Sept 1999 - from Tom Crochunis to Michael Gamer:

Michael,
     Way back when, I asked if you would participate in an email exchange about the kinds of archival projects related to BWP1800 you would love to see someone do. Guess what?
     I'd just ask you what kinds of archival work you'd like to see explored—what texts, which authors, which collections, what kind of production afterwards, etc.—and you would speculate without any responsibility to do anything about your grandiose visions other than explain what planet they are coming from.
     So, are you still up for it?
     Write when you can.
     Best,
     Tom

Thu, 23 Sep 1999 - from Michael Gamer to Tom Crochunis:

Dear Tom,
     Sorry not to be very available in the last month, but we're now settled in and I have proper (i.e., more than five minutes of surreptitious connection at the British Library) access to e-mail again.
     Let me first respond to the BWP1800. I'd like to do this and in many ways would much rather have you and I do an exchange. What would you say to this compromise?
     We celebrated by going to the Globe Theatre last night. It's the final week of their season (since they're outdoors they only run for the summer), and we saw an all-male Antony and Cleopatra. The problem is of course that they do full-text Shakespeare—which means that the play ran 3 1/2 hours and you could tell. Never could understand fictitious myths of origin, but they're operating at the Globe in abundance. Evidently at least half of their performances are "full text." I'm wondering what you might think about this, because, in many ways, it could prove the beginning of our correspondence, since the Globe itself is a kind of non-textual version of an archival problem, except what is being subjected to various ideas of purification is the centerpiece of dramatic and national literatures.
     (BTW: The man playing Cleopatra was excellent and the experience as a whole was a good introduction to British Theatre for the students. Regardless of length the new Globe is an amazing space; it really does give the feel of renaissance drama, and in many ways the space will always dwarf what's being performed in it. Aside from this play, We've seen a great Look Back in Anger and also nice productions of Coward's Private Lives and Bulwer-Lytton's Money. It's been a nice beginning.)
     Best,
     m

Oct 1999 (n.d.) - from Tom Crochunis to Michael Gamer:

Michael,
     Good to hear from you.

MG wrote: Let me first respond to the BWP 1800. I'd like to do this and in many ways would much rather have you and I do an exchange. What would you say to this compromise?

MG wrote: We celebrated by going to the Globe Theatre last night. It's the final week of their season (since they're outdoors they only run for the summer), and we saw an all-male Antony and Cleopatra. The problem is of course that they do full-text Shakespeare—which means that the play ran 3 1/2 hours and you could tell. Never could understand fictitious myths of origin, but they're operating at the Globe in abundance. Evidently at least half of their performances are "full text." I'm wondering what you might think about this, because, in many ways, it could prove the beginning of our correspondence, since the Globe itself is a kind of non-textual version of an archival problem, except what is being subjected to various ideas of purification is the centerpiece of dramatic and national literatures.

Mon, 18 Oct 1999 - from Michael Gamer to Tom Crochunis:

Dear Tom,
     Finally responding...I'll now begin to answer some questions.

TC wrote: Okay, it's as good a place to start as any: So, considering that women playwrights pose archival problems both textual and otherwise, what would be a few things that someone might benefit us all by looking into?

TC wrote: Wouldn't you love to see someone do CADD models of Drury Lane, Covent Garden, the Haymarket, and other venues? Wouldn't it be great if you could "walk through them" virtually, even stand on the stage? But where would you start? Where is the information that might lead in that direction? Which archives?

TC wrote: And to be less techno-fantastical, what about plain old text excavation? Are there some favorites that you would like to see liberated from archives and put online? Where are they housed?

Tue, 2 Nov 1999 - from Tom Crochunis to Michael Gamer:

Michael,
     Here's my ten cents on your latest. Respond away.

