Databases, Revenues, & Repertory: The French Stage Online, 1680–1793 / Données, recettes & répertoire. La scène en ligne (1680–1793) ed. by Sylvaine Guyot and Jeffrey S. Ravel (review)

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• Databases, Revenues, & Repertory: The French Stage Online, 1680–1793 / Données, recettes & répertoire. La scène en ligne (1680–1793) ed. by Sylvaine Guyot and Jeffrey S. Ravel
• Susan L. Fischer

Databases, Revenues, & Repertory: The French Stage Online, 1680–1793 / Données, recettes & répertoire. La scène en ligne (1680–1793).
Edited by Sylvaine Guyot and Jeffrey S. Ravel.
MIT PRESS, 2020.

THIS DIGITAL-ONLY, open-access, bilingual volume focuses on the ongoing work of the Comédie-Française Registers Project, an international initiative that investigates how digital humanities methods might “facilitate, enrich, and affect the study of the theatrical past,” as Sylvaine Guyot and Jeffrey S. Ravel state in their introduction (3). The Comédie-Française Registers Project springs from the incredibly complete manuscript and print records of the Comédie-Française preserved in the Bibliothèque-Musée at the far side of the Palais-Royal in Paris. A set of 112 folio registers that records nightly box office receipts from over 34,000 performances has been digitalized. That sales data has been made available online through three search and visualization tools, with access provided through an application program interface. The volume— comprised of three sets of essays, their respective comment, and a postface—is available as a PDF for download from (https://cfrp.mitpress.mit.edu). The editors and their contributors offer a dialogical approach to questions such as: How did politics, economics, and social conflict fashion the troupe’s repertory and affect its finances? Was the theater a place for critical colloquy of public issues, or a place to seek escape from the vicissitudes of life’s experiences?

Section 1, “Interpreting Data, Visualizations, and Sound,” explores the long-term tendencies in box office receipts and repertory choices throughout the eighteenth century and is rounded off by Dan Edelstein’s comment aptly titled “Back to the Future.” In his essay, “The Comédie-Française by the Numbers, 1752–2020,” Ravel compellingly invokes three earlier print studies—those of a “grub street writer” (Charles de Fieux, Chevalier de Mouhy, 1701–84), “an érudit” (Alexandre Joannidès, 1879–1926), and an “American literary historian” (Henry Carrington Lancaster, 1882–1954)—that [End Page 111] attempted to quantify the daily receipt registers of the Comédie-Française theater troupe. In the same way that the Comédie-Française Registers Project and other digital humanities projects reflect the exigencies of the second decade of the twenty-first century, so each of those earlier endeavors was informed by the ideological and sociocultural interests and expectations of the historical moment. Revisiting those earlier studies now not only underlines that “innovative quantitative scholarship existed before our current computational methods,” but also allows the “the benefits, possibilities, and limitations” of current digital modalities to be better understood and assessed (Guyot and Ravel 5).

What Ravel states concerning the successes and limitations of his predecessors is a touchstone for understanding the nature of current digital humanities projects: if the work of the three foregoing investigators “endures in the format of the codex book, and in the brick-and-mortar libraries that exist to conserve the rich bibliographical heritage of the past,” today’s digital technologies offer worldwide access (to the Comédie-Française registers) at all moments (29). Nevertheless, the lasting sustainability of these technologies and the commitment to create a means of conserving them “is shaky at best,” with the result that the availability of this data to future readers cannot be guaranteed (29). On the other hand, opines Ravel, data offered by the Comédie-Française Registers Project will not render humanities scholarship out of date, and while few humanists will replace “close reading and aesthetic judgement” with “online scrolling and clicking,” most will find interesting the insights that visual analysis of large quantities of data might bring to particular disciplines (30). This balanced assessment of the benefits and liabilities of digital humanities initiatives runs throughout the edited volume, making it in its totality a provocative meditation on more than just the ways that nightly box office data broaden perspectives in theater and performance studies; literary inquiry is complemented with material and economic...