Over the last few months, the Theatronomics team has been wrangling with how to capture data about the plays that Covent Garden and Drury Lane produced during the eighteenth century. By linking Performances, or a specific iteration of a play as performed on a particular night, to the Works table, which captures general information about a play, such as date of publication, author, and genre, in our database, we will be able to track how much money a particular play made between 1732 and 1809, on an average night, or within a specific season. We will also be able to track the success of a different authors, by amalgamating the receipts for all of the plays that they wrote. In theory, it’s fairly straightforward—but the eighteenth-century repertory complicates matters.
First, we had to grapple with the fact that plays aren’t stable entities. Managers like David Garrick and John Philip Kemble edited many of the plays that crossed their desks, sometimes extensively, and successful mainpieces were often shortened into afterpieces, as James Miller’s 1735 play The Man of Taste was in 1752. Should each new version of a play be recorded as a distinct work?
It depends on what kind of changes were made and how they relate to our research questions. It will be significantly easier to track a play’s takings over time, if the performances of all versions are attached to a single work. For database users who are more interested in the different versions of a play, we include a timeline for all known authors and editors on a work’s record, data that has been drawn from The London Stage Database, which does contain distinct records for each version of a work. We make one exception to this rule: when a play is transformed from a mainpiece to an afterpiece, we create two distinct records. Because we are interested in exploring whether it is possible to determine how much of a night’s takings can be assigned to the mainpieces and afterpieces, we need to draw a clear distinction between performances of each.
How to define a work is only one of the challenges we have encountered. Sometimes distinct works share a title. For example, James Shirley’s 1652 play The Brothers, set in Madrid, is not the same as Edward Young’s 1728 tragedy set in ancient Greece, also titled The Brothers. A third author, Richard Cumberland, unhelpfully titled his 1769 comedy The Brothers, too. Thankfully, Shirley’s play was not performed during the years covered by our project, and Young and Cumberland’s plays were performed in different decades. However, it does mean that we need to be careful that we are attaching the correct Work to a Performance, something that usually requires consulting the cast lists included in early publications of a play.
One final point of ambiguity has been the tendency for plays with long performance histories to change their titles. Often, these changes are to the subtitle, but occasionally one has the potential to trip us up. Between its first performance in 1694 and our project’s end date of 1809, the title of Thomas Southerne’s play The Fatal Marriage shifted from The Fatal Marriage: or, The Innocent Adultery to Isabella: or, The Fatal Marriage. Later advertisements and account books often only refer to it as Isabella, meaning that we have to be careful not to add an extra play with that title to the database.
As someone who has worked extensively on a bibliographical database, this exercise has highlighted the importance of bibliography and digitization projects like the ESTC and Eighteenth Century Collections Online alongside theatre-specific projects like The London Stage Database as foundational to theatre research across the eighteenth century. While I may curse the name of Richard Cumberland for not coming up with an original title for his play, it’s thanks to resources like these that we can untangle it from other, similarly titled plays.
