THEATRONOMICS: The Business of Theatres, 1732-1809

Project Information

THEATRONOMICS

Grant agreement ID: 101001052

DOI

10.3030/101001052

EC signature date 1 February 2021

Start date 1 July 2021

End date 31 December 2026

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 997 535,00

EU contribution

€ 1 997 535,00

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITY OF GALWAY
Ireland

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - THEATRONOMICS (THEATRONOMICS: The Business of Theatres, 1732-1809)

Reporting period: 2024-07-01 to 2025-12-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

THEATRONOMICS proposes a new foundation on which eighteenth-century theatre studies can build its next generation of scholarship. It identifies the remarkable financial archives for Covent Garden (CG) and Drury Lane (DL) theatres in the British Library and the Folger Library as the basis for this research. These very substantial archives are comprised of a considerable run of account books, journal, and ledgers for the period that give very specific detail on revenues, ticket sales, salary costs, other costs, and audience make-up, details that offer an unprecedented level of granularity to the analysis of Georgian cultural production. Current scholarship has no detailed overview of the commercial realities of the theatre: drama may not be dependent on money but money certainly conditions theatrical performance. Moreover, it is only through exploiting these archives that we can get a full sense of the theatre’s importance to the local economy and society of London’s West End in the period.

The central research question of THEATRONOMICS is how does a systematic analysis of eighteenth-century theatre’s financial records change our understanding of actors, playwrights, audiences, managers, and theatre’s place within London’s ecology? Understanding the financial mechanics of the theatres, particularly its diverse costbase, will enable scholars to do unprecedented comparative work on plays and playwrights across the century; it will allow us to understand the trajectory of ordinary actors’ across their career and compare male and female experience; it will illuminate the ‘back of house’ human infrastructure that supported these important cultural institutions; and, it will allow us to evaluate the managerial regimes of the men who ran the theatres in an entirely new way.

The project has seven main research aims:

1) Assess the performance of DL and CG as commercial entities
2) Compare the styles and efficiency of different managerial regimes
3) Analyse in detail the costbase of DL and CG
4) Develop an understanding of the career life-cycle of a Georgian actor
5) Measure the financial value of playwrights to the theatres
6) Sketch the theatre audience profile by theatre/genre/play
7) Establish the place of CG and DL within the ecology of London

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The project has been primarily engaged with inputting data into a new open access database to be made available to scholarship soon. The data is being sourced from two places: the London Stage Database (https://londonstagedatabase.uoregon.edu) and manuscript accounts books found at the Folger Library (Washington DC) and the British Library (London). Data taken from the London Stage Database has required extensive cleaning for use in our database.

Other significant tasks have included the design and build of a database; design and build of a brand and project website; sourcing scans of manuscript material; running workshops with the advisory board; prosopographical work on those employed by or associated with the London theatres; assigning generic categories to theatrical works; a literature review of contemporary primary material with financial information; extending the existing calendar of plays for Covent Garden and Drury Lane to 1808; dissemination of preliminary results at conferences/workshops/invited talks; and, devising meaningful categories for receipts and expenses for the theatres.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

There has been considerable progress beyond the state of the art in three main areas:

Financial data: The database that we have built currently has approximately 20,000 financial data points related to the income and expenditure of the theatres with approximately 70,000 more entered in spreadsheets awaiting checking before final upload. Once these have all been uploaded and an appropriate suite of analytical tools built, the financial vicissitudes of the theatres, the breakdown of their costbases, the careers of playwrights, the fortunes of individual plays, and the managerial efficiency of different regimes will be available for comparative analysis with an unprecedented degree of detail. Alongside our database, we have also secured, in partnership with the Folger Library, high-resolution scans of the account books for electronic publication.

Performance data: Our database includes 29,000 performance nights from 1732 to 1808. We have imported about 26,000 of these from the London Stage Database and have carried out extensive editing and cleaning of titles and genres which has enabled us to link different Performances under the same Work. We have also added about 3,000 new performance nights from 1800 to 1808 with performance details.

Prosopography of the eighteenth-century theatre: THEATRONOMICS aims to make visible the labour of the non-performing employees of the London theatres. Whereas scholarship to date has almost exclusively focused on actors and other performers, our project pays attention to the carpenters, dressers, security etc personnel also essential to the staging of eighteenth-century theatre. Moreover, our project also identifies significant tradespeople on whom the theatre relied for supplies and thus identifies the ways in which the theatre was interwoven with the commercial fabric of London.
Moreover, performer data imported to our database has been through several iterations of merging so that different instances of people appearing in our dataset can be linked to the same master record. Where possible, we have added dates (birth/death), geodata, VIAFs, page references to the Biographical Dictionary, and other datapoints to create full and useful records.

Once our data has all been checked and uploaded, we will build a set of tools to enable comparative analysis of the theatres, their financial state, and their employees and associated people.

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