Using digital methodologies to study nineteenth-century playbills

This article is known to be incomplete.

This brief paper by Dr. Barbara Bell looks at an application of digital humanities methodologies to support research into the nineteenth-century repertoire and offers up a methodology for working with theater playbills that enables previously hidden patterns of usage to emerge.

‘The bills of the day’: Using Digital Methodologies to Unlock Information Hidden within the Nineteenth-century Playbill

The study of theater history has been shaped over the last thirty years by the work of a variety of scholars, whether they were concerned with the philosophical underpinnings to the work, the wider social and cultural movements within which that work sits, or whether they were engaged in practice-as-research, seeking to re-animate old texts and practices.

What has been given less attention is the capacity of advances in digital humanities to enhance the core research of the theater historian, as opposed to the presentation of results. Some of the most intriguing developments of the last decade centered around the first forays into Web 2.0, notably the ‘’Theatron3’’ project to transfer some of the existing ‘’Theatron’’ computer-generated models of iconic theater spaces into ‘’Second Life’’ where students walked their avatars around the spaces and began to create their own digital work. The computer software employed by ‘’Theatron’’ enabled the researchers to create 3D models using the available data and the resultant spaces were made available to a wider audience and in ways that would previously have been impossible. The datasets used to create models of theater spaces, whether electronically or in the form of physical hand-crafted models are taken from a variety of extant sources; physical dimensions of surviving sites (ruined/re-developed), measurements of what are believed to be similar sites, surviving documents, contemporary descriptions by those with specialist knowledge (architects, theater managers) or an “ordinary familiarity” with the public space.

Researchers of the nineteenth-century theater are more fortunate than most in that a large quantity of relevant material survives; however, it is only when one examines it more carefully that it becomes clear that, depending on the focus of study, source material may be missing entirely, fragmentary or contradictory. It now becomes even more important that the extant materials be handled in ways that enable them to provide the maximum amount of data for the researcher to interpret.

Some of the most visible materials are the playbills which survive in almost every library and archive, whether large, well-organised collections or the single folders of disparate bills, catalogued as ‘’Paper Ephemera’’ in the Local Studies Collection. However, it is when one wishes to go beyond an apt illustration, to reveal any single playbill as containing evidence of significant managerial practices or cultural trends, that one comes up against the challenge of dealing with bills in the quantity that will allow such practices and trends to be identified with any degree of confidence.

Prior study

Over the last twenty years, digital humanities efforts have put the handling of large quantities of playbills within the reach of the lone researcher, who would previously have been confined to laboriously filling out index cards and for whom the cross-indexing and focused search of materials could become extremely difficult.

H. Philip Bolton is author of a series of volumes, listing the contents of playbills featuring adaptations of works by major writers including Sir Walter Scott and Charles Dickens. These handlists were created with the invaluable assistance of the first generation of readily available PCs and laptop computers. The handlists and their subsections are prefaced by Bolton’s overview of the materials; however, there is little in the way of formal analysis of the content of the bills and so much of the information they contain as a body remains locked within them.

One study, seeking to illuminate the workings of the nineteenth-century Scottish theater repertoire, particularly the unique sub-genre called “The National Drama” and the part played in it by adaptations of the works of Sir Walter Scott, provided an opportunity to develop a method for handling and analysing information coming out of a search of over 35,000 playbills.

Scott’s twenty-three novels and five long poems in their stage adaptations provided a major impetus for the eventual abolition of the Theatre Patent, by gifting the burgeoning Minor theater industry with a semi-legitimate repertoire with which they could compete with the Patent Houses. Furthermore, because the invaluable dialogue could be lifted directly from the novels, audiences were able to make direct comparisons between productions. However, within Scotland they were thought to have brought about a more fundamental shift in the attitude of the general population to the theater. Contemporary sources of information, reviews, memoirs, nineteenth-century histories, accepted the place of the National Drama at the heart of the Scottish repertoire and the large part that the Scott adaptations played in the rise of the National Drama; however, none thought it necessary to explain how the process worked.

Establishing methodology

The data produced by the study of a random stratified sample, comprising 3,605 entries taken from 35,000 bills, covering 30,000 nights in 280+ theaters, was intended to serve two purposes:

1. To provide quantitative and positional data (Who, What, Where)
2. To provide qualitative data (How, Why)

Both outcomes would sit alongside consideration of more traditional materials. Only bills featuring work taken from Scott would be subjected to close scrutiny. Initially, a sample of bills was analysed to help formulate the relevant search terms. Comparative analysis was made possible by the structures both of the nineteenth-century theater industry, changing programs every night for most of the century and peculiarly responsive to external pressures, and the playbill format that remained largely unchanged for much of the century, conducting a continual dialogue with the audiences through a shared language employing accepted theatrical jargon, popular cultural references and the manager’s skilful reading of the shifting mood of the target audience. It was possible to establish the parameters for the study in a set of coded terms that covered ‘’quantitative’’ items such as the name of the theater, day of the week, date and name of the play(s) concerned. These were set alongside a group of search tags that covered ‘’qualitative’’ matters. LIST HERE