The full catalogue of Lacy’s Acting Edition comprises some 1500 titles, produced by just over 320 different authors. Over a third (583 to be exact) of all titles are produced by a small group of a dozen or so recidivists, each of them accounting for more than 25 titles. These include some predictable exceptions like “Anon” (65 titles), but also some extraordinarily prolific writers like John Maddison Morton (82 titles or 5% of the LAE), J.R. Planché (69 titles), and Henry James Byron (51 titles). In the second rank of creativity, there are 20 authors each of whom is responsible for producing between 10 and 25 titles, and who collectively account for 346, about a fifth of the whole. These include such familiar names as William Shakespeare (24 titles), just ahead of the less famous Thomas Egerton Wilks (23 titles) and some distance from George Colman (12 titles). At the other end of the scale, only a tenth of titles (171) are the product of an author otherwise unrepresented.
One of my first questions when looking at the Victorian Plays Project catalogue was the extent to which it might be considered a representative sample of the whole LAE. That of course depends on the basis on which you are sampling: as a first exercise, I consider here authorship. The VPP sample contains 343 titles, which are the product of 130 authors, only 8 of whom produce more than 10 titles, and nearly half of whom (74) produce only one title. This seems like a markedly different frequency distribution. Moreover, the ranking of authors within a “top twenty” list for the two corpora shows some surprising differences. Some authors who appear high in the upper half of the LAE list, e.g. Williams and Selby, trail near the bottom of the VPP list. It is unsurprising to find that titles low down the VPP list are also low down the LAE list; what does surprise me is the disparity in ranking for the comparatively frequent authors. Tom Taylor, the highest ranking VPP author of all, is only the 10th most frequent author in LAE; and John Palgrave Simpson, who ranks 12th in LAE, only just scrapes into the 25th row of VPP. Some of these oddities may be attributed to editorial decisions by the VPP: for example to exclude entirely titles by one William Shakespeare, even though these are ranked 14th in LAE.
Anyway, here are the Lacy Acting Edition Top Twenty authors, ranked by the number of titles attributed to them.
LAE rank | VPP rank | Titles (LAE/VPP) | Author | SDA | dates |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | 3 | 82/15 | Morton, John Maddison | * | 1811-1891 A1 |
2 | 4 | 69/14 | Planché, J.R. | * | 1796-1880 A1 |
3 | 6 | 65/13 | [Anon.] | ||
4 | 5 | 51/14 | Byron, Henry James | * | 1835-1884 A2 |
5 | 7 | 41/12 | Suter, William E. | 1811-1882 A1 | |
6 | 2 | 40/17 | Brough, William | * | 1826-1870 A2 |
7 | 16 | 38/5 | Williams, Thomas J. | * | 1824-1874 A2 |
8 | 19 | 37/5 | Selby, Charles | * | 1802-1863 A1 |
9 | 11 | 36/7 | Burnand, Francis C. | * | 1836-1917 A2 |
10= | 1 | 34/20 | Taylor, Tom | * | 1817-1880 A2 |
10= | 8 | 34/12 | Coyne, Joseph Stirling | * | 1803-1868 A1 |
12= | 25 | 28/4 | Simpson, John Palgrave | * | 1807-1887 A1 |
12= | 20 | 28/5 | Oxenford, John | * | 1812-1877 A1 |
14 | 0 | 24/0 | Shakespeare, William | 1564-1616 A1 | |
15 | 24 | 23/4 | Wilks, Thomas Egerton | 1812-1854 A1 | |
16 | 14 | 19/6 | Stirling, Edward | 1809-1894 A1 | |
17= | 0 | 18/1 | Wooler, John Pratt | 1824-1868 A2 | |
17= | 18 | 18/6 | Talfourd, Francis | * | 1828-1862 A2 |
17= | 21 | 18/5 | Jerrold, Douglas | * | 1803-1857 A1 |
17= | 11 | 18/7 | Halliday, Andrew | * | 1830-1877 A2 |
There is of course much more one might wish to say about these authors. It is unsurprising to find that they are all males, and equally that they are mostly members of the Dramatic Authors Society, the agency which had been founded to ensure their copyrights were observed, and which also required payment of a fee for provincial representation. Their dates, with four exceptions, are taken from Wikipedia, where there is much else is to be found. (The exceptions yet to be immortalized on Wikipedia are William Suter, Thomas J. Williams, Thomas Egerton Wilks, and John Pratt Wooler : their dates are taken from the Hathi Trust catalogue record). Just for fun, I decided to categorize them into two age groups on the following basis:
A1: born before the Battle of Waterloo (1815)
A2: born after Waterloo but before the Great Reform Act (1832)
Unexpectedly there are equal numbers in each group.
In the interests of full disclosure, I should add that the list of plays so far converted to TEI format demonstrates a tiny and even more divergent sampling of these authors. The most frequent author so far converted is J Maddison Morton with 6 titles, which corresponds well with the LAE ranking, but the next three in that ranking are all so far missing entirely. In fact, of the authors in the LAE top twenty, the following are all so far missing: Planche, Byron, Suter, Williams, Selby, Shakespeare, Wilks, Stirling, Wooler, Talfourd, and Halliday. Only five authors are so far represented by more than one title (Morton, Coyne, Courtney, Oxenford, and W.S. Gilbert).
As comparison, I also took a look at the author counts for the 45 or so LAE titles selected for inclusion in the Chawyck Healey “English Drama” collections. Only 10 authors appear here more than once, all of them represented by no more than 2 titles, except Simpson, who clocks in three. Only four of these authors also appear in the LAE Top Twenty (the inescapable John Maddison Morton, J.R. Planche, John Palgrave Simpson, and Thomas Egerton Wilks). Clearly these titles were selected on some other grounds than their frequency in the LAE.