The business of theatre is contingent on the labour of a large number of people and a core aim of the project has been to make this labour visible.
As such, we have developed the first digital prosopography for the Georgian theatre that seeks to make equally visible the involvement of actors, playwrights, pyrotechnists, concessionaires, tallow chandler, carpenters, coal merchants, wardrobe keepers, and so on.
Our dataset contains information on ~6,000 people who derived a living from their interactions with Covent Garden and Drury Lane theatres, and contains standardised information about them such as birth and death dates, known activities/occupations within our theatres during our time period, and details on stage names, in addition to tracking name changes through marriage.
Our People records originated from the cast and author information contained within the London Stage Database and have been supplemented extensively by the Biographical Dictionary and the account books themselves. The London Stage Database provided core information about authors and actors for the 1732-1800 period; the Biographical Dictionary supported the identification of singers, dancers, and back of house staff; the account books have enabled rudimentary identification of some of those engaged with the theatres post-1800 and of tradespeople and suppliers. Collectively, these sources have allowed us to create unique profiles for the men, women, and children associated with Covent Garden and Drury Lane theatres, broaden the human infrastructure of the Georgian theatre, and shed light on the breadth of skills and expertise required to operate the theatres.
Our people profiles are richest for individuals who leave the strongest archival traces, such as the beneficiaries of theatre benefit nights ,and we have sought to strengthen our People data by linking people to their associated receipts and payments within our dataset. Information on linked transactions can be seen on individual profiles, when accessed from The People section of the site.
Our People records provide a range of biographical information via predetermined fields: name, gender, start date and type (birth, baptism or flourish), end date and type (death or flourish), and place of birth – country, place (village, town, or city). We have also linked our person profiles to external resources. This allows for easier interoperability of our data with other projects as well as usefully pointing users towards other resources with more specific information on our people. Our key external resources in this regard are VIAF, Wikipedia, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and the Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers & Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660-1800. Where biographical information is contradictory across these sources, we have privileged information from the DNB. For the most part, linking these resources has been straightforward, but many individuals do have more than one VIAF record; where this has occurred, we have deferred to the record associated with the Library of Congress/NACO. Given that VIAF relies on library, museum, and archival holdings, the proportion of people in our dataset with a VIAF record is low (~23%) compared to those linked to more specialised datasets such as the Biographical Dictionary; minor performers and back of house staff typically leave few traces in library authority files.
When we have information around an individual’s place of birth, we have collected corresponding geodata to allow for greater insight into the international dimension of our two theatres and so reveal how Covent Garden and Drury Lane recruited from far and near, attracting talent from across Europe and the home nations. In identifying place of birth, we have been directed by the DNB and Biographical Dictionary and have taken co-ordinates from Google Maps – though geodata is provided at the level of town/city, rather than the more granular level of street names.
We have also assigned gender designations (man, woman, unspecified, not applicable) to each person and assigned them Activities – identifying the different, and often multiple jobs, that an individual performed in or for a theatre (or both theatres) during our time period.
Activities are drawn in the main from the Biographical Dictionary and supplemented / corrected with evidence provided from the account books. This Activity data opens up new possibilities for a comparative analysis of the careers of men and women in addition to showcasing the diversity of professions and trades required by the Georgian theatre.
As our primary concern was in developing a prosopography of those employed in the theatre, rather than a trade directory of all those with whom the theatre did business, so some corporate entities or companies such as the Bank of England have not been given a person record as their information does not align with our predetermined data fields for biographical information. Some – such as the Sun Fire Office or the Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, where we have multiple financial transactions associated with them, have been given records. Moreover, given that we have linked benefit night takings to their recipients (see section on ‘Benefits’ below), many entities with records such as the Westminster Lying-in Hospital or the Theatrical Funds have profiles , albeit pared back (no Start and End dates or geodata) and have been designated ‘not applicable’ for gender. The nature of our theatres’ interactions with these companies not yet given a record can be determined through accessing the transcription of individual receipts and expenses, which can be discovered through the universal search feature and from The Business sections of the site.
