Introduction

Overview

The purpose of this document is to give users an introduction to the Theatronomics resource and explain how it has been sourced, structured, and categorised. The database pertains to the activities of the Theatres Royal, Drury Lane and Covent Garden from 1732 (when Covent Garden opened) to 1809 (when both theatres had been destroyed by fire). The team has transcribed and categorised all major archival sources related to financial data in this period and mapped these transactions onto the repertory and people of the theatres to the extent that was possible within the timeframe and resources of our project.

This document is designed as a brief primer to enable users to get started. Users are strongly advised to read it to understand the strengths and limitations of the resource. Our focus has been on the correct documentation of financial figures, a task of considerable effort. To make sense of those figures we have strived to provide the supporting data on the dramatic works and people of the Georgian period, although there are gaps in what we have provided to date which should be noted. Alongside this primer is a suite of supporting documentation for those who wish to better understand our methodologies. The data is considerable, varied, and frustrating: users are strongly advised to engage with this introductory material to help make sense of the resource.

Data

The database holds a considerable amount of data: there are ~27,000 items of income and ~158,000 items of expenditure documented and categorised, amounting to about ~£7.3m of financial transactions (~£3.97m in income, ~£3.37m in expenditure). There are also ancillary financial data which have not been incorporated into the main resource but are available for consultation. In order to better relate the income and expenditure to the daily business of theatre, we document 29,310 Events at the theatre (i.e. evenings of dramatic entertainment) incorporating ~76,000 Performances of ~3500 Works. The world of our database is populated by ~6000 People.

Given that the database draws on all major financial sources for the period, it is in one sense comprehensive; however, there are considerable gaps in the archival record, particularly in the earlier years. The period for which we have the best coverage, 1766-1809, also has gaps: Covent Garden is missing 6 seasons: 1770-71; 1774-75; 1775-76; 1778-79; 1784-85; 1807-8; and Drury Lane is missing 4: 1767-68; 1768-69; 1769-70; 1770-1. We provide full or partial coverage of 105 theatrical seasons of activity; full details are given below in Sources. Moreover, while the categorisation and interface are set up to allow ready comparison between the two theatres, users should be aware that because the theatres used different accounting practices (and individual theatres changed their practices over time), such comparisons should be done with great care. To take one illustrative example, our database records payments of £32,905 7s 5d and £128,313 14s 9d respectively in payments to actors employed at Covent Garden and Drury Lane over this period. This is not a basis to make a claim that Drury Lane outspent its rival on acting talent by a 4:1 ratio between 1732 and 1809. To determine the true discrepancy, one would need to take account of different available sources and coverage for each theatre, the theatres’ methods of recording payments to employees, our editorial policy as regards both the categorisation of activities, salary payments, and the particular seasons in which such payments appear.

Users should be hesitant to make assumptions of data uniformity across time and need to understand the idiosyncrasies of the resource’s data across both theatres and seasons before drawing conclusions.

In terms of our core financial data, it is important to note that the financial records we present here do not purport to be a profit and loss account statement for each performance season. Rather they are better thought of as cashflow statements for 12-month periods: they are a record of incoming and outgoing payments insofar as we can determine. The hesitation is warranted as some transactions we have examined remain cryptic and will require further research to unpick, perhaps particularly in relation to large inflows and outflows orchestrated by management. The extant account books are part of a wider set of financial records that might have illuminated some of our figures, but are now largely lost to us. However, given the sheer volume of cash we have carefully documented going in and out of the theatres, we are confident that the records are a meaningful proxy of the profitability of the business of theatre, especially if one can grapple with the large proprietorial transfers.

Users should also be aware that Drury Lane was closed for rebuilding for the 1791-93 seasons and much of the 1793-94 season (the new Drury Lane theatre was operational from March 1794) and the troupe performed during this period at other theatres (King’s Theatre, Haymarket and the Little Haymarket). Covent Garden burnt down in September 1808 and Drury Lane followed suit in February 1809; both companies performed at alternative venues (Covent Garden at the King’s and Drury Lane at the Lyceum). Such closures, with the associated disruption and different venues, should be noted in relation to the available financial figures for those seasons.

