The source
The London Stage, 1660–1800: A Calendar of Plays, Entertainments and Afterpieces, Together with Casts, Box-Receipts and Contemporary Comment was issued in five parts between 1960 and 1968 by Southern Illinois University Press, under the editorship of Emmett L. Avery, Arthur H. Scouten, George Winchester Stone Jr. and Charles Beecher Hogan. In the 1970s Ben Ross Schneider Jr. and collaborators transcribed the calendar’s contents into a machine-readable edition. It is maintained, developed, and distributed today as the London Stage Database (LSDB), under the direction of Mattie Burkert, through the University of Oregon.
About the dataset
The calendar records advertised performances at licensed and unlicensed London venues between October 1660 and September 1800, in aggregate, 52,617 event-days containing 116,819 individual piece-performances. Across its pages 239 venue codes resolve to roughly 220 distinct places, staging 2,793 distinct works performed by 16,759 named performers. Known limitations travel with the source: the summer months are thinner, cast lists are sometimes reconstructed from a neighbouring night (marked as of that date), and partial dates (month-only, even year-only) survive where a playbill did not. The usual disclaimers about any historical dataset apply, and the LSDB team have done an admirable job of documenting the dataset’s contents and limitations on their About the Data page.
Dates and the calendar
Britain adopted the Gregorian (New Style) calendar on 14 September 1752, dropping eleven days from the Julian (Old Style) calendar then in use. The day after 2 September 1752 (Old Style) became 14 September 1752 (New Style), and the dates 3–13 September 1752 were never entered in the calendars. All London Stage entries up to and including 2 September 1752 follow the Julian calendar; entries from 14 September 1752 onwards follow the Gregorian. This site follows the dataset, displaying dates as printed in the original calendars without conversion. On day-view pages for dates before the reform, a note is shown to indicate the Old Style system is in use.
Access to the Data
The London Stage Database (LSDB) site, under the direction of Mattie Burkert, offers scholarly access to the corpus and provides contextualizations for the dataset and its source. Equally, Adam Matthew Digital's Eighteenth-Century Drama collection (available by subscription) provides a browsable interface to the London Stage Database along with a number of data visualizations. Projects such as Theatronomics, led by David O’Shaughnessy, finally pursue the financial history of the patent theatres, providing invaluable contextualization from the commercial side of the entertainment industry.
Project aims
The aim of this project is not to duplicate efforts to make the database available for scholarly use elsewhere, but to offer a public-facing engagement with the dataset and its source. It sits alongside both as a public-engagement layer, a gazetteer of the venues, a reading of the repertoire and its companies, a testbed for visualizations and analytical tools, and as a demonstration of how the dataset can be used to explore the history of London theatre in the long eighteenth century. This project is not affiliated with the original researchers or their institutions. It was created independently to provide an interactive way to explore their openly published dataset.
Caveats
In the spirit of capta rather than data, all errors and misrepresentations on this site are my own, and not those of the original editors or the current maintainers of the dataset. I have done my best to represent the source and its contents faithfully, but I have not attempted to resolve its ambiguities, omissions, and blind spots, and I have made a number of interpretive decisions in how to present the data. In particular, I have normalised the venue codes to their resolved names, but I have not attempted to normalise the names of works or performers. Finally, while aiming to embed the capta in meaningful historical, cultural, and social contexts, I have not attempted to update the dataset with any new information.
Credits
- The London Stage, 1660–1800: A Calendar of Plays, Entertainments and Afterpieces, Together with Casts, Box-Receipts and Contemporary Comment. Edited by Emmett L. Avery, Arthur H. Scouten, George Winchester Stone Jr., and Charles Beecher Hogan (Southern Illinois University Press, 1960–1968).
- Machine-readable edition: Ben Ross Schneider Jr. and contributors; Mattie Burkert and LSDB team, distributed by the University of Oregon. Dataset made available under CC BY-NC 4.0 by the LSDB team.
- Historical map: An Exact Survey of the City's of London and Westminster ye Borough of Southwark and the Country Near Ten Miles Round Begun in 1741 & Ending in 1745 by John Rocque Land Surveyor & Engrav'd by Richard Parr (David Rumsey Map Collection)
- Historical places: Tim Hitchcock, Robert Shoemaker, Sharon Howard, Jamie McLaughlin, Patrick Mannix, Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA), et al. Locating London’s Past [Data files]. Available at: https://www.dhi.ac.uk/data/locatinglondon (Accessed: 13th April 2026).
- Plate and period imagery: Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, via its Open Access programme.
Contact
For questions or comments about this website, please contact:
- Alexander Huber
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