MG wrote: I've been thinking a lot about Ellen Donkin's chapters on Hannah Cowley, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Joanna Baillie—especially the Baillie since it outlines the kinds of conflicts experienced by women who happened to be playwrights concerning the relation between their own respectability and that of the theater. If Donkin's correct about Baillie's unwillingness to participate in the process of getting a play together during rehearsals, it would pose telling contrast to Samuel Coleridge's descriptions of his own experience in working on the production of Remorse. Coleridge's preface to the text version of that play is openly enthusiastic about the expertise of the actors in adapting his text to the stage, and his thanks to them are effusive. Then again, the play did run 20 nights and produced one of the single largest windfalls of his career. The contrast between Coleridge's involvement and Baillie's lack of involvement, then, suggests that women playwrights interested in maintaining their reputations as women might suffer financial losses as a result—unless a theater manager or male relative was especially assiduous on their behalf. I'm hoping, then, that other people will take up Donkin's lead and write both about the texts of plays written by women and the histories of their production. I also would like to see someone begin to work to putting some of the more interesting Larpent versions of the plays by women—where the Larpent text differs from the one published—on-line as well.

MG wrote: Hogan's The London Stage, Part V: 1776-1800 has a number of illustrations in it of various London venues, and there are many more in the British Library and the Huntington Library.

MG wrote: Recreating these on-line would be useful for the classroom, to say the least. I find that the most difficult thing to get students to understand about London stage drama after 1794 is the vastness of the theaters. It's fairly easy to explain to them—i.e., that the theaters were so large that only half the audience could here normal conversation well—but it's very difficult to get them to bring that information to an actual play text, let alone getting them to block out scenes as they read. These are the moments where any kind of visual aid would be useful, and an interactive one would be quite wonderful.

MG wrote: At this point, the Chadwyck-Healey Literature Online database is probably the single best resource for texts. It contains a large number of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century texts—I think their current number for English drama is nearly 4,000 plays by 1,200 authors ranging from the thirteenth century to the twentieth. Of these, a fair number are by women playwrights, though obviously a collection like the Huntington Library's Kemble-Devonshire collection has many more plays by women in it.

MG wrote: Of my favorites, I have to say that it would be nice to have reliable texts of any major romantic stage drama on-line. Besides plays by Cowley, Inchbald, and Baillie, I'd especially like to see the kinds of spectacles that were popular during the 1790s put on-line. I'm speaking about things like Robert Merry's The Picture of Paris, or naval reenactments like The Glorious First of June.

Thu, 18 Nov 1999 - from Michael Gamer to Tom Crochunis:

Responses below. I think it's time for you to do more than ask questions! I want a real exchange, even if you are the site manager. I still know no one as creative about thinking about romantic theatre. Your comments will spur on mine.

TC wrote: So it turns out there might be something interesting to explore through textual evidence. What are some ways you think we could think about discrepancies between print and Larpent versions. Any particular writers or texts you have in mind?

TC wrote: What do you know about getting permissions for things like this to go online? Ever tried it?

TC wrote: What kind of interaction do you fantasize about here? Keep it clean.

TC wrote: Can you say more about the status of catalogues and materials in this collection? What texts are available?

TC wrote: Texts of spectacles. Hmm. What would you make of the texts in a class? What would you need to supplement these in ways that would serve your instructional purpose? Why these kinds of texts in particular? Any interesting ones by women?

Wed, 24 Nov 1999 - from Tom Crochunis to Michael Gamer:

Michael,
Okay, here's another whack at some of the stuff you have raised. I'll try to put in more than a few prompting questions. Here goes...

MG wrote: With the Romantic Drama Anthology for Broadview Press, Jeff [Cox] and I are going to pay particular attention to the Larpent texts and the discrepancies that exist between them and the published play texts. They often prove to be reliable guides to how plays might have been performed on stage.

Hmm. Why do you say that? It would seem, in one sense, that the Larpent texts would be unreliable in quite specific ways (aimed at frontal presentation to the licenser), but maybe their typical ways of being unreliable makes them somewhat reliable, if read correctly. But how do you test your sense of a Larpent text's meaning for how plays were actually performed. Do you mean to suggest a kind of triangulation through checking with other sources of information?

