Abstract: “The Value of the Romantic Playwright“
When Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s tragedy Remorse premiered at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane on January 24, 1813 to record-breaking sales—making it the most successful new tragedy in two decades—the playbill for its opening night did not include the author’s name. It’s possible that manager Richard Brinsley Sheridan thought that most theatregoers would not recognize Coleridge despite his well-known status in literary circles; in any case, it was not standard practice to include authors’ names on playbills—with the exception of Shakespeare and a few other canonical stalwarts—even as machinists, scenographers, dressmakers, and other makers were regularly allotted prime page space. Conversely, Coleridge’s name emblazoned the print edition of Remorse available for purchase at the theatre; that text, unlike the performance, assigned value to the author as the work’s creator. Yet, what the theatre lacked in authorial recognition for Coleridge, it made up for in profit: like most playwrights, he profited significantly more from the staging of his work than from its printing. The play’s 1813 run would turn out to be the single most profitable endeavor in his career, surpassing his printed works even as the latter ushered him into lasting literary fame.
Taking the case study of Coleridge’s Remorse as its starting point, this paper will seek to explore the complex notion of authorial value in the context of the Romantic theatre. More specifically, it will compare the disparate yet entangled systems of authorial attribution and renumeration across the theatre and the book trade, asking how each market valued authors in terms of fiscal and cultural capital. Relying on AI-generated analysis of playbills from the two Theatres Royal in the first two decades of the nineteenth century, I will identify changing trends in authorial name recognition and ask whether these trends align with the increasingly elevated status of the author in the publishing world, and whether there is any correlation between increased pay for playwrights in the theatre and an increase in playbill attribution. Taking up these and related questions, my paper will ask how thinking in terms of value can help us to better understood the economics of the Romantic theatre.
Bio: University of Glasgow, UK
Deven Parker is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Glasgow. Her current project investigates the history of intellectual property and authorship in context of the Romantic theatre. Her previous research has taken up long-distance communication in Romantic Britain and media history. Her publications have appeared in SEL 1500-1900, Essays in Romanticism, the Keats-Shelley Journal, and elsewhere. She received her PhD in English from the University of Colorado, Boulder in 2019.