2015/06/23 by Gillian Russell · 2 citations
Arts and Humanities · #Literature: history, themes, analysis #Historical Art and Culture Studies #Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism #Ephemera #Georgian #Newspaper #Context (archaeology) #Period (music) #Documentation #Art #Visual arts #History #Media studies #Sociology #Archaeology
paper · doi:10.3138/ecf.27.3.535
openalex publication_date 2015/06/23 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
Collections of printed theatre-related ephemera—playbills, newspaper cuttings, tickets, and engravings—constitute a major source of information about the Georgian theatre. This article considers the importance of one such collection, held in the British Library and recently digitized, that documents the fashion for private theatricals in Britain and its empire during the Georgian period. The collector of this archive was Sarah Sophia Banks (1744–1818), whose role in its making has been occluded. I explore Banks’s archiving of private theatricals in the context of her documentation of fashionable sociability as a whole. Banks’s archive reveals the imbrication of theatre, sociability, public and private spaces, and print media in the Georgian period.