Receipts — London Theatre, 1660

At a glance

Takings are expressed in pre-decimal pounds, shillings and pence, twenty shillings to the pound, twelve pence to the shilling. Figures below are a lower bound: they come from a pattern-match over the managers' own marginal notes in the printed calendars, and any page that phrased receipts idiosyncratically will have slipped through the net.

Median nightly take, season by season

Each line plots the median take of a single theatre across one season, a more honest centre than the mean, which is pulled upward by benefit nights and royal commands. Shaded bands mark the patent-theatre period; benefit nights are still included.

The highest takes on record

The twenty-five largest single-night receipts transcribed in the calendars. Benefit nights, performances whose profits went to a named player or manager, are flagged, because they cluster at the top of the list.

The slimmest evenings

The ten smallest takings on the same ledger, a few guineas for a ghost house on a wet Wednesday.

On the data

The printed London Stage calendars preserve, alongside the bills of the evening, the managers' own notes on the night's takings. Those notes have been parsed back into machine-readable totals. Vol. II and III entries sometimes split receipts into money (cash at the door) and tickets (paper distributed in advance); both are summed. For ledger-grade analysis that reconciles with Treasurer's accounts and house charges, the Theatronomics project (NUI Galway) is the definitive source for Drury Lane and Covent Garden from 1732; these pages are complementary, per-performance grain across all venues that reported a take, including Lincoln's Inn Fields, the Queen's, the Haymarket and the smaller houses.

Receipts of the House

At a glance

Median nightly take, season by season

The highest takes on record

The slimmest evenings

On the data

Receipts unavailable