MG wrote: Yet they also pose questions that are difficult to begin to answer. In my own experience with reading Larpent manuscripts I found that many of them differed not only from the first editions published by booksellers but also from the later versions of plays (such as Inchbald's 1807 British Dramatists, the 1824 London Stage, or the 1829 Cumberland's British Theatre) that claim to have taken their texts from the prompt-books of the theatres. With three different versions of a play one faces some interesting questions: how faithful are the Larpent texts? How much do the discrepancies in later collections of British Drama stem from the evolution of a play's performance? Which prompt books from which years? We'll also be including contemporary reviews and newspaper accounts in this edition where they're available in an attempt to explore some of these questions—and to invite students to explore them as well.

What do writers and others associated with them say that discrepancies stem from (when they talk about it at all)? I like this point you slide in about "Which prompt books from which years". It suggests that local practices (within a given company, by a particular playwright, under the auspices of a particular manager or influenced by a particular actor) might be a crucial part of the theatre history landscape. That seems likely to be truer than has been widely recognized and it seems to really speak in favor of gathering resources in ways that allows evidence of local variations to be centrally available. Does it sound like I'm talking about online. I think I am.

MG wrote: I never have, though we're going to try to include a number of illustrations in the anthology. I don't know how different it would be to get permissions for a Web site. I imagine it would be far more difficult; once you've put an image on the Web it very quickly gets reproduced all over the place—and it's nearly impossible to discover the source after a while.

How can we have this conversation with archives and libraries so that the discussion stops being about owning the static image. Maybe, developing a substantial resource through CADD would seem less subject to piracy because of the labor involved and the definitiveness of any such resource. But who will take on this work?
     Can we encourage graduate student projects in directions like these? Could anyone get tenure for doing something like this? Would humanities higher education know what to make of such work?
     And here I get a little global... It seems to me that one of the things that information technology tools invite... but that structures within higher education resist... is the potentially complex collaboration within previously scholarly disciplines of various kinds of expertise... like a working group combining theatre historians, those skilled in architectural design, and those with a background in theatre practice. Some of the projects we're talking about are likely never going to be done by theatre historians alone... not until someone young (perhaps at heart) enough to be turned on by technology gets tenure at an institution they like and can begin to explore some new avenues in their work without any concern for what the field will make of it all. It seems a shame to wait for that, but it's hard to see how the right kinds of collaboration could happen any sooner given the current economics and discursive practices in higher ed.

MG wrote: I have to imagine that it would not be that difficult using existing computer technology to create a model of a theatre based on a series of illustrations and architectural plans. It would be an incredibly labor-intensive enterprise; but I also imagine that it would tell us large amounts about how these plays were staged and performed. For example, in Hannah Cowley's A Bold Stroke for a Husband there are two scenes in which the scene suddenly shifts to "The Prado"—and where the usual kinds of notations regarding scene changes do not occur. One ends up wondering whether these actually were new scenes or simply played on another part of the stage. I imagine the latter, since the characters always "Exit" but then immediately appear in the "Prado" scene still walking, just as they did when they left the previous scene. Any kind of illustration of Covent Garden around 1783-4 would provide a few clues, but collecting together every illustration from that era and from that extrapolating the actual theatrical space would be a real boon. So much of the time it's not possible to imagine how scenes are blocked, or even what kind of movement occurs in them.

What interests me about this kind of "research" is that it would build from certain kinds of evidence (architectural plans, visual images, anecdotal descriptions) and then establish parameters within which speculation could occur. A kind of performative historiography might be possible. But it seems to me that it's precisely this kind of historiography that is needed if theatre history in all its material performance is going to be more than grist for the scholarly monograph mill (a medium, by the way, that has limited value when writing about the theatre, a medium that forces a kind of novelistic speculation on the writer).

MG wrote: The problem with databases like the C-H is that they multiply the errors of editions on a massive scale. Part of this is the problem of scanning texts; part of this stems from the fact that they don't often use first editions—and even when they do they do not proofread them at all. Most 18th-century plays are not that well printed, and so, along with printer's errors, you also have situations in which entire words for some reason never imprint on the page. One of Hannah More's plays in the British Library, for example, has a page missing; I then went and looked it up on Chadwyck-Healey and there were the same two pages missing from their text as well. I think that there's really no substitute for edited and annotated editions—especially of these texts.

