Documents of Performance : the Assignments Book of the Britannia Theatre, Hoxton

Abstract

Documentary evidence about the financial terms under which nineteenth-century dramatists produced their work is generally available only in piecemeal records that have survived by happenstance. This volume of agreements is therefore significant as it charts more than six hundred agreements made between individual playwrights and the management of one East End theatre, the Britannia, over a period of forty years. The article not only explains its provenance and the nature of the transactions contained within it, but also indicates how supplementary annotations in the Assignments Book reveal how it functioned as a working document.