Our resource contains data for the period 1800-1809. As this is an addendum to the London Stage, we have treated this period a little differently. In a considerable change to its accounting policy, Drury Lane began recording individual salary payments in 1799 in their main books (rather than the aggregate lump sum salary payments of earlier seasons) and we decided that we would document these for the final decade of our resource. Less satisfactorily, we did not have the resources to individually code the songs and dances that appeared in the repertory for this period in the manner we did for the pre-1800 period; however, they are documented, along with some cast information, in our notes on each night’s activities. There is also a higher proportion of anonymously authored Works (where anonymous can also mean unknown) and little-known actors for this period (as the Biographical Dictionary ends in 1800), although we imagine that in time other scholars will be able to identify many of these people and we will update accordingly.

Users should also be careful, when looking at figures across broad ranges, that our data is a mixed dataset on two levels. The majority of our sources are standard account books, relatively uniform in format and practice for the theatre in question. However, some seasons draw on different kinds of sources…

Notably the diaries of Richard Cross which provide only estimates of door receipts. Moreover, for a very small number of seasons we offer a combination of sources on the grounds that this is a sound approach in terms of offering the most accurate figure for a financial record of an individual theatrical night, as different kinds of records kept by the same theatre prioritise different financial information. Full details on the sources used for each season are provided below.

Sources

We have used a variety of sources for this project, manuscript, printed, and digital. Our primary printed, tertiary, and digital sources include:

The London Stage 1660-1800, ed. Van Lennep et al, 11 volumes in five parts (1960-70);
A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses… 1660-1800, ed. Highfill et al, 16 vols (1973-93);
The London Stage Database, ed. Mattie Burkert et al (2018) https://londonstagedatabase.uoregon.edu; and,
The London Stage Calendar, 1800-1844, ed. Michael Burden and Jonathan Hicks https://londonstage.bodleian.ox.ac.uk [currently offline].
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

The London Stage, 1660-1800 and its digital incarnation, The London Stage Database, were indispensable, with the latter providing us with our original core dataset which we corrected, modified, and supplemented for our purposes. These resources remain essential for our website and users are directed to consult them for rich contextual material – such as cast lists, newspaper reviews, performance order – that will enable better understanding of our financial records.

Scans of the manuscript account books at the Folger Shakespeare Library provided much of the material for Drury Lane while that related to Covent Garden was accessible primarily through Nineteenth Century Collections Online. British Theatre, Music and Literature: High and Popular Culture, a Gale database of material held in the Egerton Collection at the British Library. For those who wish to get a flavour of the manuscript sources directly, project funding and partnership with the Folger Library has enabled the scanning of much of the manuscript sources for Drury Lane, available here: Folger Digital Collections also make available the account book for the Covent Garden 1793-94 season. Other archives provided data for other seasons as documented below. Notably, the Garrick Club in London provided us with an account book for Covent Garden’s 1758-59 season previously, as far as we can tell, unknown to scholars.

Most sources are account books, itemising receipts and expenses for a single and entire season, held at the British Library or Folger Library, which we have incorporated in full. Where this is not the case, notes in square brackets specify the source’s coverage OR those elements of it which we drew upon, as appropriate AND/OR dates of partially covered seasons. Non-account book sources comprise:

Performance registers that give receipts sporadically and/or for large parts of entire seasons (‘Rich’s Register’ for CG 1732-33; T.a. 56 for DL 1758-59; various sources for Drury Lane 1763-64).
Documents produced as part of disputes over Drury Lane’s profitability, which give performance receipts, but not for most benefit nights (LC/204, pp. 62-9 for 1742-43; John Powel’s ‘Tit for Tat’ for 1747-49).
The diaries of Richard Cross, which give estimates of performance receipts (almost invariably as round figures without shillings or pence, and recognisable on that basis), documented as receipts proper in our database for those dates on which we have no alternative data, but located in the Event notes for those dates on which other, more precise data is available.

Excellent introductions to the advantages and challenges of working with these materials are given in Judith Milhous’s ‘Reading Theatre History from Account Books’ in Players, Playwrights, Playhouses: Investigating Performance, 1660-1800, ed. Michael Cordner and Peter Holland (Palgrave, 2007), 101-131 and Milhous and Robert Hume’s ‘Theatre Account Books in Eighteenth-Century London’, Script & Print 33 (2009), 125-35.

