"Announcing each day the performances": Playbills, Ephemerality, and Romantic Period Media/Theater History

The playbill thus reliably appealed, as Coleridge thought the show of nature did, to both "Eye & Ear." [...]as a text which had the potential to survive the event it advertised, the playbill served as a way of commemorating and preserving the ephemerality of performance, creating a sense of periodicity and thereby a form of theater time. Gamering the Playbill Such commentaries not only made the playbill visible as a medium, charging it with affective significance, but also drew attention to collecting practices as a form of mediation. [...]Robert Southey's playbill education was made possible through his aunt's preservation of the playbills of the Bath theater, while Thomas Noon Talfourd noted the importance of a collection of playbills "as the most precious of literary curiosities-as forming a series of golden links in a chain of delight. On the one hand, they granted a new visibility to the ephemeral text as a potential object of value because the most prestigious sacral books had become displaced, fugitive, subject to appropriation and in some cases purgative recontextualization-all books were in a sense now "ephemeral"-and on the other, they reinforced ephemerality as a way of defining the limits of value in the market economy of print, particularly the boundary of the "unidentifiable mass of material" that is not commodifiable. [...]the bibliomaniac and the ephemerophile were not necessarily antithetical but were important to each other and in the case of Haslewood and numerous other book collectors of the period these identities were embodied in a single individual. Genest's model of a capacious or fugitive theater history was later stigmatized as "bill-sticking history" that was too invested in the ephemeral.66 Bratton claims that "anecdote, inherited wisdom, professional interest in the box office-all the material and emotional heritage of the stage-was viewed merely as the context which helped (or more often hindered) the realization of the written dramatic text" (my emphasis).67 In other words, "all the material and emotional heritage of the stage" was increasingly rendered as ephemeral, and the privileging of the written dramatic text was predicated on texts such as the playbill being defined in this way.