The London Stage 1660-1800: A Short History, Retrospective Anatomy, and Projected Future

The London Stage, 1660-1800, a day-by-day performance calendar spanning 140 years, was for its time a magnificent achievement published in eleven volumes (1960-1968 [recte 1970]) running to 1058 pages of introductory matter and 7182 pages of text, plus 672 pages of volume indexes. A one-volume cumulative index compiled from scratch totalling 979 pages finally appeared in 1979. The London Stage remains fundamental to scholarship and criticism in this period, though few users are aware that it suffers from dire problems and inconsistencies, and the 1979 Index compiled by Ben Ross Schneider, Jr is an utter disaster. Part 1 (1660-1700) was credited to William Van Lennep, though he never contributed anything to the project, and he turns out to have concealed major sources at Harvard from his collaborators that went unused. None of the editors made any use of important government documents in the Public Record Office, so Chancery lawsuits (a very rich source) and regulatory documentation in the Lord Chamberlain’s records went entirely ignored. Little attention was paid to the publication of plays, and almost none to surviving manuscripts. The many surviving promptbooks were almost totally ignored. Attention to music, dance, and opera was pathetically sketchy and inadequate. Helpful though the five ‘Part’ Introductions are in many ways, they are narrow and shallow, not even making obvious use of the old British Museum Catalogue of Printed Books. These defects and deficiencies notwithstanding, the 1960s calendar served as a crucial foundation for major later scholarship. Publication of such resources as the Highfill-Burnim-Langhans 16-volume Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers, and Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660-1800 (1973-1993), Milhous and Hume’s Vice Chamberlain Coke’s Theatrical Papers 1706-1715 (1982), and Pierre Danchin’s monumental 15-volume edition of Prologues and Epilogues 1660-1776 (1981-2001) have added enormously to our knowledge of theatrical practice and regulation in London. Daunting as the enterprise admittedly must be, a re-do of the entire project is clearly necessary – economically unthinkable in a world of physical print, but now feasible in a world of electronic databases.