Green: full coverage (i.e. records of receipts and expenditure for the entire season, albeit sometimes lacking details found in other seasons’ sources)

Blue: partial coverage (inc. Cross estimates when present alongside (an)other source(s))

Yellow: Cross estimates of performance receipts (and no other source(s))

White: no substantial financial sources


Season	Covent Garden Sources	Drury Lane Sources
1732-33	Garrick Club, ‘Rich’s Register’ [perf. receipts]
1733-34
1734-35
1735-36	BL Eg. 2267^A
1736-37
1737-38		BL Eg. 2320, ff. 71v-75v [30 Aug.-13 Oct. 1737]^B
1738-39
1739-40
1740-41	Folger W.a. 94 [19 Sep. 1740-20/21 Apr. 1741]; John Rylands Library, English MS 1111 [Cross] ^C
1741-42		John Rylands Library, English MS 1111 ^C
1742-43		The National Archives LC/204, pp. 62-9 [perf. receipts]^D
1743-44
1744-45
1745-46		Hugh Owen Library, Aberystwyth University, GB 982 GP/2/5^E
1746-47	BL Eg. 2268	Yale University Library, Osborn Collection, Diary 1746-47^F
1747-48		Houghton THE GEN TS 1574.316 [John Powel’s ‘Tit for Tat’: perf. receipts]; Folger, W.a.104 (1) [Cross]
1748-49		Houghton THE GEN TS 1574.316 [John Powel’s ‘Tit for Tat’: perf. receipts]; Folger, W.a.104 (1) [Cross]
1749-50	BL Eg. 2269	Folger W.a. 155 [30 Oct. 1749-28 Apr.1750, expenses, most receipts]; Folger W.a.104 (1) [Cross]
1750-51		Folger W.a. 104 (2)
1752-53		Folger W.a. 104 (2)
1751-52		Folger W.a. 104 (2)
1753-54		Folger W.a. 104 (2)
1754-55		Folger W.a. 104 (2)
1755-56		Folger W.a. 104 (3)
1756-57		Folger W.a. 104 (3)
1757-58	Hugh Owen Library, Aberystwyth University, GB 982 GP/2/6; BL Eg. 2270 [perf. receipts for certain benefit nights]^G	Folger W.a. 104 (3)
1758-59	Garrick Club, ARR7 Shelf 7 Vol. 1	Folger T.a. 56 [Winston MS 8: perf. receipts]; Folger W.a. 104 (3) [Cross]
1759-60	Folger W.a. 95	Folger W.a. 104 (3) [22 Sep. 1759- 22 Jan. 1760]
1760-61	BL Eg. 2271^H
1761-62	Folger W.b. 2 [25 Sep.-27 Nov. 1761]
1762-63
1763-64		Dougald Macmillan, Drury Lane Calendar 1747-1776 [most perf. receipts from playbills annotated by JP Kemble]; Folger T.a. 57 [Winston MS 9: some perf. receipts]; anonymous continuator of Cross Diaries [one perf. receipt]I
1764-65
1765-66
1766-67	BL Eg. 2272	Folger W.b. 273
1767-68	BL Eg. 2273
1768-69	BL Eg. 2274
1769-70	BL Eg. 2275
1770-71
1771-72	BL Eg. 2276	Folger W.b. 274
1772-73	BL Eg. 2277	Folger W.b. 275
1773-74	BL Eg. 2278	Folger W.b. 276
1774-75		Folger W.b. 277
1775-76		Folger W.b. 278
1776-77	BL Eg. 2279	Folger W.b. 279
1777-78	BL Eg. 2280	Folger W.b. 280
1778-79		Folger W.b. 281
1779-80	BL Eg. 2281	Folger W.b. 282
1780-81	BL Eg. 2282	Folger W.b. 283
1781-82	BL Eg. 2283	Folger W.b. 284
1782-83	BL Eg. 2284	Folger W.b. 285
1783-84	BL Eg. 2285	Folger W.b. 286
1784-85		Folger W.b. 287
1785-86	BL Eg. 2286	Folger W.b. 288
1786-87	BL Eg. 2287	Folger W.b. 289
1787-88	BL Eg. 2288	Folger W.b. 290
1788-89	BL Eg. 2289	Folger W.b. 291
1789-90	BL Eg. 2290*	Folger W.b. 292
1790-91	BL Eg. 2291	Folger W.b. 293
1791-92	BL Eg. 2292*	Folger W.b. 294
1792-93	BL Add MS 29,948	Folger W.b. 295
1793-94	Folger W.b. 436	Folger W.b. 296
1794-95	BL Eg. 2293*	Folger W.b. 297
1795-96	BL Eg. 2294*	Folger W.b. 298
1796-97	BL Eg. 2295	Folger W.b. 299**
1797-98	BL Eg. 2296	Folger W.b. 300
1798-99	BL Eg. 2297	Folger W.b. 301
1799-00	BL Eg. 2298*	Folger W.b. 303**
1800-01	BL Eg. 2299	Folger W.b. 304
1801-02	BL Eg. 2300*	Folger W.b. 305
1802-03	BL Eg. 2301*	Folger W.b. 306**
1803-04	BL Eg. 2302*	Folger W.b. 307**
1804-05	BL Eg. 2303*	Folger W.b. 308**
1805-06	BL Eg. 2304*	Folger W.b. 309**
1806-07	BL Add MS 29,957	Folger W.b. 310
1807-08		Folger W.b. 311**
1808-09	BL Eg. 2307*	Folger W.b. 312-313**J

