Large posters or 'Great Bills' as they were known, were frequently printed by theatres that could afford the extra expense, in addition to the much smaller playbills usually printed on the day of the performance. Authors' names weren't included as standard on early posters or playbills, but King Richard III would have been a version of the Shakespeare play, and The Shipwreck was a nautical comic opera written by Samuel James Arnold with music composed by his father Dr. Samuel Arnold.

The manager of Drury Lane John Philip Kemble (1757-1823) played Richard, Duke of Gloucester, with his younger brother Charles (1775-1854) as Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, who ended Richard's tyranny. The young princes were played by the teenage actors John Suett (1785-1848), and Frances Maria Jackson (1790-1882), both appearing at Drury Lane for the first time. She went on to become the much-loved actress Frances Maria Kelly who spent most of her 35-year career at Drury Lane. Other interesting actors on this bill were Charlotte Tidswell (1760-1825), best-known as the woman who looked after the actor Edmund Kean as a child after his father committed suicide, the successful actress Anne Biggs (1775-1825), and the prolific actor Richard Wroughton (1748-1822) who had retired from the stage in 1798 to settled in Bath but had been persuaded to return to the stage in 1800 by the Drury Lane management.

The cast of The Shipwreck included the tenor Charles Dignum (1765-1872), John Bannister (1760-1836) who became manager of Drury Lane from 1802 to 1815, Richard Suett (758-1848), John Suett's father, the petite French dancer Maria-Thérèse de Camp (1774-1838), who married Charles Kemble in 1806, and the dancer Bella, or Arabella Menage (ca.1789-1817), who doubtless danced one of her famous hornpipes in this production.