Playbills of the Theatre Royal Edinburgh

The National Library of Scotland is at it again! This time they've put together over 240 playbills from the Theatre Royal in Edinburgh between 1800-1850. This new collection is available at http://www.nls.uk/playbills/.

From the main page you have the option to browse the playbills or search. Browsing takes you to a list of playbills with the main performance, other performances, date, and location. Occasionally there will be notes about that particular performance. Playbills are listed alphabetically -- note that "The," "A," "An," and so on are included in determining the alphabetical position of the playbill (in other words, "A Winter's Tale" is listed in the As instead of the Ws.)

Click on the main performance and the returning page will give you additional information about that set of performances, as well as a thumbnail of the playbill. The performance information will not be a transcript of the playbill, but you can look at a larger version of the playbill and read it for yourself (which I heartily recommend you do; the asides in the playbills and the language used is just a joy to read.)

If you'd rather search instead of browse, the playbill search allows you to search by year (decade, really), keyword, and profession (author, patron, performer, etc.) A search for "Shakespeare" across all dates found 34 results (and the Shakespeare play wasn't the leading play for all performances.)

You can also check out the highlights of the collection, a history of the theatre itself, and a brief page of links and "further reading." Nice.

Posted to Countries-United Kingdom