News

Epilogue: #TheaterThursday

Last week marked the final curtain call for our beloved #TheaterThursday series, as its author Rose Ruhnke prepares to graduate from the University of Oregon and move on to new adventures. Fans of the series will be pleased to know that we have moved all of the posts to a dedicated gallery-style page, now reachable from the Theater Thursday link in our main navigation menu: Visit the new Theater Thursday gallery Awards for #TheaterThursday Perhaps I should say, beloved and award-winning series! That’s right–Rose received not one, but TWO formal commendations for her presentation on #TheaterThursday at UO’s Undergraduate Research Symposium last month: a Theater Arts Award, and an Honorable Mention for the English and Composition Award. One of the award committees praised Rose’s presentation as “well researched, impressively delivered, and exemplary of the values of the dissemination of new knowledge and creativity.” The rest of the LSDB team couldn’t agree more. Congratulations... Read More

June 4th, 1791: Curtains at Drury Lane

It is a bittersweet Thursday indeed; for today marks our final #theaterthursday ! While we may be mourning the end of #theaterthursday, we cannot help but simultaneously celebrate these past four months of London Stage history spotlights. It has been my joy and privilege to bring you all theater history events “on this day in history” for the past seventeen weeks. We’ve covered topics from stage rivalries and regulations, to Shakespearean forgeries, and beyond. I will be sad to see it end. We cannot forget, however, that the London Stage saw its fair share of curtain calls too… So, for one last time, on THIS day in London Stage history: Drury Lane Theatre, closed for the season and “for ever” !?! Well… not EXACTLY “for ever.”  View of the new front, towards Bridges Street, of the principal entry to the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, la nouvelle façade, by Pastorini Begbie, 1776. Folger Imaging Department,... Read More

Downtime and improvements this week

The London Stage Database will be down for planned upgrades later today, Monday, June 1, starting at 3:00 p.m. Pacific time. We expect the outage to last no more than an hour. Once the site is back up and running, it will feature an updated database with significant improvements to the identification of dramatic Works and Witnesses associated with individual performances. This update builds on work we launched quietly last week: a new Drama corpus that brings together more than 900 printed plays and their metadata for large-scale text analysis. We’ll be sharing more about the corpus and the latest database improvements in some upcoming blog posts, but for now, you can check out the refreshed and expanded Data Downloads page on our website!

May 28th, 1689: A Royal Request Gone Wrong

Welcome back to our sixteenth #theaterthursday! Can you believe we’ve had so many weeks worth of London Stage event “on this day in history”? As the traditional theater season (which ran fall through spring) nears its end, so too does #theaterthursday, but today, beloved readers, is not that day! So (without further ado) on THIS day in London Stage history a royal request of the theaters… gone wrong: The year is 1689 and London is still in the wake of the Glorious Revolution. England saw their Catholic King, James II (brother and successor of Charles II), usurped by his own daughter, Mary, and her husband, William of Orange. In February, Mary officially became England’s monarch and the throne was returned to protestant (Anglican) hands. Only a few months after coronation, on this very day of May 28th, Mary made her first trip to the theater, but only after having made a very... Read More

Meet A11y: An Accessibility Overhaul

My name is Ceilidh, and I’m a Research Assistant on the London Stage Database team. I have a passion for bringing accessible and interactive learning to new platforms and larger audiences. One of my first projects with the LSDB was to bring our work in line with updated accessibility standards being implemented this year across all University of Oregon websites. With mentorship from Librarian Erin Winter and IT developer John Zhao, I learned a host of new technical skills and approaches to accessible design. This post focuses on the changes I made to improve site navigation for screen readers, which are widely used text-to-speech tools that read websites out loud. Accessibility & A11y Compliance fixes to the LSDB site One of primary goals of the London Stage Database project is to make knowledge and information about the London Stage accessible to everyone. However, simply making information freely available on a website doesn’t mean... Read More

May 21st, 1700: A Dangerous and Growing Evil

After Puritan-led Parliament’s infamous ban on public theater, it took eighteen years before playhouses in London were up and running again. The return of King Charles II in 1660 brought more than monarchy back to the city; it revived theater too. Charles’s royal support, however, was far from enough to completely insulate the London Stage from future attacks like that of Parliament. Even after years of its reinstatement, the playhouse faced repeated allegations of impropriety. On May 21st, at the turn of the (18th) century, London newspaper The Flying Post reported on one such attack: reporting that the Grand Jury of London had officially made arguments against the public “frequenting the Play-houses.” View of the Sessions House in the Old Bailey, by unknown author, 1772. Licensed from The Trustees of the British Museum, under a a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 License The Jury gathered at the primary criminal courthouse of London, the Old... Read More