What the Larpent Collection Contains—and What It Does Not Contain

The Larpent Collection of play manuscripts has been well known to scholars for more than seventy-five years.  Dougald MacMillan’s excellent catalogue was published in 1939 with 2502 numbered entries.  Some of the items are not English plays—the collection also contains Italian operas, some oratorios, some “addresses” spoken in theatres, and quite a few prologues, epilogues, and interpolated scenes. MacMillan was aware of some missing items. He says,

Presumably, all new plays performed between June 24, 1737, and January 18, 1824, were licensed as the law required; and one might expect to find them in the collection in the Huntington Library. But, enormous as the collection still is, it is not now entirely complete. The extent and causes of the shrinkage are difficult to determine, but from time to time, apparently, individual pieces were abstracted.[1]

He offers Garrick and Colman’s The Clandestine Marriage and Sheridan’s The School for Scandal as instances of major plays that must unquestionably have been licensed but for which no Larpent manuscript was to be found in the collection that came to the Huntington.[2] 

The impression one gets from the Catalogue is that a few pieces strayed for one reason or another.  MacMillan very naturally worked with what he had agreed to catalogue.  He did not ask “What ought to be in the collection?”  If we pose that question, the answer is disconcerting. So far as I can determine, almost no scholars have asked the question or worried about the answer.  Allardyce Nicoll was clearly puzzled by what he failed to find.  He says worriedly, “Personally, I can find no explanation for the vagaries of the Larpent and Lord Chamberlain’s MSS. One would have expected to find all the theatres represented in them.”[3]   Nicoll is quite correct that we would “expect” plays from all theatres to be preserved in the collection up to John Larpent’s death in 1824—but this proves not to be true.  There are major puzzles to confront, some of them likely to be permanently insoluble. 

My best estimate is that there “should” be about 3874 Larpent manuscripts of English plays, but what we have is roughly 1990 or only about 51% (details of this calculation will be laid out below.) So the “extent ... of the shrinkage” is roughly 50%.  We need therefore to ask three questions.  First, what was the 1737 Licensing Act intended to do and how was it supposed to work?  Second, how well did practice square with Parliament’s intentions?  Third, at what point(s) and why did drastic attrition occur?  Any answer to the third question must be speculative, but we may usefully propound some hypotheses.