Royalty

Royalty, in the modern commercial theatre the payment made to a dramatist—usually a fixed percentage of the takings—every time his play is performed. Amateur societies generally pay a fixed fee for each night or group of nights of a particular production. The payment of royalties is of comparatively recent origin. In Elizabethan times plays were either bought outright by a manager, as was done by Henslowe, or formed part of the stock-in-trade of the company to which the actor-author belonged; this was the system under which Shakespeare worked. While a play remained in manuscript no other manager or company could perform it, but once it was printed anyone could stage it on payment of a small fee. This probably helps to account for the number of early plays which have failed to survive, since they were never printed. Some authors, particularly if a play had been successful, would recover the original prompt-copy for the sake of the small fee they might receive when it was printed. The first to do this systematically was Ben Jonson, whose collected plays and masques were printed in 1616, and it is to his pioneer work in this field that we owe the publication of the plays of Shakespeare by Condell and Heminge in the First Folio of 1623. From then onwards dramatists began to bear in mind the importance of a reading public which was to increase considerably, particularly when the rise of Puritanism made it safer to read plays than to see them. As early as 1602 the custom arose of giving the author the profits of the third, sixth, and ninth performances of a play, the so-called ‘author's nights’ (see BENEFIT), but with few theatres, a potentially small audience, and a constant change of bill, many plays failed to achieve even a third night. Under Restoration conditions dramatists continued to receive little monetary reward for their work; most of them, being men of substance, had little need of it and the others managed as best they could, sometimes with the help of a patron. Conditions were little better in the 18th century. One of the most successful plays of the time, The Beggar's Opera (1728), brought Gay less than £700, which was considered enough to make him rich. At the end of the century a return was made to the old practice of buying plays outright. Thomas Morton is said to have received £1,000 for one of his comedies, and Mrs Inchbald £800 for Wives as They Were and Maids as They Are (1797). Unfortunately in the early 19th century the prestige, and consequently the monetary value, of dramatic works declined sharply. Farces and musical pieces earned more than straight plays, and even they were priced very low: it was possible to buy a burletta outright for two guineas. Consequently the theatre was inundated with a stream of thefts, plagiarisms, and adaptations of French and German plays turned out quickly by poorly paid hacks.

The first movement to secure proper recognition of dramatic authorship in England was made by Planché, and it was mainly owing to his efforts, and those of Bulwer-Lytton, that adequate copyright protection was established for plays written after 1833, though the law was sometimes difficult to enforce. The first dramatic copyright law in the USA was not passed until 1856. In France, where Beaumarchais had made great efforts to establish a royalty system earlier, Scribe secured for himself the payment of a royalty after the success of Le Solliciteur (1817), and by 1832 a payment to the author of 12 per cent of the nightly receipts was usual. One of the first to profit by the new system in England was Boucicault. For his highly successful London Assurance in 1841 he received only £300, whereas in 1860 he netted £10,000 for The Colleen Bawn, which seems to have been the first play in London to be paid for on the royalty system. Other authors were quick to follow Boucicault's example, and by degrees the standard rate of royalty became 5–10 per cent, rising perhaps to 20 per cent for established authors. During the early part of the 20th century, with the theatre largely dependent upon successful West End runs and subsequent provincial tours, dramatists tended to make either a great deal of money or very little. Since the Second World War, however, there have been increasing opportunities for them to supplement their incomes by writing for the radio, the cinema, and television. Limited subsidies have also been secured through the Arts Council, either indirectly, because of the increase in the number of companies whose grants enable them to take risks with new works, or, less often, through bursary schemes, personal grants, and the attachment of resident dramatists to particular theatres. (See also SHARING SYSTEM.)