The purpose of the Romantic Melodrama project is to understand the foundational role of melodrama in shaping aesthetic experience during the Romantic period. Its empirical focus will be the exhaustive documentation and detailed analysis of performances of melodrama in the first decades of its popularity. This site will make available – in curated, searchable form – data that is currently either scattered or inaccessible to researchers, including playbill records that have never before been digitized or catalogued.
British theatre historians for the past half-century have depended on a resource called The London Stage 1660-1800 for much of our theatrical data. Providing dates, cast lists, returns, and snippets from reviews, its eleven volumes are invaluable and have inevitably shaped subsequent research. As its title suggests, The London Stage 1660-1800 cuts off just as melodrama is beginning. Its focus on London’s major theatres (Drury Lane, Covent Garden, the Haymarket, and the King’s Theatre) necessarily excludes Britain’s provincial stages and the many minor, ‘illegitimate’ houses scattered over the metropole. For information about these performances, researchers must comb newspapers and collections of playbills, making it a Herculean labor even to amass foundational data for a study. This project will make available to researchers a richly-tagged, searchable database of every recorded performance of melodrama in Britain between 1793 (the year of Edward Jerningham’s Margaret of Anjou) and 1843 (the year of the Theatre Regulation Act).
The bases of the Romantic Melodrama project are approximately 200,000 images of playbills collected from archives across the United Kingdom and the United States. This core archive will grow as we continue to visit new archives and photograph their collections. From it, we expect to locate some 10,000-12,000 performances of melodrama across England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland by the completion of the project. Our rationale for inclusion is straightforward: we seek to include any play that has been advertised as a ‘melodrama’ or ‘monodrama,’ or as ‘melodramatic’ by a theatre at any point in the fifty-year span of the project. Because of the nature of playbills and theatrical marketing, many popular nineteenth-century plays are advertised via a host of generic tags over the history of their representation. A play like Der Freischutz; Or, the Seventh Bullet, for example, appears on playbills as an ‘Opera,’ an ‘Operatic Romance,’ a ‘Romantic Opera of Diablerie, and as a ‘Melodramatic Opera,’ just to name a few of the terms used.
This database currently contains 1,430 playbill records and will be continaully updated over the course of the project.