|
Article Excerpt
Our title refers to a desire that has flourished for at least 150 years, to trace Shakespeare's activities as a theatre professional (actor, sharer, playwright) through the provincial boroughs and households that were visited by the companies to which he belonged. The pioneer here was James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps, who spent parts of twenty years, from the 1850s through the 1870s, visiting record repositories and muniment rooms throughout England. He collected a lot of valuable information, about 1,250 records of payments, etc. However, he didn't find what he was looking for (Shakespeare's signature in a record, or at least his name), so he laid aside his materials in disappointment. The Records of Early English Drama (REED) project doesn't share that urge for the name, but we are attempting a complete and systematic survey, and at this point (about halfway through) it has collected between 5,000 and 6,000 records that are published in what we call the "Red Army" (the collections of records from counties and boroughs, published in the REED series). (1) Where does this get us, in fulfilling that desire to trace Shakespeare's activities? Within those volumes the reader can trace the travels of the king's men after a lot of effort, thumbing one's way through (so far) twenty--four collections of records: for example, the king's players were paid 40s. at Coventry in 1603, and 20s. at Shrewsbury in the same year (Ingram 1981, 362; Somerset 1994, 288). But there's a better way, and its development is our subject.
Beginning in 1984, working in a version of Basic, the indexing of Patrons and Performances was begun. An activity begun on a very simple level has evolved over time into something much more complex. Most problematic, agility and stamina were required to negotiate these tables and find information--the environment, latterly in dBASE IV and then Access, was not "user-friendly!" For the internet, the data-records are being refined to enhance their usefulness; for example, the payments in "old money" ([pounds sterling]. s. d.) are being converted so they can be compared, totalled, or averaged, and an embedded Julian calendar will allow users to know the day of the week for records bearing specific dates. Second, a great deal of further research is being carried out to extend our information about "Perform" records (now renamed as "Events"). We're researching, visiting, and photographing (where possible) every known or probable venue used by performers with the aim of presenting visual, architectural and bibliographical details relevant for the study of early theatre in the provinces. Third, we're linking all these places and activities with a detailed map of England and Wales before 1642, with which the user can focus on a desired locality and see details of topography, period roads, rivers and neighbouring places as well as the performance and patrons' biographical data linked with that site. The map is produced using ArcIMS, and we are grateful to Byron Moldofsky and his associates in the Cartography Office, Department of Geography, University of Toronto for their cartographic skills in creating the interactive map. (2)
Can we follow Shakespeare on the road yet? Not quite, although we are quite well-advanced towards that goal; it requires the completion of the REED data, which continues to be published volume by volume. So, instead of actually following Shakespeare on the road, we can demonstrate the architecture of the web site that will allow you to trace those travels, as soon as the data have all been uploaded. We've concentrated our efforts on design issues, using at first a small and manageable subset of the data (Lancashire patrons, events and venues),...
|
