At the centre of the “Romantic Melodrama” project is the British Library collection of playbills, which chronicles London and provincial performances from roughly 1780 to 1860. A portion of these – over 90,000 playbills – were made available digitally. Our team has consulted the remainder of the collection, including some 25,000 undigitised playbills and those in fragile states and on microfilm.
In addition, we have thus far consulted the holdings of playbills at the following archives: