uncompared may be designated mutually as presumptive duplicates; but the only way to determine if bills are actually duplicates or variants is to make a close visual comparison of all available bills-a time-consuming business even in a well-catalogued archive (and a much more difficult task where the two or more presumed duplicates reside in different collections).

Conclusion. The term duplicate must therefore be used with caution and should be considered to have merely presumptive status until a definitive comparison with other available ostensible duplicates can be made. The term variant must also be used systematically and carefully. The identification of one bill, whether issued on the date of performance or before, as the most authoritative one and any other or others as less authoritative and therefore "variant" remains arbitrary until proven to be so.

For the purposes of this Finding Guide, in cases where two or more presumptively duplicate bills exist for a given performance, an indication of "duplicate" is entered. Where two or more such bills have been collated and found to be at variance, each bill is labelled as a "variant." Caveat: users should note that collation has not been done in all cases and, consequently, that bills identified as duplicates may in fact prove on inspection to be variants.

Establishing the authenticity of a bill can be an exacting task. The vast majority of playbills for the period are easily recognized as genuine, though some are facsimiles, and only a very few have proved to be spurious. Three such bills occur among the Garrick bills in the Folger collection. In 1776, the year of his retirement from the theatre, Garrick closed out his last Drury Lane season with performances of a number of his most popular roles, including Ranger in Benjamin Hoadly's comedy The Suspicious Husband, King Richard the Third (in the Cibber redaction of the Shakespeare play by that title), and Don Felix in Susannah Centlivre's The Wonder. The Folger collection has anywhere from three to six bills for a given performance of these three plays.

Five bills for The Suspicious Husband for 23 May 1776 are archived together in BILL Box G2 D84 1775-76, and another may be found in W.b.474, p. 453. Five of these six seem unexceptionable, but one (BILL Box G2 D84 1775-76 No. 2, copy 5) has previously been identified as a forgery. The suspect bill for The Suspicious Husband appears to be typographically indistinguishable from its counterparts, right down to such details as a turned "s" and the broken descender of a "g". Visual comparison of this bill with another, evidently genuine bill (BILL Box G2 D84 1775-76 No. 2, copy 1) using the Hinman Collator demonstrates that copy 1 and copy 5 are typographically identical. Indeed, the correspondence is almost uncannily close, given the fact that other, evidently genuine bills for the same performance bear subtle variations in register and lineation attributable to the slight movement of type or the stretching of paper under pressure in the press as bill after bill is printed. Setting typographical identity aside for the moment, it is clear that copy 5 is printed on paper different from that used for all other copies of the bill. The paper of copy 5 is heavier and somewhat larger in size than the paper used for these (and hundreds of other) playbills; and it bears prominent chain lines and a watermark that distinguish it further. On the other hand, the pressure of the press produces a reverse impression on the back side of a bill as it is printed, significant enough to be felt. The same reverse impression is discoverable on the back of the suspect bill.

Those who have examined the suspect bill in the past, notably Professor George Winchester Stone, Jr., have concluded that the bill is a forgery. Professor Stone annotated the bill as follows: "confirmed in loose bills" and appended his initials ("gws"). On the reverse of the bill another person, presumably a member of the Folger staff, wrote: "Forged bill from large Garrick portfolio - 236 cs 1253." However, no notes seem to exist recording the reasons for making this judgment. The answer to the question of how and why the forgery was "confirmed" remains uncertain. A fresh consideration of the question on this date by two current Folger staff members, Erin Blake and Kim Tully, suggests that the bill may well be a forgery but that additional proof is required to confirm the fact. What may be concluded from the evident fact of typographical identity but different paper--if the paper is indeed not genuine, that is, not paper that could have originated in the shop of the customary printer of Drury Lane playbills? The paper could indeed be eighteenth-century paper, available to the printer of theatre bills; alternatively, it could be of later manufacture. Research would be required into watermarks and other physical evidence (the chemical makeup, notably the acidity, of the paper, for example, and the genuineness of the chain lines and watermark) in order to establish its provenance. Common sense suggests how doubtful it is that the original printer of bills for Drury Lane Theatre at this time would have paused long enough, in the rush of preparing hundreds of bills for an imminent performance, to print a seemingly special copy from the same type on other than ordinary paper. But if someone else outside the print shop printed it, either at the same time or later, the only way to account for the observed typographical identity is to posit the photographic copying of an authentic existing bill and the subsequent creation of a stereotype that could then be used to forge one or more copies of the original bill.

Such a process of deception is well within the realm of possibility. Adding to the likelihood of forgery here is that the bill contains very "high profile" information, documenting one of Garrick's last performances in a role he made famous and therefore adding to its value for collectors. All the same, pending confirmation of the nature of the paper (or discovery of further notes on the question), we should probably conclude that the bill is a "presumed," but not quite a "confirmed," forgery.

On 27 May 1776, Garrick presented the character for which he first became famous, King Richard the Third. Four bills for this performance survive in Folger collections: three in BILL Box G2 D84 1775-76 and a presumed variant bill for this date in Scrapbook [from Wright sale], Richard III, item 2. One of these bills has also been identified as a forgery. Still a third set of bills, three in number, for Garrick as Don Felix in Susannah Centlivre's The Wonder on 10 June (BILL Box G2 D84 1775-76) include a bill identified as a forgery. The same conclusion should be drawn in the case of the forged bills for Richard the Third (BILL Box G2 D84 1775-76 No. 3, copy 3) and The Wonder (BILL Box G2 D84 1775-76 No. 6, copy 4). These bills also have been annotated by Stone: "original in loose bills gws", and a Folger staff member has written on the reverse: "Forged bill from large Garrick portfolio - 236 cs 1253." Although these latter two bills have not been checked on the Hinman Collator against other, genuine bills for their date, the paper on which they are printed is different. In fact, the paper in all three instances of presumed forgery is a close if not exact match-adding to the likelihood of forgery in these three instances.

