Amateur Theatricals and the Dramatic Marketplace: Lacy’s and French’s Acting Editions of Plays

Historically an exclusive, upper-class entertainment, private theatricals became a widespread, primarily middle-class pastime in the course of the nineteenth century. To the emerging bourgeoisie, play-acting represented an important way to negotiate class identity by emulating the habits of social elites. The foremost raw materials for private stagings of drama were the acting editions of plays published most prolifically in the second half of the century by T. H. Lacy and Samuel French, consecutively. This paper examines Lacy’s and French’s publication and marketing strategies by placing side by side guide literature and play series issued by them, to illuminate the impact these strategies had on the dramatic marketplace, and the way that Lacy, in particular, engaged social anxieties about the theatre in establishing his business concept. It then traces the changing composition of Lacy’s and French’s Acting Editions to highlight a significant increase in plays by women from the 1880s onwards. I argue that this increase expresses the evolution of amateur theatricals into a distinctly middle-class social practice because the female dramatists that French’s favoured, produced work congruent with bourgeois interest in morally sound, domestic topics and educational value, and recommended themselves through the respectable public personas they created for themselves.