Taking in the London Stage Database

The London Stage Database is an online resource that went live this summer. The website explains its origins:

The London Stage Database is the latest in a long line of projects that aim to capture and present the rich array of information available on the theatrical culture of London, from the reopening of the public playhouses following the English civil wars in 1660 to the end of the eighteenth century. . . .

In the middle of the twentieth century, a team of theater historians created a calendar of performances based on playbills and newspaper notices used to advertise performances, as well as theater reviews, published gossip, playhouse records, and the diaries of people who lived at the time. The result was The London Stage, 1660-1800: A Calendar of Plays, Entertainments & Afterpieces, Together with Casts, Box-Receipts and Contemporary Comment. Compiled from the Playbills, Newspapers and Theatrical Diaries of the Period (Southern Illinois University Press, 1960-1968). This 8,000-page, eleven-book reference work was understood immediately as essential to scholarly research and teaching about the period. It was also frustratingly difficult to use for any kind of systematic inquiry.

In the 1970s, the editors of The London Stage commissioned a computerized database of the information in their reference book. The London Stage Information Bank, as it was then known, was created over the course of a decade. . . . Regrettably, it fell into technological obsolescence after only a few years, and it was long thought irretrievably lost. The only surviving artifact of the project that remained in circulation was the Index to the London Stage, which was shelved alongside the original reference books in many research libraries.

Mattie Burkert began to investigate the history of the Information Bank in 2013 and published “Recovering the London Stage Information Bank: Lessons from an Early Humanities Computing Project” in the Digital Humanities Quarterly in 2017. Over the next two years, she led a team to “salvage the damaged data and code from the Information Bank and to transform it into a modern relational database.”

The result is an open-access resource hosted by Utah State University. It has definite limits, as its creators explain. Some of those limits involve the surviving information, some how it was catalogued in the preceding databases, and some the quirks of computers:

Large sections of the data are missing from the recovered files, including most or all of the performances thought to have taken place between September 1733 and September 1736; between June and September 1770; between September 1781 and September 1786; and between October 1793 and September 1794. . . . Furthermore, in the damaged files recovered from the Information Bank project, all the performance dates are misrepresented as a series of special characters, like unprintable words in a comic book (e.g. "?!*&%"). Advisory Board member Derek Miller discovered that this problem resulted from a systematic shift in the underlying hexadecimal code.

I decided to do a very simple test of the database by asking for appearances of the word “Boston.” After all, theater here was extremely limited until after independence. The results reflected the depth of the Boston Public Library’s collection of early British plays. They also brought up this intriguing reference to an actress:

Mrs Lloyd is identified in playbill of 18 Aug. She has “the name of Lloyd, but [is] better known by the name of Mrs C——we (who played several parts at the military theatre of Boston in America about two years ago)” (Morning Post, 16 July [1779]).

That was during the unusual season of 1775-76, when the British military holding Boston made Faneuil Hall into a theater.

TOMORROW: Who was Mrs. Lloyd?