There are ~3500 Works in our database, of which ~1600 relate to dramatic pieces typically billed as mainpieces and afterpieces, while the remainder refer to songs, dances, music, or entertainments. Works are designated as either mainpiece, afterpiece, or remain undesignated (typically, the songs, dances, music, and entertainments are undesignated and are distinguished at the Performance level – see below). Works are also categorised by Genre and Performance Medium (see discussion in Genre document). The date of a Work’s first performance is given when known; when that date is uncertain, the date of publication is given instead.
What is a Work and when does a Work become a different Work? Adaptation, translation, revivals, and differing titles make this a very challenging question when dealing with the volume of works and the relative obscurity of many of them in our period. It is perhaps also a vexed question for Shakespeare and the many differing versions and adaptations of his Works.
Our editorial policy prefers to group Performances together under a single Work where at all possible, rather than creating multiple Works for those Performances, while recognizing distinct outliers and building in some flexibility for different manifestations of a Work in the repertory.
We believe this will allow users to trace a Work in the round and allow them to disambiguate where they disagree (whereas it would be more difficult for them to aggregate different Works). That said, this principle cannot be said to be rigid and we’ve tried as best we can to recognise the individuality of each case.
The complexities of identifying discrete Works and hard borders between it and another Work are many. Some examples will help illuminate our approach.
The Parting Lovers [True Blue], a 1739 interlude by Henry Carey, has an extensive afterlife. So we have included all 87 Performances of variant titles such as The Parting Lovers, Nancy; or, the Parting Lovers, The Press Gang, The Press Gang; or, the Parting Lovers, True Blue, The Spaniards Dismayed; or, True Blue Forever, and, last but not least, True Blue; or, a Bang at the Dons between 1740 and 1795 as Performances of this single Work. We have also included Thomas Hull’s True Blue; or, the Press Gang, a patriotic afterpiece revival from 1776,and listed Hull as an author. While this may be too crude for some purposes, this approach will give a fuller sense of the significance of Carey’s work across half a century.
Coriolanus, on the other hand, while it is a play that most people will associate with William Shakespeare, appears in our database as four separate works which we believe reflects a truer state of affairs in the eighteenth century: Coriolanus (1623) by Shakespeare; Coriolanus (1749) by James Thomson; Coriolanus; or, The Roman Matron (1752) by Thomas Sheridan, James Thomson, and William Shakespeare; and, Coriolanus; or, The Roman Matron (1789) by John Philip Kemble (whose claim to an author credit may be a stretch for some), James Thomson, Thomas Sheridan, and William Shakespeare. These appear as four separate Works for a combination of reasons: the plot changes considerably between them; each of these writers are significant in their own rights; we had the time to disambiguate these, but this is not the case for all Works in our repertory. These factors outweighed, in this case, a perfectly reasonable counter-argument to group them together given the title’s strong association with Shakespeare.
Another challenging example is The Judgement of Paris. William Congreve wrote a libretto for this in 1701 but it does not appear in our dataset until Thomas Arne reset it in 1742 for Drury Lane where we have labelled it a Musical – Drama/entertainment. It is also staged at Covent Garden in 1750. However, Drury Lane had previously staged a ballet pantomime (Dance – Pantomime) in 1733 by John Weaver of the same title. This background – both Drury Lane productions but one musical and one rooted in dance – provides a complex backdrop to a new 1757 ballet pantomime of The Judgement of Paris, produced at Covent Garden. What is its lineage? Clearly, the Weaver version has better generic overlap but that ballet was not successful and petered out very quickly in 1733. The Arne Judgement of Paris was much more successful, closer in time to this new version, and was also staged at Covent Garden. It seems more likely perhaps that elements of Arne found its way into this piece but we are not sure. We have left authorship designated as anonymous or unknown with a note pointing to its two possible antecedents for others to cast their own judgement. For cases such as these, it is possible that more research would glean an answer but we suspect for many of them, we will never know for certain.
Generally speaking, when we have Works with the same title, we have had to assume that the Work being performed is the most recent iteration but this will not always be accurate (whether it would even be possible to determine which version played is also up for discussion).
Another significant play, King Lear, which has 216 performances over the period (infamously a version by Nahum Tate from 1681) has not been disambiguated like Coriolanus with interventions by David Garrick (1756) and George Colman (1768) simply noted. Resources have not been sufficient to complete the grouping and disambiguation research as evenly or thoroughly as we would like. We welcome corrections and suggestions from experts on particular plays and authors.
We have considered authorship in an inclusive fashion, not least as it helps capture the flow of culture from continental Europe and the centrality of music and dance to performance in the period.
Thus, authors of source plays in other languages are listed as authors (e.g. Voltaire is identified as an author of The Orphan of China (1759), alongside Arthur Murphy) and composers/choreographers are included on an equal footing where we have identified them. We do not include authors of prologues, epilogues or contributed songs as authors; we always recommend consulting the London Stage to get a full sense of those involved in a Work (not to mention the eight volumes of Pierre Danchin’s Prologues and Epilogues of the Eighteenth Century). Moreover, our anonymous designation does not mean that the identification of such an author is not possible: there are doubtless many authors of currently anonymous Works that others will be able to help identify, perhaps particularly for the new plays first performed in the 1800-1809 period.
