ABSTRACT
In 1717 Bartholomew Fair was limited to three days and stage plays banned, but in a year or two it had sprouted again into a two-week carnival and the theatre booths were back. The three-day fairs became less attractive and less profitable as a summer alternative available to actors in the main London theatres: they turned more and more to performing in newly built provincial theatres, leaving the fairgrounds to a different kind of operator. In 1718 William Pinkethman built a theatre in Richmond, Surrey, convenient for the Prince of Wales, and for his company’s annual visits to the London fairs, and four years after his death in 1726, Thomas Chapman either reopened it or erected another theatre. Early eighteenth-century theatre in the fairgrounds, the provinces and Scotland all demonstrated the potential of a different theatre beyond the wealthy west end of London and beyond the legitimate and accepted drama.