Notes

* An alternative series of Covent Garden account books, which spans 1789-1809 with gaps (BL Add MSS 29,946-29,958) is also available for this season, but we have not drawn upon it, except for the occasional cross-reference. These alternative account books are used for 1792-93 and 1806-7 as we have no other data.

** Tally sheets, providing audience numbers and receipt breakdowns for Drury Lane, covering part or all of the season also exist. These figures have been added to our notes for the relevant dates, drawn from the V&A Theatre Collections, and can be viewed in the Calendar section of the resource.

Covent Garden, 1735-36.
A descriptive summary of this season’s expenditure exists in two nineteenth-century copies, BL Add. MS 32,251, pp. 299-308, and BL 11791.dd.18, vol. 3, ff. 177-89 (a fuller version). Their contents are somewhat different from those in the standard account book (BL Eg. 2267). We have not used it, but Milhous and Hume have described, analysed, and transcribed it (using the fuller copy) in Theatre Survey 31 (1990), 200-41.
Drury Lane, 1737-38.
For description of Eg. 2320, and attribution of the relevant part to Richard Cross, see Terry Jenkins, ‘The Diary of Benjamin Griffin: A Re-Appraisal’, Theatre Notebook 73 (2019), 89-101.
Covent Garden, 1740-41; Drury Lane, 1741-42
We have not seen the MS of English MS 1111, but have accessed it via Harry William Pedicord, ‘Course of Plays, 1740-2: An Early Diary of Richard Cross, Prompter to the Theatres’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 40 (1958), 432-72.
Drury Lane, 1742-43.
In 1743 DL rebel actors produced a list of performance receipts, found in TNA LC/204, pp. 62-98. We have not seen the MS and it is not included in The London Stage, but we have accessed it via Milhous and Hume, ‘David Garrick and Box-Office Receipts at Drury Lane in 1742-43’, Philological Quarterly 67 (1988), 323-44.
Drury Lane, 1745-46.
For analysis and an alternative transcription of Hugh Owen Library, Aberystwyth University, GB 982 GP/2/5, see Milhous and Hume, ‘A Drury Lane Account Book for 1745-46’, Theatre History Studies 10 (1990), 67-104.
Drury Lane, 1746-47.
We have not seen the MS of Richard Cross’s 1746-47 diary, held by Yale University Library, Osborn Collection, and it is not included in The London Stage. But we have accessed it via Milhous and Hume, ‘Receipts at Drury Lane: Richard Cross’s Diary for 1746-47’, Theatre Notebook 49 (1995), 12-26, 69-90.
Covent Garden, 1757-58.
There are two sources for this season’s CG accounts, which Jenkins compares and analyses in ‘Two Account Books for Covent Garden Theatre, 1757-58′, Theatre Notebook 70 (2016), 109-25. They differ markedly, especially in expenditure records. We have followed Jenkins in privileging the Aberystwyth account book which better represents actual costs, but have included the BL book as an ancillary dataset and have used it for additional information on benefit night receipts in our main dataset.
Covent Garden, 1760-61.
Garrick Club, ARR7 Shelf 7 Vol. 2 is an alternative account book for the same season, which we have not used. Nor was it drawn upon for The London Stage.
Drury Lane, 1763-64.
Accessed via The London Stage’s calendar. Information from the anonymous continuator of the Cross Diaries is also included in The London Stage, and we used it via that source for a single performance receipt. Folger T.a. 57 gives some performance receipts, which we used for certain nights.
Drury Lane, 1808-09.
There are two account books for this season, one (W.b. 312) pertaining to the dates before Drury Lane’s conflagration, 17 Sep. 1808-24 Feb. 1809, the other (W.b. 313) to those when the company was performing at the Lyceum Theatre, 16 March-19 June 1809.

