Genre is a vexed issue for the study of Georgian theatre. An examination of the various generic categories that appear in the Larpent Collection of manuscripts generated a list of dozens of different generic labels that managers and prompters used to identify their submissions. Such complexity would be overly detailed for our needs so we have organised those genres into ‘buckets’ as listed below.
We have relied considerably on the London Stage for assigning genre. In other instances, particularly for new plays 1800-1809, we have used the Larpent Collection, newspapers, published editions/playbills available for consultation online and, occasionally, we have glanced at the Larpent manuscript itself. But we have not, of course, read all or most of the Works in our dataset.
Most Works has also been assigned a Performance Medium of either Spoken Drama, Musical, or Dance as well as a genre designation. The idea being that by applying these two levels of categorisation to our Works, we could both reflect the complexity of the Georgian generic landscape while limiting categories to a useful number.
Therefore, users will be able to filter for comedy (and see comic operas alongside spoken drama comedies) or specify by performance medium (thus isolating spoken drama and opera into separate lists).
There are issues with our methodology, not least the brash claim to separate spoken drama from music and dance, when much of the pleasure of the Georgian repertory is the amalgamation of all of these in the one Work.
Music and dance are everywhere in the repertory and our Performance Medium labels in particular should be treated as rough impressionistic guidelines rather than an assertion of fact.
Nowhere is this more evident when it comes to pantomime where users can identify pantomimes classified as musical or dance. At one level, this is a nonsensical division as we would be confident that all pantomimes would have both music and dancing. The label we have assigned here is largely based on the description of that Work’s first performance in the London Stage, and whether music or dance was emphasised in that description. Thus, patterns in how pantomimes were advertised can be traced. Of course, users who don’t find this useful are free to simply filter by pantomime so nothing is lost in the attempt. Our approach offers users the opportunity to manage very large swathes of data with broad brushstrokes and generate a starting overall impression of how dance and music waxed and waned in our period, subject to finer and more refined analysis as they see fit.
There is also some helpful information in our Notes to some Works that refines our labelling. To take an example, David Garrick’s Lethe (1741) is labelled as a Spoken Drama – Comedy but we have also added a contemporary description as ‘A Dramatic Satire’ in the Work’s note. This has not been done systematically, only when such a description presented itself readily and was deemed illuminating. Such notes have generally been added when our labelling system has not been adequate: for instance, the 1808 comic ballet Poor Jack; or, the Benevolent Tars of England is labelled as a Dance – Ballet but our note ‘Comic ballet’ helps the reader see the important comedy element.
Here you can see the allocation of Larpent genres into our genre ‘bucket’ categories: