Of the 332 distinct author names attested on the title pages of Lacy’s Acting Editions, 30 remain stubbornly invisible elsewhere. In some cases there just isn’t enough information to identify them (the “Captain Arbuthnot” credited with the authorship of the burlesque L’Africaine; or, The Belle of Madagascar played at Covent Garden in October 1865 is a case in point) ; in others the name is just too common (“G. Smith” anyone?). But that still leaves 302 authors to investigate.
All of these works have been catalogued in some library somewhere however, which means (I naively supposed) that some cataloguer will have chosen a VIAF code for their authors. It seemed worthwhile therefore investing effort in trawling through the VIAF lists to pick out a code for each of my authors. No doubt ChatGPT could have done it quicker; in any case, at the end of the trawl, I had VIAF numbers for 300 of my authors – and only two mysteries. Firstly, George Marsh, author appropriately enough of “Lost and Found” and two other Lacy titles, who is listed as a member of the Dramatic Authors Society but is otherwise hitherto untraceable; secondly, George Roberts, who contributed seven titles under the stage name of “Robert Walters” including “Under the Rose” and “An Ample Apology”, but is listed only by the Era Almanac and in the ATCL database, described below.
Of the 300 authors anointed with a VIAF code , after a few days fighting with SPARQL (tx Stuart) I was able to endow 214 with a Wikidata identifier, which I had rather hoped would serve as the key to all manner of other useful things. It seems odd that over a quarter of the authors known to VIAF (86 of them to be precise) are otherwise unknown to Wikiworld, but there you are.
As might be expected, many of the authors (176 at the last count) have entries in Wikipedia. Some of these (but by no means all) provide links to other, perhaps more respectable, sources, notably the Dictionary of National Biography, in both its (wikisource-hosted) original and (paywall-protected) OUP versions. I was able to harvest links to ODNB entries for 144 of my authors via Wikidata; finding links to the Wikisource version was done by hand, which took a day or two. At the end of this part of the exercise, I had found ODNB biographies for 147 authors and DNB entries for 127. Unsurprisingly there were 22 authors with an entry in ODNB but not in DNB; less so, there was at least one case of a DNB author apparently purged from the ODNB, though present (admittedly as an appendage to the entry for his wife) in the original DNB. Where did you go wrong, Edward Stirling (1809-1894)?
I also checked all my author names against Boase’s Modern English Biography, which is a lot easier to search, and found 99 of them there. Interestingly, 30 of these were authors unknown both to ODNB and DNB.
The long-running theatrical newspaper The Era published in its annual Almanac volumes for 1868 and 1869 a set of short biographies of (then) living dramatic authors, ostensibly written by Edward Ledger. These brief notices provide an interesting contemporary perspective on 53 of my authors; 15 of them unknown to ODNB.
Impressively detailed exhaustive bibliographies and biographical notices for 27 of my authors are provided (behind a paywall) by Gale’s Dictionary of Literary Biography. In the absence of any such thing as an agreed canon of dramatic writers, it is difficult to see on what basis authors have been chosen for this particular collection. It cannot be anything to do with the number of titles they produced, since some of the most prolific of Lacy’s authors are conspicuously absent. Nor can it be related to the fame of the writer as witnessed by the number of other reference works mentioning them, since such well-known figures as Edmund Yates, Mark Lemon, G.H. Lewes, and even J.R. Planche are also missing.
I also sought traces of my authors in some less obvious quarters. The ATCL database (http://www.victorianresearch.org) is a wonderful resource documenting the production of the victorian novel, in the widest sense; 51 of my dramatists were not averse to churning out a few novels too, and hence feature in it; 6 of them are unknown to ODNB – indeed, one of them (Captain George Hatton Colomb) is listed by ATCL and nowhere else. ATCL also provides an interesting list of novelists who also wrote dramas; not all of these were Lacy authors, of course. It also indicates when the author concerned has a more detailed notice elsewhere.
Another wonderful resource, the Curran index (https://www.curranindex.org/) documents the wider world of Victorian journalism; it enabled me to determine that at least 66 of my dramatists also earned a living by contributing articles to periodicals indexed by Curran et al.
And finally, a footnote on the Dramatic Authors’ Society, which was “was the only organisation in the nineteenth century specifically devoted to the needs of dramatists. “ (Stephens) . Founded in 1834 after the Dramatic Authors Act became law, the DAS collected and redistributed fees on behalf of its members. All but two of its original 23 members were Lacy authors. During its fifty year life, the Society published lists of its members and their works with an indication of associated fees, for the use of provincial theatres. Putting together such lists as I have found, it seems that at least 91 of my authors are or were at some time DAS members.
The data thus far collected is feeding into a web page I am constructing: if you want to see its prototype version, check out the web site. And if you have information to fill my gaps, please get in touch by commenting on this page!
Étiquette : Lacy Acting Edition; Victorian Plays Project
Going public(ish)
Despite silence here, I’ve been busy on all things Lacyesque for the last few weeks, getting ready to wheel out the first ever English-language presentation of what I now realize should be referenced as “The Digital Lacy Project” if it is to be taken seriously in the grooves of academe. So last week I gave said presentation, 20 minutes of introduction to the various ways in which 19th c drama as attested by Lacy’s Acting Edition has been passed on to us, along with some possibly dubious statistics about its representativeness. The occasion was a bijou, one might even say “boutique”, conference to launch the Punch Pocket Books Project at the University of Caen Normandie, a funded collaboration between said University and others, see website. From my perspective, this was a great opportunity to revisit the afore-mentioned grooves from the perspective of the unattached researcher, rather than the annoying technical expert. I got to hear a couple of excellent plenaries and a range of research presentations, plus, as a bonus, participated in a practical workshop on pocket-book construction. The ambience was laid back and the company was genial, even though the technical infrastructure was occasionally hostile (nobody seemed to know how to make zoom behave properly in the classy new amphitheatre). I read my script in 22 minutes exactly, and flashed through my prepared slides without incident. Nobody visibly fell asleep; and there were a few encouraging reactions. I even got invited out for a post-conference drink, which was nice.
In preparation for this event, I started writing at least three different papers: one on the varieties of format in which the components of the LAE have been transmitted to us; one on the vexed issue of representativeness; and one focussing on the burlesque. To boil all these down to a 20 minute presentation was an interesting challenge; I expect to recycle some of the inevitable rejectamenta on this platform anon.
Another Fine Mess…
As previously mentioned, I have been trying to mangle Allardyce Nicoll’s Handlists into a tractable database for what seems like forever. Here’s the latest and hopefully last update.
Some of the entries are just disambiguating cross references: these are (or should be) marked as eType=’note’. Some of them are partial entries including a reference to another entry which may or may not contain the same data: these are (or should be) marked as eType=’ref’. This classification of entries was carried out by the addAtts script early on in the pipeline; the same script also added a magic key for each entry to facilitate matching up Lacy and Nicoll entries, but ignored entries with eType=’ref’ for some reason. I did not notice this gaffe till later, much later, after I had spent weeks on the next stage of the pipeline, (the clever bit of matching up Lacy and Nicoll entries, which involved a lot of manual intervention)
Here’s what I did to fix that blunder…
saxon -xi entries.xml addAttsAgain.xsl > oops.xml
(run a corrected version of addAtts script (renamed addAttsAgain) to generate a file of corrected entry elements for the entries of eType ref, now renamed as eType=part).saxon oops.xml addWhen.xsl > oops2.xml
(run the existing addWhen script to add a @when for these new entries)saxon allEntries.xml attributePatch.xsl > temp.xml
(run attributePatch script to produce an improved version of allEntries.xml. )
The text is now quite intelligently tagged, and there is a (non TEI) schema to describe its markup. I need to do more on its documentation, but there is an ODD.
Dates
Round about now, I realised that @when values were missing for many titles, and were mostly not in ISO format, which matters, partly because I can now use my ODD-defined schema to validate the file but mainly because it would be nice to sort entries correctly by date. So I embarked on the long tedious process of dating the entries a bit more consistently.
Nicoll represents dates in one of three different ways.
- Where the full date of a performance or a license is known, it is given as DD/MM/YY or (occasionally) DD/MM/YYYY. This is easy to identify and extract to the @when attribute for the entry
- Where the date is only partial, it may appear in the form MM/YYYY. This is more problematic.
- Where the only date available is that of a publication, it will usually be in the form YYYY, possibly in brackets. I wrote a script to extract these to the @when attribute too.
There are quite a lot of OCR errors to correct (I instead of 1, u instead of 11, s instead of 5, redundant blanks or nonexistent punctuation, and so on). Many of these could be fixed with regexp search and replace. I also found cases where the end of a printed line had simply been ignored, which were more difficult to detect.
Eventually, I have plausible dates for as many as possible of the datable entries, in one or other of the three formats specified. I run another script to convert them all to a kosher iso format i.e. YYYY, YYYY-MM, or YYYY-MM-DD, and then validate. A surprisingly large number trip at this last hurdle, mostly because of a previously unspotted OCR error, but this does throw up five cases which can only be attributed to lax proof reading at Cambridge University Press. These five include obvious nonsense like “32/2/1822” given as the date for the Drury Lane performance of Edward P. Knight’s “The Veteran Soldier”, and more tangled cases such as “29/2/1823” given as the date for a performance at the Adelphi of Moncrieff’s “The Secret”. Sorry, Allardyce, but 1823 was not a leap year, so this cannot be true. Moreover, according to the Adelphi Calendar (https://www.umass.edu/AdelphiTheatreCalendar/auth.htm) , on 28 Feb 1823, the theatre was dark for Lent… and the same source is stubbornly silent on the existence of a play of this title and authorship anywhere. So someone is mistaken.