Navigating the site

There are four main ways into our dataset with a degree of relationality between them built in.

The Business

This comprises our core dataset of financial transactions captured in the extant account books.

We have transcribed and categorised ~27,000 items of income and ~158,000 items of expenditure to the value of ~£7.3m between 1732 and 1809.

All line items have been double-checked. We have captured virtually every item – both amount and account book narrative – on a line-by-line basis and added explanatory notes where appropriate. A notable exception is our treatment of Covent Garden’s paylists (which document individual weekly payments to 100+ people every week of the season) where we record the aggregate totals only. Drury Lane, for the most part, only records the aggregate total of weekly salary payments (those paid on a per diem basis) in its accounts up to 1799. We have recorded individual salary payments at Drury Lane 1799-1809, partly on the grounds that as this decade was an extension to the London Stage calendar (with thanks to The London Stage Calendar, 1800-1844), it warranted some special attention.

Our filters allow users to look at our financial data from/to specific dates but also on a seasonal basis. Our theatrical season runs 1 September – 31 August. We considered other options for determining season’s duration (first and last entry in the relevant account book, or from the first performance of a season to the day before the first performance of the next season) but for several reasons we resolved on this fixed date approach. For one, receipts and expenses are regularly recorded on dates that are far removed from when they were incurred (e.g. a benefit deficiency payment might be made two years after the fact). For another, the question as to whether a carpenter’s bill in July/August was for work best described as repairs (for the season just past) or refurbishment (for the season to come) was a philosophical conundrum we do not believe can be answered with confidence. Finally, we believe this approach makes sense for ease of comparison: with two institutions operating different dates and accounting practices, this at least imposed some uniform, if somewhat arbitrary, discipline on their business. However, our approach has the minor drawback that for some seasons (see Covent Garden, 1747-48 by way of example) we have some ‘overspill’ transactions. Thus, our resource will show a small amount of transactions for Covent Garden in the 1747-48 season and some few others despite us not having an account book for that season; those transactions that appear there emanate from the account book for the previous season.

Income and expenditure have been categorised into a two-tier system of umbrella categories and categories. Expenditure items are also assigned a payment type (internal, external, departmental, unknown). More information on our approach to categorisation and on transcription process can be found here

The Performances

There are 29,314 theatrical evenings which we characterise as Events in our database: 14,690 for Covent Garden, 14,624 for Drury Lane. Each Event is populated by Performances of Works i.e. plays, songs, and dances. Events are divided into categories which users can filter: benefit (author, employee, tickets taken, and charity), command, requested, and standard.

Benefit nights were a quintessential feature of the Georgian repertory where management would give over the profits of an evening to a named and advertised beneficiary or group of beneficiaries. The beneficiary would typically have the right to sell tickets to which they could add the door receipts of an evening, once they had paid management the house charge, a previously agreed estimate of the operational costs of the theatre for the evening. The simplicity of the premise is belied by the many complex variations that can be found in the account books. More discussion of the different types of benefit nights, including tickets taken nights, can be found here.

Requested performances feature a Performance of a Work that was advertised as being staged at the request of someone or some group of people (e.g. Masons, foreign royals or dignitaries, merchants), often anonymous or simply marked as ‘By desire/By particular desire/By request’. Where we can identify the requester or even the type of requester (‘Several Ladies of Quality’, ‘Several Persons of Quality’, ‘Several Persons of Distinction’, ‘Persons of Quality and Distinction’, and ‘Several Eminent Citizens’), we have done so. It is possible, if not probable, that ‘By desire’ may for many of those evenings simply be a marketing tic. Nonetheless, we have included these nights as Requested as we believe this pattern of marketing is of potential interest. Where we have not identified the requester, users are directed to the London Stage for details (although it usually desired ‘by Ladies’). Where the ‘desire’ was directed towards a performer, rather than a Performance of a Work, we have not included it in this category.

