News

May 28th, 1689: A Royal Request Gone Wrong

Welcome back to our sixteenth #theaterthursday! Can you believe we’ve had so many weeks worth of London Stage event “on this day in history”? As the traditional theater season (which ran fall through spring) nears its end, so too does #theaterthursday, but today, beloved readers, is not that day! So (without further ado) on THIS day in London Stage history a royal request of the theaters… gone wrong: The year is 1689 and London is still in the wake of the Glorious Revolution. England saw their Catholic King, James II (brother and successor of Charles II), usurped by his own daughter, Mary, and her husband, William of Orange. In February, Mary officially became England’s monarch and the throne was returned to protestant (Anglican) hands. Only a few months after coronation, on this very day of May 28th, Mary made her first trip to the theater, but only after having made a very... Read More

Meet A11y: An Accessibility Overhaul

My name is Ceilidh, and I’m a Research Assistant on the London Stage Database team. I have a passion for bringing accessible and interactive learning to new platforms and larger audiences. One of my first projects with the LSDB was to bring our work in line with updated accessibility standards being implemented this year across all University of Oregon websites. With mentorship from Librarian Erin Winter and IT developer John Zhao, I learned a host of new technical skills and approaches to accessible design. This post focuses on the changes I made to improve site navigation for screen readers, which are widely used text-to-speech tools that read websites out loud. Accessibility & A11y Compliance fixes to the LSDB site One of primary goals of the London Stage Database project is to make knowledge and information about the London Stage accessible to everyone. However, simply making information freely available on a website doesn’t mean... Read More

May 21st, 1700: A Dangerous and Growing Evil

After Puritan-led Parliament’s infamous ban on public theater, it took eighteen years before playhouses in London were up and running again. The return of King Charles II in 1660 brought more than monarchy back to the city; it revived theater too. Charles’s royal support, however, was far from enough to completely insulate the London Stage from future attacks like that of Parliament. Even after years of its reinstatement, the playhouse faced repeated allegations of impropriety. On May 21st, at the turn of the (18th) century, London newspaper The Flying Post reported on one such attack: reporting that the Grand Jury of London had officially made arguments against the public “frequenting the Play-houses.” View of the Sessions House in the Old Bailey, by unknown author, 1772. Licensed from The Trustees of the British Museum, under a a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 License The Jury gathered at the primary criminal courthouse of London, the Old... Read More

Scheduled downtime this Thursday, May 21

The LSDB website will be down for patching and maintenance on Thursday (May 21) at 3:00 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time. This is expected to be a brief outage, lasting 10 minutes or so. Thanks in advance for your patience!

May 14th, 1711: What is Going on at Punch’s Theatre?!

As any of you who have perused the London Stage Database know, sometimes you come across performance events that leave you asking: “what in the WORLD was going on here?” Yes, performance events from the long eighteenth-century can be so bizarre as to seem (at first glance) indecipherable. For this week’s #theaterthursday, I bring you one such event: May 14th, 1711 at Punch’s Theatre. “[A] Benefit [for] the Little Child that Dances with the Swords. (…) With new Scenes, Machines, and several Dances by Fairies.” Dancing Fairies? Machines? A child performing with swords?! Surreal as it is, this event was far too interesting to ignore. The first clue we have in parsing out the performance of May 14th is the venue: Punch’s Theatre. During the 1710-1711 season, a man by the name of Martin Powell ran this playhouse, located close to Covent Garden. Punch’s was, in fact a puppet theater, and Powell quite the famous... Read More

“A Moral Victory”

Late last Thursday, a federal judge ordered the NEH to restore thousands of grants that were terminated en masse last spring, including one to our project, “Extending the London Stage Database.” After more than a year of uncertainty, we have a victory…at least, in court. Read on for more details about what this decision actually means for LSDB and the thousands of other projects affected.  What does this decision say? 1) The terminations were unconstitutional. In her 143-page decision, Judge McMahon ruled against the operatives of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) who cancelled nearly every active NEH grant in April 2025. She found that they had violated grantees’ rights under the U.S. Constitution–specifically, the first and fifth amendment provisions protecting freedom of speech, freedom of association, and equal access to due process under the law: “The injury is not limited to the loss of money; it includes the disruption of protected expression,... Read More