ABSTRACT
The duration of the Peninsular War coincides with the first quarter of the nineteenth century as a period particularly under-represented in English theatre history. The London Stage, 1660–1800: A Calendar of Plays, Entertainments & Afterpieces, Together with Casts, Box-receipts and Contemporary Comment (11 vols, 1960–1968) provides an indispensible chronicle of the plays performed in London’s patent theatres until the end of the eighteenth century, but its closest analogue for theatre post-1800 is J.P. Wearing’s The London Stage, 1890–1899: A Calendar of Plays and Players (2 vols, 1976). While Allardyce Nicoll and William Burling have published important records of early to mid-nineteenth-century theatrical performances, a trip to the archives is still required for a full picture of the entertainments available at the time of the Peninsular War. 1 The arrangement of Nicoll’s ‘Hand List of Plays Produced Between 1800 and 1850’ makes it difficult to gage the relationship between the different plays in the repertoire, while Burling focuses exclusively on London’s summer patent theatre, the Haymarket. I here attempt to offer some redress by providing ‘A Calendar of Plays for Covent Garden, Drury Lane and Bristol Theatre Royal’, which spans the years 1807 to 1815 examined in this book.
