ABSTRACT
The Britannia Theatre was one of the longest-surviving of the theatres which catered for East End audiences in nineteenth-century London, and its sheer size suggests that these must have been drawn from much further afield than the environs of Hoxton — especially for the long-running and widely renowned annual pantomime. The facts reveal that the 1864 Britannia Shakespeare Festival never took place. At present the history of the Britannia Theatre is in great need of being rewritten. Contrary to most accounts of the theatre, its policy changed several times during its existence. Two important features of the Britannia policy were the pantomime and the festival – the presentations which excited the most attention and drew the largest audiences. The one fact about the Britannia audience upon which all observers agree is that there were an awful lot of them. The greatest source of information on the changing nature of the audience lies in the advertising policy of the theatre.