Just to put those peccadillos into perspective : by my reckoning, there are now 24,351 distinct entries in the Nicoll database, of which 24,301 are apparently now correctly dated . Fifty are genuinely undated; five have impossible datings. A pretty good error rate.
Multiple authorship
As I may have remarked before, the entries in Nicoll’s Handlists are of quite a few different types. Some of them are just cross references, supplying the name under which a pseudonym has been indexed but not documenting any particular performance; others (quite a few) are partial entries, associating a performance or publication for one author with an entry for the same performance or publication listed under the name of the “main” author in a collaboration. Nicoll supplies the following definition: “I have adopted the principle of placing the main entry of any particular play under the name of that author whose name appeared first in the play-bill, newspaper advertisement or review from which information regarding authorship was obtained”. For my purposes however, all these additional entries simply inflate the number of performances etc. (by a factor of nearly 10%) and are unnecessary for a resource in digital form. I therefore tag them differently, and process the multi-author entries so that all the authorship information is accessible in the same place. For example, here is the “main” entry for a play with multiple authorship:
<entry when="1897-09-06" xml:id="N08816" eType="multi" n="ohsusannah_AMBIENT">
<class group="FARCE">F.C.</class>
<author>AMBIENT, MARK </author>
<title>Oh! Susannah! </title>
<perf>Eden, Brighton, 6/9/97; Roy. 5/10/97.</perf>
<lic>L.C. </lic>
<bib>French </bib>
<note type="auth">[Written in collaboration with A. ATWOOD and R. VAUN .]</note>
</entry>
The Handlist also contains two fragmentary entries, one for each of the two co-authors:
<entryFrag when="1897-09-06" xml:id="N08946" eType="part" n="ohsusannah_ATWOOD">
<author>ATWOOD, ALBAN </author>
<title>Oh! Susannah! </title>
<perf>Eden, Brighton, 6/9/97.</perf>
<note>See M. AMBIENT.</note>
</entryFrag>
<entryFrag when="1897-09-06" xml:id="N19381" eType="part" n="ohsusannah1_VAUN">
<author>VAUN, RUSSELL </author>
<title>Oh! Susannah 1 </title>
<perf>Eden, Brighton, 6/9/97.</perf>
<note>See M. AMBIENT.</note>
</entryFrag>
I wrote a script to combine all these to produce a new multi-author entry, like this:
<entry when="1897-09-06" xml:id="N08816" eType="multi" n="ohsusannah_AMBIENT">
<class group="FARCE">F.C.</class>
<author>AMBIENT, MARK </author>
<author type="also">ATWOOD, ALBAN </author>
<author type="also">VAUN, RUSSELL </author>
<title>Oh! Susannah! </title>
<perf>Eden, Brighton, 6/9/97; Roy. 5/10/97.</perf>
<lic>L.C. </lic>
<bib>French </bib>
<note type="auth">[Written in collaboration with A. ATWOOD and R. VAUN .]</note>
</entry>
Note that e.g. “R. VAUN” now appears as “VAUN, RUSSELL”. Achieving that particular coup de main involved quite a lot of XSLT juggling before I found a 99% successful solution.
In the process, I found only the following five cases where the author name referenced by Nicoll was hard to find in the Handlists.
- “TAIT” (but I found him in the errata list for vol 4)
- “PINCROFT” Confusingly, this exists as a pseudonym for BANERO J.M. , which is also the name of the main author. Something wrong there: Nicoll nodded.
- “MOUNTJOY” No other sign of this pseudonym.
- “Corri” must be Clarence Collingwood Corri, who supplied the music for George Sims’ 1899 farce In Gay Piccadilly. Dan Leno was in it.
- “CARGILL, G.B.” I have not yet found any other sign of this co-author.
The next challenge
It is definitely time to revisit the Lacy catalogue. What’s to do with the 196 catalogue entries for which no corresponding entry has shown up in either of Nicoll’s Handlists? Are they all old stuff, first published or performed long before 1800, and therefore reasonably omitted from the Handlists? Or are there some rogue components amongst them? Time will tell. Meanwhile, here’s the current state of affairs, according to my reportCounts script.
Today there are 24351 entries in this file, of which ....
24350 are classified
22995 are plain old entries
some of which are unclassified
1356 multi-authored entries
1750 fragmentary entries constructed from cross references
30 fragmentary entries constructed from notes
51 notes, xrefs, and comments
18784 with perf data
15896 with lic data
4158 with bib data
1169 have been matched out of 1300 Lacy references
1327 catalogue entries linked to a Nicoll entry out of 1511
391 entries have a bib referencing Lacy but no @matches
493 have a female author