Command performances are an important subset of requested performances that were requested by the king or a member of the royal household. In cases where London Stage (and in several instances the account books) has the wording “Present His Majesty” / “Present His Royal Highness X”, we did not code as “Command” since the practice of commanding performances was regulated and marked accordingly in the account books for a reason. Rather than being an imposition on the theatre, such nights virtually guaranteed a lucrative evening as the presence of royalty generated considerable audience interest. Command nights are rarely benefit nights, but this combination does occasionally occur. Please note that a limitation of our data structure only allows one person to be nominated as the commander of a piece; thus, for the many performances ‘By Command of Their Majesties’, only George III has been identified as the commander thus unfortunately underplaying Queen Charlotte’s theatrical presence (happily, we have the capacity to link multiple people to a financial transaction so ‘Their Majesties’ will have both parties in that context). Royal personages whose status changes over time are identified as a static individual e.g. George III is identified as commanding even when he did so in his earlier capacity as the Prince of Wales (although note that some instances of George, Prince of Wales are identified as George IV even though he did not acquire that title within our period).

A standard Event is one which does not bear any features of a benefit, requested, or command night.

A Work refers to a single artistic piece such as a play, song or dance, to which variously titled Performances can be ascribed in order to ascertain correctly the full performance and financial history. Thus, Shakespeare’s Work Henry V has 128 Performances linked to it in our period, with varying flavours of anti-Gallic titles on display.

We have income documented for about 2/3 of our theatrical nights comprising door receipts in the main but also ticket sales and charges, typically for benefit nights, when recorded. On the landing page for The Performances, users can see the revenue and associated metrics but if users click on the date of the Event, they will be brought to a calendar view which offers the full extent of the financial and attendance records available in our resource, incorporating the fuller financial and seating records where available. Combining door receipts and ticket money is extremely complicated for several reasons: 1) the twin desiderata of showing how profitable a night was to the theatre and how full it was are largely incompatible (ticket money is typically divided between the theatre and the beneficiary; ticket nights, particularly later in the century, often incur deficit to be repaid from ticket sales and these are difficult to unravel in the books) 2) ticket money often comes in on much later dates 3) ticket money records are not always available and 4) ticket money gets treated in different ways for different people in a complex benefit system.

We include a complete record of all theatrical evenings held at these theatres drawn from The London Stage Database and The London Stage Calendar, 1800-1844, adding information on benefit nights for 1800-1809 to the latter source’s data. Users can therefore track the changing popularity of dramatic pieces, songs, and dances even where we do not have financial records of door receipts. For most dramatic pieces that appear with consistency in the repertory, users are likely to find performances for which we have financial data and performances for which we do not.

It is therefore crucial to remember that when our resource records, for example, 158 performances of Susanna Centlivre’s A Bold Stroke for a Wife (1718) and £16,266 15s worth of income over our period, that the financial transactions only represent the records for those nights for which we have records.

In other words, Centlivre’s comedy – and many other plays, particularly those performed before the late 1760s – generated considerably more money than what we document here. Equally important to remember is that the money associated with A Bold Stroke for a Wife or indeed any Work cannot be attributed solely to that Work but to the complete entertainment offering of an evening.

Determining which of the Performances on offer of an evening was the prime attraction is rarely straightforward and requires careful attention to a spectrum of everchanging variables.

Our filters allow users to generate precise subsets of Event and Performance data. The filters will return results found in the resource’s Events. Thus, a search using the Genres filter for ‘Comedy’ for the 1806-7 season will return 236 results i.e. Events on which comedies were performed. Those Performance title categorised as Comedy will be highlighted in bold. However, if we then graph that result, the graphic will show 254 results as there were Events that staged multiple comedies (and we believe this number to be of greater interest). Users should thus be aware that the Performance Type, Genres and Medium filters operate on the level of Performance (and graphs may thus generate modified numbers from the initial tabulated results) while the Theatres, Event Type, and New Performances operate on the level of Event for reasons we believe are intuitive (these results will always match the graph). Where a filtered search combines filters that operate on both the Performance and Event level, the Event graph is preferred. For example, a search for Genres>History and Event Type>Benefit will graph the number of Events that were benefit nights featuring a history genre performance, rather than the number of history genre performances staged on benefit nights.