Our treatment of small business owners also requires comment. The tradespeople and suppliers have mutable identities over time, as businesses acquire and discard partners, but we have emphasised the relationship of the theatre to the goods and services, rather than to any particular individual. Between 1757 and 1778, for example, Covent Garden sources linen from – in chronological order – Mr. Batten & Co.; Messrs. Hughes & Batton/Batten; Mr Hughes; and, Messrs Hughes & Bates. As the ‘& Co’ indicates a corporate entity and we are confident that these transactions relate to the same business (trade directories identify Hughes & Batten, William Hughes, and Hughes & Bates all operating out of 5 York St, Covent Garden for periods between 1759 and 1778), we relate all transactions to ‘Messrs. Hughes & Batten’, as we privilege the ability to look at the continuous trading relationship over looking at discrete entities, where appropriate. We identify the primary name based on variables such as duration of trading relationship, frequency of transactions, and order of trading relationships. In most cases of this type, the corporate identity will be indicated by ‘Messrs’ or ‘& Co.’ Included in the display name. Other names related to the same trading relationship will be linked as variant names.
Given the complex and various ways in which our sources collect and present biographical information, a considerable amount of work has been undertaken in order to refine and reconcile data to generate accurate profiles of individual’s presence in the repertory, and to bring our sources more in line with the expectations of twenty-first century scholarship. As such, in a key departure from eighteenth-century and twentieth-century sources, we opted to refer to someone as ‘Mr’, ‘Miss’, or ‘Mrs’ only when their first name is not known.
For the most part, the primary name assigned to a person reflects the name under which they first appeared upon the stage. This is designed to help show the trajectory of a career, with subsequent name changes listed as variants. Major celebrities and royalty, however, are an exception to this rule and are listed under the nomenclature than enshrined their fame i.e., Mary Ann Yates is listed as such, rather than as Mary Ann Graham, even though she first entered the bills as ‘Miss Graham’, and Miss Ramsey is given as a variant for Charlotte Lennox, rather than her being listed as Charlotte Ramsey. Similarly, George IV is listed as such even though during our period he was the Prince of Wales – a hereditary title that was also held by father and grandfather during our period, making it less useful as a primary identifying feature.
Another vital step in naming and identifying key individuals has been the cleaning up of OCR and scribal errors from our legacy datasets and the identification of the different names people used throughout their careers, merging these together to create individual profiles that give a meaningful sense of a career as a whole. We have retained records of these name variations wherever it makes sense to do so, reflecting the multiple ways in which a person was mentioned in the bills and accounts, and recorded these as Name Variants.
This practice means that a person record will provide you with a list of all the known names a specific individual may have appeared under during our period. These variants are also fully searchable, so if you are seeking an individual from a playbill, the database will return all records where that version of a name is listed as a variant.
The use of Name Variants also enables us to build fuller profiles for those who changed their names during their career – either through marriage or for other reasons. So, for instance, searching for Mrs Pope will return data records for both Elizabeth Younge and Maria-Ann Campion, who each had a theatrical career in their own right before their marriage to Alexander Pope (no, not that one, the Pope from Cork).
In addition to name changes through marriage, many people in the theatre also adopted a stage name. In these instances, the name they chose to appear under, and which was consequently given in playbills and advertising, is provided as that person’s primary name, with their real name listed as a variant (on the basis that they were not billed as such). In some instances, the connection between a stage name and a given name is intuitive, for instance Thomas Robson (b.1737-d.1813) is the stage name for Thomas Robson Brownhill, however others are more obscure, such as John Evans (d.1793), who went by the name Charles Clementine DuBellamy, or John Cochran (b.1727-d.1812) who is billed as Mr Moody.