Mainpiece and afterpiece labels are designated on the basis of form and content, rather than chronology (although it is typically the case that they will synch). This approach captures the evolution of the entertainment trends on the London stage as they evolved; we see this in particular on benefit nights later in the century where audiences might be tempted by three or four shorter pieces, the theatre eschewing a longer five-act piece entirely on such occasions.
Where a play begins life as a mainpiece and becomes an afterpiece (or vice versa), we generally recognize these as one Work. But sometimes a gap in time, an additional author (i.e. adapter), or even a shift in genre would rather indicate two different Works would be appropriate. Thus, for example, The Royal Merchant; or, Beggar’s Bush, a 1705 anonymous revision of John Fletcher’s 1622 The Beggar’s Bush,is treated as distinct from Thomas Hull’s 1767 revision of the same as this was staged as a comic opera, as opposed to the earlier spoken drama. We believe this to be a sufficiently sharp generic distinction to warrant the split. Fletcher is identified as a co-author of both of these Works.
Similarly, we have treated two major versions of Milton’s Comus separately: we have a 1738 version from John Dalton and Thomas Arne and a 1772 revival by George Colman the Elder. There is a reasonably large gap between the last performance of Dalton’s and Colman’s first, a large number of Performances for each of them, and the later version was an afterpiece rather than a mainpiece. Treating them separately made sense here, not least as the scholar more interested in Milton’s impact on the eighteenth-century repertory can combine these two relatively easily. However, with a Work with such a rich performance history it seems highly likely that there are variations and overlaps within our binary division that others with more time to reflect will delineate. The further attractions of splitting such Works as Comus is that our filter for new performances will return those initial performances of Colman’s 1772 version as new, a more accurate reflection of how the London audience would have perceived them.
There is caution advised in relation to songs, dances, music and entertainments. Due to the focus of the project, the magnitude of the data, resource limitations, and the limited expertise of the team, these Works have not received the same degree of attention as the mainpieces and afterpieces. What we present is a starting point for more research rather than an endpoint. For these Works, we have grouped together titles and variant titles of Performances to the degree that was feasible for us. Users can thus track 245 Performances of the dance The Drunken Peasant over four decades but as to its origins, choreographer, and evolution, we have nothing to add, only a hope that it will prove a useful platform for a future dance specialist. Equally, although for slightly different reasons, we have not paid as much attention to oratorios on the grounds that while they are an essential component of the theatrical season, featuring heavily during Lent, they are financially uninteresting. Theatres rented out their premises to oratorio companies and received fixed payments so we have little sense of how busy such nights were or how they varied. Consequently, users are directed to the London Stage for better information on oratorio nights.
Refinement is ongoing as we try to look at Works on a case-by-case basis, adhering to these deliberately flexible editorial principles: a hard and fast rule that would bring artificial order to the gloriously varied and palimpsestic Georgian repertory not being, in our view, a realistic or helpful ambition.
Each Event in our database consists of a series of Performances, mostly on the mainpiece-afterpiece model (generally, a five-act spoken drama followed by a two-act farce or musical), although there are a myriad of variations of this, particularly as the century progresses and theatre-goers expected a wider range of entertainments over the course of the evening. There are more than 76,000 Performances recorded in our database. Each of these has been assigned to one of our ~3,500 Works.
Each Performance has been assigned one of these categories: mainpiece, afterpiece, dance, song, music, or entertainment. Our filtering tool will return all Events in which one of those type of Performance appears with the relevant Performance highlighted in bold. For mainpieces and afterpieces, the Performance type may differ from the Work type as we preferred to assign all Performances of a Work to a single record rather than splitting into two Works. For example, Leonard MacNally, Edward Lysaght, and William Shields’s Robin Hood began life as a mainpiece in 1784 before becoming an afterpiece in 1789. We have classified the Work as a mainpiece (as this is how it began life and how it remained in the repertory for a period) but the 102 Performances vary between mainpiece and afterpiece. Thus, the Work is unified and users can more readily track its evolving and mutable performance history.
Users should also bear in mind that for songs and dances, we extracted our dataset from the London Stage Database and we limited this to those songs and dances that are specifically identified under the ‘MUSIC’, ‘SINGING and ‘DANCING’ sections that can be seen in the individual calendar entry for that Event. In other words, there are other songs and dances that appear in the repertory as part of the description of the mainpiece and afterpiece or in the COMMENT that do not appear in our dataset. Equally, we wish to be clear that we have only included songs, music, and dances with some identifying feature: we have excluded ‘Dance/Song by [named performer]’ on the grounds that we know nothing of that piece. But all such pieces with even broad identifying features that seem useful we have included; thus, users will find 364 instances of ‘Scottish dance’ on the grounds that tracing the ethnicity of a song/dance/piece of music is of interest, even if the particularities of these dances are not immediately apparent. Finally, users should be aware that resource constraints means that the songs/dances/music are treated differently from and including the 1800-1801 season where we have simply identified the titles in our Event notes (they are not included in our relational database).