UNRECORDED & WITH OVERTONES OF JANE AUSTEN: By Command of their Majesties, Theatre Royal Weymouth. On Monday July the 27th, 1801

Unrecorded silk playbill for two performances given before King George III during one of his summer stays in the southern English coastal resort of Weymouth. George III first came to Weymouth in 1789 to convalesce and returned many times over the next 16 years making the town highly fashionable. The playbill has strong overtones of Jane Austen’s novels as her characters repeatedly visit Weymouth, notably Tom Bertram in Mansfield Park where he is thrilled by the races and parties. One of the plays performed before King George on our playbill - The Wheel of Fortune - is among the plays considered, and rejected, for performance at Mansfield Park under the baleful influence of Henry and Mary Crawford.

DESCRIPTION: Printed on shot silk (20x34cm), heavily stained to the right side and with a couple of small chips. The royal crest surmounts the details of two plays, The Wheel of Fortune (Richard Cumberland, London premier 1795) and Lock and Key (Prince Hoare, London premier 1796), both of which feature a ‘Mr Sheridan’ among the company, perhaps the playwright, Richard Brinsley Sheridan? Work by the printer Margrie is confined to a couple of guides to Weymouth from 1788 and 1795; Oxford’s John Johnson collection has a silk playbill from August 1802 for Weymouth Theatre Royal by the printer, Virtue - the only other similar item we can locate.