You raise a really important point here. This gets to the heart of the problems of "reproduction." But I wonder whether the problem doesn't have more to do with our lack of understanding of what these texts are when we get them electronically. I mean, if we got them as printouts from microfiche, we'd know how to read their aberrations (from experience) but here we are inexperienced in decoding the code, as it were.

MG wrote: I'm currently enjoying many of Inchbald's farces—ones like A Mogul Tale or The Child of Nature—both of which make considerable use of spectacle. A Mogul Tale is especially lush—full of hot air balloons landing on stage and harems and eunuchs and seraglios, not to mention full-scale processions and Indian gardens—all in two acts.

Daniel O'Quinn did a great paper at NASSR '99 in Halifax on James Cobb's Ramah Droog. He used visual images of the scenography and descriptions to unpack how the stage space might have been used. It is kind of interesting to think of the dramaturgy of audience response that spectacular bits aimed to effect. Interesting to script the interplay between event and response in order to put the dialogue in a performance context. Doing this kind of thing might help us more fully register the dynamics of Patrice Pavis' theories of drama's interplay with mise en scène within historical contexts. I mean, what kind of theatrical gesture, in terms of gesture toward the audience, is the landing of a hot air balloon, or unveiling of a sublime prospect or gothic interior within the public space of the theatre. What are these gestures of revealing and showing about affectively? And then how does their use constitute part of the dramaturgy of the period? And, even further, how then do women playwrights employ these gestures in their writing for the stage?
     Ah, so many questions. Back to you.
     Tom

[Editor's Note: At this point, the email conversation breaks off. However, archival research has provided the editor with further responses on coarse paper in Gamer's hand. These include an indication of the sections of Crochunis' last email message to which they are intended to be responses. It is believed that these manuscripts were passed to Crochunis during a visit to the Boston area in January 2000.]

TC wrote: What interests me about this kind of "research" is that it would build from certain kinds of evidence (architectural plans, visual images, anecdotal descriptions) and then establish parameters within which speculation could occur. A kind of performative historiography might be possible. But it seems to me that it's precisely this kind of historiography that is needed if theatre history in all its material performance is going to be more than grist for the scholarly monograph mill (a medium, by the way, that has limited value when writing about the theatre, a medium that forces a kind of novelistic speculation on the writer).

TC wrote: Daniel O'Quinn did a great paper at NASSR '99 in Halifax on James Cobb's Ramah Droog. He used visual images of the scenography and descriptions to unpack how the stage space might have been used. It is kind of interesting to think of the dramaturgy of audience response that spectacular bits aimed to effect. Interesting to script the interplay between event and response in order to put the dialogue in a performance context. Doing this kind of thing might help us more fully register the dynamics of Patrice Pavis' theories of drama's interplay with mise en scène within historical contexts. I mean, what kind of theatrical gesture, in terms of gesture toward the audience, is the landing of a hot air balloon, or unveiling of a sublime prospect or gothic interior within the public space of the theatre. What are these gestures of revealing and showing about affectively? And then how does their use constitute part of the dramaturgy of the period? And, even further, how then do women playwrights employ these gestures in their writing for the stage?

This conversation is the beginning of what we hope will be an ongoing thread of discussion at the BWP1800 site. If any of the ideas offered here stir your thinking, write to the site and we'll post your remarks in order to continue the conversation.

Michael Gamer and Thomas C. Crochunis

Michael Gamer is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He is author of Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception, and Canon Formation (Cambridge University Press, September 2000) and has edited an edition of Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto for Penguin Classics (forthcoming 2000). With Jeffrey Cox he is editor of Romantic Period Drama: An Anthology (Broadview Press, forthcoming 2001). He has published a number of essays on various aspects of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century culture, which have appeared in ELH, PMLA, Studies in Romanticism, and other journals.

Thomas C. Crochunis heads the publications department at the U.S. Department of Education research laboratory at Brown University. He is editing Joanna Baillie, Romantic Dramatist: Critical Essays, a volume of essays on Baillie's plays and dramaturgy (Gordon and Breach, forthcoming). In 1998, he was guest editor of a special issue of Romanticism on the Net on British Women Playwrights around 1800. He is also co-founder (with Michael Eberle-Sinatra) of the Web-based working group on British Women Playwrights around 1800.