[This essay is the first part of a conference paper jointly presented by Thomas C. Crochunis and Michael Eberle-Sinatra]

The British Women Playwrights around 1800 Web project began because we were interested in sustaining over time a community exploring the histories and writing of women in late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century British theatre. The project has had a split allegiance from its beginning. It has tried on one hand to help form a contemporary community of inquiry to help those of us who work on British Women Playwrights from the years around 1800 to share our work. On the other hand, the project has sought to accumulate materials and commentary about these women playwrights so that they will become better known to scholars and students of the humanities. Though we knew from the beginning that we weren't about something as straightforward as recovering the neglected plays written by women and putting them online, we have only discovered little by little that a critique of scholarly practice is essential to opening a space for these neglected histories. For example, the constraints placed on inquiry in women's theatre history by the business of scholarly publishing have made an electronic project seem a comfortable fit for our work; we see this realization as both a fortuitous circumstance and relevant data that reveals how historiographic practices affect historical knowledge.

What I want to put forward in this presentation are four main propositions about our historical subject and our methods that inform the ways we think about the content of our site. By stating these directly and unpacking them very briefly, I want to suggest that the formation of a scholarly venue like ours can produce methodological self-reflection that is extremely valuable in generating both creative possibilities for how to move forward and cogent critique of scholarly historiography.

Play texts are a distinctive kind of historical artifact.

Play texts occupy different positions in relation to issues of historical representation than scholarly editing has yet adequately dealt with. If part of the impulse in textual editing is toward some form of representation of the historical, play texts complicate that task immensely. First, they raise questions about what ought to be represented—the manuscript artifacts whose relationship with subsequent performances is uncertain, the traces of the performance itself, or the published text that can have any of a number of relationships to staging? Second, play texts complicate authorial intention beyond all measure, since any such intention must be interpreted in relation to complexes of social process, interpretation, and counter-intention that make the versions of literary texts seem simple by comparison. Finally, play texts are artifacts in a medium—words on paper—that is different from the medium of performance. Although the textual medium determines the artifact's form, the writer likely wrote the script for use within a social process (rehearsal, reading, censorship). Therefore, textual artifacts related to theatre need to be understood as contextual gestures toward artistic intentions. All three of these complications ought to give us pause when we think about how and why to publish a theatre text electronically or in print as part of an act of historical representation.

Reading play texts requires new protocols of interpretation.

The uses to which play texts might be put by those using electronic resources—that is, how theatre materials might be "read"—differ from how literary texts are read, for the reasons outlined above. Even if we simplified our reading by focusing on a playwright's intention, we would need to read a playscript in relation to its theatrical context since plays invoke the theatre as actual or imaginative venue. But there is more complication: to read women's theatre writing of the period around 1800, it is essential to do more than read single plays or an author's oeuvre as literary writing. Not only does reading beyond the literary allow for an awareness of women's plays as a family of texts similarly influenced and sometimes similarly structured, but it also reminds us that reception of these plays in either theatres or print responded to both their literary content and their engagement with social processes like those of the patent theatres. Furthermore, all these nuances of scholarly interpretation aside, these plays might also be read today by theatre practitioners seeking possible performance texts and by students with an interest in women's writing. After all, since these plays have been left out of the educational canon, it's possible that people will have never been taught about them and might just find them surprisingly interesting to think about, read aloud, imagine in performance. This possible interest in non-scholarly reading adds further complication to how we publish the texts since we cannot assume that a dense historiographic apparatus will support all possible kinds of reading.

Studying women's writing for theatre requires sociological methods.

The social contexts bearing on women's theatre writing in the years around 1800—as cultural production then and as object of scholarship now—differentiate it from other forms of cultural production of its time, like poetry or the novel. While there are many provocative connections that can be made between women's writing in other, more commonly discussed genres and their plays, fundamental differences exist between how we need to think about women's writing for the theatre and about their other forms of literary production. Women's playtexts must be contextualized sociologically if they are to be understood in any adequate way. Though literary analysis and textual criticism of the various versions of women's plays are possible approaches that, strategically employed, can illuminate the particular circumstances and strategies of a woman writer, scholarship on women playwrights requires a versatile methodology of inquiry that gathers evidence from widely variable sources ranging from receipt books, glancing journalistic references, caricatures, advertising bills, personal correspondence, second-hand mentions, and the play texts themselves. In effect, however normalized the social process of women's literary production in other genres, we don't yet know enough about women's complex social authorship of theatre texts to read these plays as literary works. To historicize our interpretations, we must view play texts as complexly linked sources of data.

Building a venue for inquiry stimulates collegial discourse.

The value of a Web-based venue that both allows for shared work and accumulation of resources is especially important for women's theatre history. Sociological inquiry depends on studies of patterns of activity and a lone scholar can find developing a project based on sufficiently dense information from multiple sources almost overwhelming. Collaboration through providing practical leads, sources, and even, potentially, sharing data might make certain projects possible that might otherwise be inconceivable within the currently expected pace of professional publication. Also, considering that the range of types of reading in which those interested in women playwrights might engage—from scholarly data collection and textual editing to performance experimentation and reading out of interest—an approach taken by a performance-oriented reader might stimulate a history-oriented reader to raise new questions. Such cross-fertilization of inquiry is particularly important to work in theatre history and performance where so many elements of social process must be part of any robust inquiry into a text, a writer, or a historical period. Of course, collegial interaction, more immediate publication of creative interpretations than books or articles can offer, and even contentious disagreement can affect how inquiry moves forward. The more the discourse thrives within a shared venue . . . well, the more the inquiry thrives.

Although my four propositions range from statements about the nature of women's theatre writing as historical material to comments about developing new models of scholarly process, it is my view that our rethinking of history and historiographic practices needs to happen simultaneously for a Web-based venue to merge the data-manipulating power of computers with the social activity of groups of colleagues. We can't expect to get new wine just because we use new bottles.