One might further observe that the very fact (putative or certain) of existence of forged bills for performances by a famous actor suggests what great cultural significance this actor had in his own time and continues to have for subsequent generations.

Whereas the authenticity of a bill is seldom in doubt, the dating of a playbill can sometimes prove a troublesome task. Playbills in the Garrick period regularly provide the day, the date, and the month of performance (for example, "This present Monday, May 21st"), but not always the year. A perpetual calendar must therefore be consulted to determine the year date, and several choices almost always occur. Information extrinsic to the bill (advertisements and notices in newspapers, prompters' diaries, letters, contemporary accounts, and other identifying or corroborating sources) must therefore be consulted to determine the full date in question.

Fortunately, the preparation of the current Finding Guide postdates the compilation of the five-part calendar of theatre performances for the period, The London Stage 1660-1800. In preparing Part 4 of the calendar, George Winchester Stone, Jr. made an extensive search of Folger bills and found a great number that either lacked a year date or bore a date entered by an unknown hand that required verification. Stone went to considerable effort to date these bills, often finding that a date entered after the fact was mistaken. In every case where verification was required and accomplished, Stone left his initials ("gws") in pencil in the margin of the bill opposite the date. No instance has been found in which Stone was in error (a tribute to his skill and persistence). In every instance where Stone has verified or corrected a date, his initials are included in the Finding Guide entry. In a much smaller number of instances where a bill was not seen and verified by Stone, The London Stage has been used in combination with a perpetual calendar to verify the correct date of a bill lacking a year date. In such instances, the initials of the principal scholar involved in the preparation of this Finding Guide ("jd") have been added. The interested user may of course consult the London Stage entry for any performance date represented by a Folger bill.

Another important factor affects the dating and authentication of a bill. Because the Julian calendar gave way to the Gregorian calendar during the Garrick period, dating a bill by means of a perpetual calendar must be done with this change in mind. The Gregorian calendar began in 1752: 2 September 1752 was followed by 14 September 1752, resulting in a gap of twelve days. Thus, to find the actual day-date for the period before the change, 12 days must be subtracted from the Gregorian date. It is of course much easier simply to use a perpetual calendar that incorporates this change from Julian to Gregorian. Wherever the day or the year has been supplied editorially in the present Guide for entries falling in the pre-Gregorian period, the pre-Gregorian day-date has been ascertained and entered.

Still another aspect of authentication is found in the troublesomely contradictory nature of variant bills for a given date-very often for a benefit performance. It was sometimes the case that a cast list sent to the printer on the day before or on the morning of performance would have to be altered owing to the sudden indisposition of a performer. In most cases only a role-actor pairing would have to be changed, but sometimes an entirely new piece had to be substituted. The evidence is quite inconclusive as to whether bills already printed before the change was made went into circulation anyway or not. (If the eighteenth-century printing house was anything like the Elizabethan printing house, uncorrected sheets might well find their way to the reading public along with those more up to date.)

The London Stage 1660-1800 calendar does not provide a census of bills, whether variant bills or not; it simply presents what in the view of the editor comprises the most authoritative information. In the case of benefit bills the information available may be less reliable. Although playbills were normally printed on the day of performance (it being too uncertain a venture to print them before then, and in any case these decisions were typically made at the last minute), benefit bills were regularly printed in advance, as we have seen, in order to allow the beneficiary or beneficiaries to circulate them and thus drum up ticket sales. Whether a benefit bill or not, the verbal formula used in stating the date makes the distinction clear: "This present Friday [or other day] . . ." indicates a bill printed on the day of performance; "On Friday [followed by a date] . . ." or "On Friday [or other day] next" signals an advance bill. This is a basic distinction reflecting playhouse and hence printer's practice. It would, of course, be unacceptably consumptive of space and time to try to provide information of this kind in the Finding Guide. It is significant, in this context, that The London Stage 1660-1800 does not discriminate between advance and date-of-performance bills. All the same, a bill printed on the day of performance has at least potentially more authority than one printed before the fact.

In a telling example, Miss Dawson's benefit at Drury Lane on Thursday, 16 April 1761, was originally intended to include a performance of As You Like It, but a notice printed at the bottom of a surviving benefit bill, and also at the bottom of a bill printed on the day of performance, indicates a sudden change (the suddenness emphasized by some syntactical confusion): "At the indisposition of a Principal Performer has obliged Miss DAWSON to change her Play, Tickets deliver'd for As You Like It, will be taken." We may deduce from this evidence that benefit bills, as well as tickets, for As You Like It were printed well in advance; such bills, once superseded by later ones, would lose their authority and, if consulted without comparison with other bills for the date, would prove misleading. In the present case of Miss Dawson's benefit, The London Stage 1660-1800 is up to the challenge, giving the information on the changed, day-of-performance bill and printing the statement explaining the change.

In another instance, however, the challenge produces confusion. Two advance bills for the performance at Drury Lane on Friday, 17 April 1761 ("On Friday next" and "On FRIDAY" respectively) give two different performers of the role of Anne Lovely in A Bold Stroke for a Wife: Miss Haughton (given also in The London Stage 1660-1800) and Mrs. Clive. Other information, preferably a bill printed on the day of performance and corroborated by a notice in the newspaper, an entry in the prompter Hopkins's diary, or some other information would need to be found in order to determine which actress actually ended up playing the role.