This is one of a series of one hundred and fifty-five late 18th-century playbills for performances at the Wakefield Theatre, Westgate Street, in Wakefield, Yorkshire. They document every performance that took place at the theatre each season from 1786 to 1795, under the management of the successful actor and theatre manager Tate Wilkinson (1739-1803). The majority bear the manuscript comments annotated in a contemporary hand: ‘There’ or ‘There ½’, indicating that the annotator was a member of the theatre staff who was present for the whole performance, or who entered after the interval, at ‘half-price’. Each playbill has needle marks on its left-hand edge, indicating that the group was once bound as a record, possibly by the theatre management.

Wakefield Theatre was built by the merchant James Banks in 1776 and opened under Wilkinson’s management on 7th September 1776 with The Beggar’s Opera. By 1783, the Yorkshire circuit comprised theatres in York, Hull, Leeds, Wakefield, and Doncaster, with Pontefract added in 1789. Wilkinson usually ran his seasons at Wakefield in September, and it was rarely open for more than one to three weeks a year to coincide with the Wakefield races, when the town was crowded. He closed Wakefield in time to open his season at Doncaster to coincide with the races there, after which the company performed at the other theatres in the circuit throughout the year.

Wilkinson, the first manager of Wakefield Theatre, began his eleventh season there in 1786, the first year’s season covered by these playbills. A Londoner by birth, and an actor before a manager, Wilkinson went into management in the area in 1766 when he went into joint management of York Theatre Royal with Joseph Baker, assuming sole management of the Yorkshire circuit on Baker’s death in 1770. Wilkinson took the York Circuit to new heights, extending the circuit to include Hull, Leeds, Pontefract, Wakefield and Doncaster, improving the theatres, increasing their audiences, and providing a wider range of plays and actors from London.