Works

There are ~3500 Works in our database: ~1600 relate to the standard mainpieces and afterpieces of the Georgian repertory; the remainder are Songs/Dances/Music/Entertainment. We have a more refined dataset in relation to those mainpieces and afterpieces; the data on the works. Pre-1800 Works were imported en masse from the London Stage Database before undergoing a long process of data cleaning. In essence, this involved deleting rogue imports and the slow merging of variant titles that had imported separately but were in fact all variants of what we believe to be an individual Work.

The records for each Work can be seen on an individual page by simply clicking on a title as it appears listed on a performance night. Clicking on the title of a Performance will open a separate window for the associated Work which will give the user our resource’s aggregate data for that Work. This includes the total number of performances (and that total split by theatre), the total amount of receipts associated with that Work (and that total split by theatre), and those other Works most commonly paired with it and their genre. Users can exclude songs/dances/entertainments from those pairings by ticking the ‘Mainpiece/afterpieces’ box. A slider allows the user to specify the revenue and pairings for a particular period and/or theatre e.g. what was paired with The School for Scandal between 1790-95 (Prince Hoare’s No Song No Supper – 7 times. And if one was to click on that work, we can also immediately see that it was paired even more often with The Rivals [13 times] so it was a clear favourite of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, author of both those comedies and, crucially, Drury Lane owner). The recorded receipts associated with that Work across both theatres is also graphed in a bar chart for convenience.

Further discussion of our Works and associated Performances can be read here . See also our discussion of Genre.

Capacity

The original ambition of the project was to provide real as well as nominal values in our database. In other words, we wished to account for inflation to compare the financial pulling power of plays over time in a more meaningful way. There were reasons why this was not possible, not least the fairly stagnant inflationary nature of most of the eighteenth century suddenly careering into a wildly inflationary period over the course of the French Revolutionary Wars, meant that such an approach would have produced peculiar and likely meaningless results, certainly as far as the theatre historian was concerned.

We instead tackled the issue of comparing receipts over time in a way we felt would be more pertinent to the theatre historian: we measure door receipts against the expanding capacity of the theatres and we account for ticket price changes.

Thus, our capacity % figure represents the income generated by a night’s entertainment expressed as a percentage of the money generated by a ‘full’ house. A £200 house in 1750 is a very different indicator of success to a £200 house in 1790. Nonetheless, there are very significant challenges and qualifications that need to be understood in relation to this figure and these are documented here. In brief, our position is that we do not believe that it is possible to assign a maximum revenue (calculated on a ticket price x headcount basis) to our theatres over our period and our approach is rather our assessment of how much money a manager might reasonably expect to be generated on a good night. Our ambition for this metric is modest, but we believe it will offer a helpful, if broad, perspective on comparing how well a theatre is doing over time.

Revenue %

The purpose of this calculation is to allow comparisons between theatres on any given night. It is calculated by expressing a theatre’s income on any night as a percentage of the total income earned by both theatres. Thus, if Covent Garden has a revenue % figure of 63%, then Drury Lane has a revenue % figure of 37%; we can say with some confidence that whatever Covent Garden was staging proved considerably more alluring to the London theatregoer.

This is a somewhat artificial figure because it does not, of course, take any account of other entertainment options available in London on that evening. Nonetheless, it has the merit of simplicity and, over time, gives us a good sense of how well a theatre was doing at a particular moment in time relative to the opposition house. There are other caveats: for instance, there may be some nights where the gulf in financial performance is understated as the spillover from one full theatre might go to the other house. In other words, we might imagine scenarios where the ‘losing’ theatre benefits from the limited capacity of the other.

We have limited this calculation so that it only makes the calculation when both theatres have comparable financial data (standard vs standard night, both with door receipts; benefit vs benefit, both with ticket sales; standard night with door receipts vs benefit night with door receipts and ticket sales and so on). For other nights, it will return n/a (when we are not comparing full data with full data) or 100% (when only one theatre is operational).

The People

The business of theatre is contingent on a large number of people, and the patent houses of Covent Garden and Drury Lane are no exception.

