ABSTRACT
In the eighteenth century, the managers of the Drury Lane and Covent Garden theatres included some of the period’s most interesting personalities: the names of Colley Cibber, David Garrick, George Colman and Richard Brinsley Sheridan, arouse attention. That of Thomas Harris, a man who controlled a patent theatre for longer than any of them, is barely remembered. Harris and John Rutherford approached the actor, William Powell, and asked him to become a sharer and leading player, but he hesitated because, he said, his associates would be ‘two inexperienced young men, who perhaps might know but little of the world, and certainly could know nothing of the internal management of a theatre’. Harris’s relationships with most of his playwrights were rather better than this, but in general, his businesslike methods verged on the grasping. Harris’s policies and personality are also revealed in his relations with his actors, and better than in the squabble over benefit charges that took place in 1800.
