Regency Publications - Fiction, Non-Fiction, and Poetry

I also write Regency set stuff--and my favorite research sources for snapshots of popular culture are old magazines like Ackermann's Repository and La Belle Assemblee, which you can find on www.archive.org. They're a great place to find advertisements for upcoming books, both fiction and non-fiction, and sometimes for theatre reviews.

Archive.org is a great resource, but tough to find things in if you don't already know what you're looking for. In general, go to advanced search, pick a data type of Text (for what you're looking at) and enter a date range. The do more searches based on the type of material you find in that date range.

At least that's how I manage to find random stuff, unless I know the exact collection, title or author.

By the way, it's really easy to wander off topic in there...

Jeff

There were three mainpieces for the 1811-1812 season (which seemed to run fall-to-spring). The first was:

October 16, 1811 at the Covent Garden Theatre: The Day of Tribute, aka, Kamchatka, or, The Slave's Tribute. By Charles Kemble.
Plot: "Little more than Kotzebue's Count Benyowsky converted into an opera"

The other two mainpieces later that season were: T. Dibden's "Up to Town" started November 6, 1811, and Reynolds's "The Virgin of the Sun" started Jan 31, 1812.

In the previous season, there were three mainpieces and three afterpieces. Reynolds's "The Bridal Ring" (16 Oct 1810); Morton's "The Knight of Snowdoun" (5 Feb 1811); and Holman's "The Gazette Extraordinary" (23 April 1811) were the mainpieces. "Harlequin and Asmodeus, or, Cupid on Crutches" (25 Dec 1810); Colman's "X, Y, Z" (11 Dec 1810); and Lewis' "Timour the Tartar" (29 April 1811) were the afterpieces.

All this was from the "Theatre in Dublin, 1745-1820: A Calendar of Performances, Vol. 6" from the appendix entitled, "Plays New to London", which suggests that this is the Covent Garden (London) calendar, not the Covent Garden (Dublin) calendar. It's a big book... p. 4,527.

You might try the Covent Garden E-Learning Centre to double-check. It might be more informative if you sign up for a subscription. I wasn't able to see anything with the free view, but you might sign up and poke around a bit. But multiple sites were in agreement that "Tribute" was playing the specific year/month you were asking after.