Benefit

Benefit, special performance, common in the 18th and early 19th centuries, of which the financial proceeds, after deduction of expenses, were given to a member of the company, who was allowed to choose the play for the evening. In the days of the sharing system and the stock company an actor might rely on his benefit to provide him with ready money, his weekly ‘share’ barely paying current expenses; or it could be for a player who was ill or his dependants. Before the introduction of the royalty system a performance was sometimes given for an author. According to Colley Cibber in his Apology (1740), the first benefit performance in England was given in about 1686 for Mrs Elizabeth Barry, but it did not become common practice until much later. There is an interesting account of the way it worked in Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby (1838), and the abuses of the system in the early American theatre can be studied in Odell's Annals of the New York Stage (1925–49). It was an unsatisfactory arrangement, which exposed the actor to petty humiliations and kept him in a constant state of financial uncertainty, and it gradually died out between 1840 and 1870. A comprehensive account can be found in Sir St Vincent Troubridge's The Benefit System in the British Theatre (1967). A slightly more dignified method of making money was the Bespeak Performance, whereby a wealthy patron or local authority would buy most of the tickets for one evening and sell or give them away, choosing the play from the company's current repertory. In that case the proceeds were divided among the company and not given to an individual.