While we have sought to create unique records for each person employed in or paid by our theatres through the cleaning and merging of replicated records, this has not always been possible. Common names such as Jones, Smith, or Young and prominent acting families, such as the Grimaldis and Cibbers, create challenges in disambiguating individual careers and payments. Where we can do so with certainty, we have sought to disambiguate these individuals; the six individuals appearing as ‘Miss Young’, for example, can for the most part be disentangled at the level of benefit nights through using their biographical data (marriage dates) in conjunction with cast roles, allowing us to assign benefit nights and payments to named individuals with a relatively high degree of confidence. When we have not been able to identify a specific recipient of a benefit night, these have been assigned to a ‘Master’ record, that gives high-level information only – a surname and the theatre in which they worked. It is hoped that future work might be able to resolve these so that they can be reassigned to the correct individual.
Adding to the complication of common names, is the tendency for performers to be billed as ‘A Young Lady’ or ‘A Young Gentleman’ upon making their theatrical debut. Where it is known that better-known performers made their debut in this way, information has been provided in the Notes field to mark that they are the ‘Young Lady/Gentleman listed in the bills on [DATE]’. Where we have not been able to make such an identification, we have retained separate records for these unknown ladies and gentlemen. While an imperfect decision, we felt it was important to make this common marketing strategy more readily visible. Therefore, you will find a series of Ladies and Gentlemen with sparsely populated records, indicating only the date and role in which they were cast in this manner or, where a phrase was used in a more capacious way, a sense of how frequently each theatre billed someone in this way.
It should be noted that our Name Variants reflect the different names used by a person during our period and not beyond; data does not reflect name changes if someone remarried in the 1810s, for instance, and in the case of those people who have been identified only from account books, Name Variants indicate the different ways that person was referred to in the manuscript sources only. People identified from the London Stage or Biographical Dictionary have a more extensive list of names reflecting the plethora of titles they might have been given in the bills (Mr, Mrs, Miss, Signora, Mademoiselle etc).
Our richest people data typically corresponds to those individuals who have benefit nights. We have sought to link all of our benefit nights to their respective beneficiaries and have attempted to build richer profiles for our beneficiaries by linking them to their other mentions in the receipts and expenses.
We have identified ~6,500 benefit nights, which give us in the region of ~13,000 beneficiaries. In light of our prosopography, we have been able to attach~88% of these beneficiary records to the corresponding Person record with a high degree of confidence. These confidently assigned records also include common groupings, such as the series of benefits advertised as ‘For a person in distress’, which have been allocated to a single record based on their shared nomenclature: they are not for the same person but rather indicate a consistent advertising practice. Nonetheless, given scanter biographical information for more minor performers and for those joining our theatres in the 1800s, as well as the tendency of the account books to list beneficiaries (especially ticket sellers) by surname only, with no indication of gender, some caution is needed and we welcome corrections.
The other 12% (c.1,600 records) have been assigned to the person who represents the best-fit option, and such instances of best-fit have been indicated in a note. Where we have no sense of who a beneficiary might be, we have created generic ‘master records’ to which the data has been assigned. Master records are frequently used when a beneficiary has a common surname, such as ‘Smith’ or ‘Jones’ and there are multiple people with that name active that year at that theatre. However, where we have sought to disambiguate wherever we can. This means, for example, that when ‘Thompson’ has a benefit night, those which we can confidently attach to an identified Thompson, such as John Thompson the box keeper, have been associated with the correct individual; those that cannot be linked to him with a reasonable degree of confidence, or linked to another Thompson, have been associated with a generic ‘Thompson’ record that contains no prosopographical details beyond an association with a theatre i.e., the theatre at which that benefit took place.
This approach means that we have assigned benefit nights by using the full range of biographical data and name variants in our dataset in order to determine to whom we assign benefits. This allows us, once again, to account for scribal errors in the account books and name changes through marriage to create a more holistic picture of an individual’s career as told through their benefit history.
A challenge to this methodology is provided by widows; their benefit nights have been assigned to their spouse as the benefit in question relates to the estate of the deceased. A few exceptions are made to this when the widow already has their own career within the theatre and their widow’s benefit have been linked to their profile to better elucidate the careers they experienced as separate from their husbands. The same basic methodology for assigning benefit nights has been used to link receipt and expense payments to Person profiles – with the exception that those payments on which we are uncertain have been left unattached, rather than being assigned to master records.