The London Stage Database team will be retiring the Legacy Search on May 1, 2025. Please take a moment before that date to reproduce any pre-2021 searches and export any resulting datasets you may wish to preserve for future use. We are making this change in order to free up computational resources for new features and data, currently in development with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Watch this space for more updates and, coming soon, new ways to keep up with the latest project developments!

About

This page provides an overview of the London Stage Database project and funding. In 2025, our team updated and reorganized content from an earlier version of this webpage (now available through the Internet Archive). Information from that earlier version may be found below and on the following pages:

  • History: Provides a timeline of the project from the 1960s to present day
  • Team: Highlights current team members and their roles in the project
  • Citation and Sharing: States our commitment to open research principles, offers suggestions for how to cite the database, and includes references for the website's background images
  • Media Coverage: Includes links to media coverage of the London Stage Database
  • About the Data: Outlines the provenance and limitations of the data

Overview

On a given night during the long eighteenth century (1660-1800), hundreds of spectators gathered to participate in an institution at the heart of public life in London: the theater. An evening at the playhouse was a far more elaborate event than we might assume today, consisting not just of full-length dramatic or operatic performances, but also myriad entertainments interspersed between the acts: prologues, epilogues, afterpieces, pantomimes, instrumental and vocal music, dancing, and more.

The London Stage Database gathers together the surviving records of nearly 52,000 such performance events, making it possible to browse and filter these events by date, location, titles of plays and entertainments staged, and actors and roles represented on cast lists. This database sheds light on economic, political, social, and cultural developments extending far beyond the playhouse.

We hope that this database, like the eighteenth-century London theater itself, will capture the imagination of a broad and varied public, including scholars, students, librarians, archivists, theater practitioners, data scientists, and genealogists.

Funding

This project is made possible by grants from the NEH and Office of Digital Humanities (Awards #HAA-258717-18 and #HAA-300527-24).

Additional funding comes from the Office of the Vice President for Research and Innovation at the University of Oregon, UO Information Services, College of Arts and Sciences, UO Libraries, and the Department of English.

Development work and hosting (2018-2020) were supported by the Department of English, College of Humanities and Social Sciences, and Office of Research at Utah State University.