Visualizations
The following graph represents the number of performances at the Drury Lane Theatre, the Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre, and the Dorset Garden Theatre across each year from 1661 to 1700.
The line graph is a useful way of representing data regarding the number of performances for different theatres in each year from 1661 to 1700. It could also have been done using a bar or column graph, but to me, line graphs are the easiest, least busy and most clear means of data representation. Other types of visualization would have proved difficult to include the data I wanted to show in a way that was also as visually simple.
The contrast between the active years of the two theatres can provide rich historical context to Restoration scholars. In May 1660, after the Restoration of Charles II to the throne of England, the playhouses reopened after eighteen years, and the patents for all the “stock” plays were divided between two companies—Thomas Killigrew’s King’s Company (1660-1682) and William Davenant’s Duke’s Company (1660-1682). It was also mandated that the companies would hire actresses and would perform their plays in indoor playhouses. By 1668, the Duke’s Company was managed, for all intents and purposes, by Davenant’s widow, Lady Mary Davenant (Pearson 32). It was during her management of the Duke’s Company that a new play by Aphra Behn, the “first” professional female playwright, was performed on the public stage. Over the next twelve years, the Duke’s Company was the exclusive producer for twelve plays by Behn.
In 1682, the Duke’s Company of Lincoln’s Inn Fields and the King’s Company of Drury Lane’s Theatre Royal merged to form the United Company, which in 1693 split up to form the Actor’s Company, with the actress Elizabeth Barry as one of the original patent holders. It was around this time that three new female playwrights, Catherine Trotter (1679-1749), Delarivier Manley (1672-1724) and Mary Pix (1666-1709), entered the public stage in 1696. The first plays of all three were produced within six months of each other and their printed play-texts reveal that these three women were writing supportive prefaces to each other’s plays. Paula Backsheider argues that now that the newly constructed playhouses were enjoying the patronage (and sometimes the presence) of the King, the female playwrights would consciously experiment with ways to enter and influence public discourse on the great national questions as well as on domestic concerns (Backsheider 70). The playhouse was an emerging social space and it represented the possibility for a new socio-cultural discourse.
My visualization, unfortunately, does not include data about particular plays being performed at these theatres and in this way, obscures information about the role of women in theatre. In future visualizations, I would like to include data on three particular aspects:
- The number of plays written by women which were being performed at each theatre across this period;
- The number of actresses who were working at each theatre across this period; and,
- The number of significant anti-theatrical pamphlets and lampoons, anonymous or otherwise, that were published in each year across this period.
These three factors would allow the audience to make connections between the relationships that were developing between female playwrights and the actresses in the three major theatre houses of the Restoration, and also how their creative production was impacted by anti-theatrical sentiments.
Tech Info
Flourish has been a useful tool for this particular visualization. The pre-sets and the design choices have little impact on the argument and are curated only insofar as to be visually discernible and clear. I believe the difficulty of my plan lies in the lack of easily discernible datasets about the particular questions that I am interested in exploring, which I can then visualize and represent using handy tools such as Flourish.