The London Stage Database team will be retiring the Legacy Search on May 1, 2025. Please take a moment before that date to reproduce any pre-2021 searches and export any resulting datasets you may wish to preserve for future use. We are making this change in order to free up computational resources for new features and data, currently in development with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Watch this space for more updates and, coming soon, new ways to keep up with the latest project developments!

User Guide

This page links to our quick guides for interacting with and understanding the information presented in the London Stage Database. In 2025, our team updated and reorganized this content from an earlier version of this webpage (now available through the Internet Archive).

  • About the Data: Outlines the provenance and limitations of the data
  • Glossary: Defines archaic and specialist terms related to eighteenth-century performance culture
  • Cast Lists: Explores our approach to representing cast lists from The London Stage reference books
  • Authors: Discusses the role of playwrights in long-eighteenth-century performance culture and contextualizes the representation of individual authors in the database
  • Dates: Explains how “old” and “new style” dating could affect historical research, particularly comparisons across national traditions
  • Search Tips: Offers advice for using the keyword and advanced search interfaces and for refining search results