Yorkshire Playbills

Within the City of York there are a number of collections of playbills which were published to accompany productions at theatres which were part of the 'York Circuit'. This initially included the York, Hull, Leeds, Wakefield, Doncaster and Pontefract Theatres. The oldest playbills, dating back to the mid-18th century, and collected by the antiquarian and bibliophile, Edward Hailstone (1818-1890), were bequeathed to the Dean and Chapter of York Minster and placed in the York Minster Library as part of what is now called the Hailstone Collection.

Further playbills from the Yorkshire Theatres are deposited with York City Archive. These cover much of the 19th century, although there are gaps in the collection from the latter part of the century. A small amount of playbills from the Yorkshire circuit are housed at the Borthwick Institute. There are also both playbills and posters in the post-1945 Theatre Royal Archive Collection housed at York St John University. Many of the playbills from these collections provide historical detail and unwitting testimony which illuminates the social and political history of the time.

Part of the agreement between the Theatre Royal and York St John University in respect to the Theatre Royal Archive, was to look at the eventual digitisation of the collection. It was felt that a collaborative pilot project between all parties (to include the University of York which hosts the cataloguing records of the York Minster Library) to digitise a small number of playbills as a pilot project, would afford a superb platform for, and generate interest in, the playbills themselves and the Theatre Royal Archive generally. There would also be the added possibility that further playbills, from the 'missing' period of the 19th century, would be discovered and added to the collections.

A pilot project was implemented to digitise 30 of the playbills and posters, covering the period 1746 to the present day, using the Creative Commons license. The digital images are hosted by York St John University, currently on our Digital Archive.

The latest playbills to be digitised are those belonging to the City Archives and are specific to the period just before and during the Great War. A selection of these formed part of a series of exhibitions in Fountains Learning Centre in 2014, focusing on the Great War.