Romantic Melodrama is five-year international research project funded by the British Academy and sponsored by Queen Mary University of London and the Price Lab for Digital Humanities. An outgrowth of the Price Lab’s English Playbills project, it has received essential and generous support from the Penn Library and the Center for Undergraduate Research and Fellowships. The duration of the British Academy grant is four years, and will run through the summer of 2024, after which the project will continue until its completion. The project will make available to researchers a richly tagged, searchable database of every recorded performance of melodrama beginning with the 18 March 1793 premiere of Edward Jerningham’s Margaret of Anjou at the Haymarket Theatre and ending in 1843 with the Theatre Regulation Act. These first fifty years of performance witnessed melodrama’s astonishing popularity and rapid innovations, as theatres large and small, metropolitan and provincial, adapted it to their own purposes. We project a repository of over 5,000 records in the database at its completion.

Prospecting Playbills, by By Louisa Shepard in OMNIA