The Theatrical Season
PATENTS AND LICENSES
In the eighteenth century the three theatres of Drury Lane, Covent
Garden and the Haymarket were officially, i.e. not merely nominally as
they are to-day, entitled Theatres Royal. This is because they held patents
granted to them by the crown, which patents were guarded by their
possessors with extreme jealousy, since no theatre for the acting of plays
proper was allowed, without such a patent, to be opened, m For generations
the patentees fought, and with success, the conferring of a patent on any
other person or persons than those currently in possession of one.
These patents had first been issued by Charles n some three months
after he ascended the throne. He granted two of them, on 21 August 1660,
to Thomas Killigrew and to Sir William Davenant. The first of these was
the precursor of the Drury Lane patent, the second of the Covent Garden
patent. What these documents recited was not only the legal right to build
a playhouse and to perform in it, but also the protection of the actors
belonging to those playhouses from certain older statutes, notably 39 Eliz.
i.c. 4, 2, which stated that all “common players wandering abroad” could
be punished as vagabonds. A permanent home, sanctioned by the crown,
was therefore both a necessity and a safeguard.
The Davenant and Killigrew patents, for all of their importance to
the well-being of London’s theatrical life, led for many years a turbulent
existence. They had to be renewed, usually every twenty-one years. w
They were sometimes revoked. They were transferred from hand to hand,
sometimes under suspicious circumstances. But with the passage of the
Theatrical Licensing Act of 1737 order was restored at least as regards
Drury Lane and Covent Garden, who were therein stated, by virtue of
their patents (which were the personal property of the patentees, and
could therefore be sold or bequeathed), to be the only theatres under law
173 In addition to the three London Theatres Royal patents had been granted, by 1 Boo,
to the theatres of Bath, Bristol, Cheltenham, Chester, Cork, Dublin, Edinburgh, Hull,
Liverpool, Manchester, Margate, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Norwich, Richmond (Surrey),
Weymouth, Windsor, York.
*74 Watson Nicholson, The Struggle for a Free Stage in London (Boston and New York, 1 906),
p. 198, and passim.
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