Opening the doors each night required not only actors, singers, and dancers, but carpenters, wardrobe keepers, constables, scene painters, and many more. Our People data seeks to make the labour of these people visible and thus represents those who worked on stage, backstage, in the accounting department, and who supplied key goods and services from outside the theatre.

Our resource, with ~6,000 people, now represents the most ambitious dataset of the Georgian theatrical world available, built on the excellent work of its precedents. Our theatrical world is capacious, and it may be distinguished from the Biographical Dictionary by the inclusion of many of the external tradespeople and suppliers of the theatres, allowing scholars to better understand how the theatres were connected to the economy of London. We have included people where we can identify at least one of our activity categories and have focused most of our efforts on those who received benefit nights as the theatres often – but not always – captured rich financial data related to those nights. Moreover, these people seemed likely to be of most interest to scholars. Work is ongoing on the linking of other financial transactions to people.

To bring the careers of this range of employees to life, and to sketch out their careers, we have sought to record birth, baptism, flourish, and death dates (when known) in addition to providing unique identifiers through VIAFs, Wikipedia, and Dictionary of National Biography records. These external links provide additional biographical information and enhance the interoperability of our core dataset. It is important to note that we have not sought to replicate the biographical detail of the DNB or Biographical Dictionary (for which we have supplied page references for all relevant individuals); our core aim has been to create discrete profiles that can be reliably associated with financial transactions. The references to other resources are thus designed to assist users looking for fuller information.

In addition, each person’s profile will include the following information, when we have been able to determine it:

Name variants
Geodata for place of birth
Authored Works
All activities to which we can associate with them in our period, by theatre. These are largely generated with reference to the Biographical Dictionary, but we occasionally differ with that source. Some activities, particularly for those people external to the theatres, are assigned based on the evidence of the account books.
Benefits in their capacity as author or charity including ticket sales, charges, and ticket count (if available)
Benefits in their capacity as employee/ticket night beneficiary including ticket sales, charges, and ticket count (if available)
Requested works (all performances for the evening are listed but in some cases the Event notes, viewable when users click on the date, will indicate which particular Work was requested)
Commanded performances
Associated expenses and receipts (this process has not been completed for all individuals and is ongoing)

We pay particular attention to beneficiaries in our dataset as 1) in many cases, they will be individuals of most interest to theatre historians and 2) theatre accountants tended to record the most granular financial data on them (benefit night money had to be allocated between the theatre and the beneficiary).

More information on our approach to People can be read here.

The Calendar

The Calendar gives users the richest data on a day of the theatre’s activity, selected by clicking on the data field at the top of the page. Users can then see the performances staged, the Event type of the evening, and other associated main points of interest, such as a list of beneficiaries if it was a benefit night. There is also a full breakdown of door receipts where available (full price, half price, aftermoney, and, occasionally, supplementary receipts). Where available, there is an audience breakdown by box, pit, and gallery for some seasons. Finally, all other items of expenditure for that date are itemised. Users can toggle between the theatres to compare activities and finances on a particular date.

Updates

The project has now concluded and the team disbanded so there are limited opportunities for major updates. However, it is envisaged that a data refresh will take place within 12 months and there will be an opportunity for some tweaks to the functionality of the site as well. We welcome the comments and suggestions of users to improve our resource. Please email david.oshaughnessy@universityofgalway.ie

Funding and open access

This website is part of a project that has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s 2020 research and innovation programme, grant agreement No.101001052.

A core principle of this funding is that all outputs are open access. We are more than pleased for others to use this data as they see fit but would ask that the project be cited appropriately.

Accessing the Data

In addition to data being available to view through the resource, researchers have the ability to query and download raw data via the search system’s in-built export tools, or to access data programmatically using the system’s Application Programming Interface (API).

Exporting Data

Results from search queries are available to export in .csv format via the download button on the web interface. The downloaded data can be opened in software such as Excel, or a standard text editor.

API Access

Data may be accessed programmatically using the system’s RESTful Application Programming Interface (API). Data from the API is provided in JSON format. Full documentation on the routes and responses provided by the API is available via the project’s interactive API documentation, hosted at: https://data-theatronomics.universityofgalway.ie/api/data/v1

If you plan to access the project’s data in this way, please contact david.d.kelly@universityofgalway.ie. Depending on usage, this API may change to require authentication in the future, or be subject to changes to endpoints or data formats.