CATCOM: A Database on Performances of Spanish Classical Theater

The research group DICAT (http://www.uv.es/dicat/index_en.html) has been working for almost twenty years on the creation of research instruments that will enhance scholars' knowledge of Early Modern Spanish theater through the use of digital tools that create new ways to combine and apply data.¹ The database Diccionario biográfico de actores del teatro clásico español (DICAT) (Ferrer Valls) was the result of work done during nearly fifteen years. The DICAT group created a database with almost five thousand entries, which document the activity of actors, actresses, heads of companies, and musicians who worked in Spanish professional theatrical companies during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We also included five hundred digitized signatures and a visual database with two hundred images and videos, together with a digitalized edition of the unpublished manuscript Confirmación de la Cofradía de la Novena, which includes the documents and regulations related to the 1634 foundation of the actors' guild.

The project CATCOM. Database of plays mentioned in theatrical documentation (1540-1700), which we are currently developing, is based on our previous experience of creating the database DICAT. It is important to point out that Spanish theatrical documentation is exceptionally abundant, especially if we compare it to other European countries of the early modern period. We find a lot of documents regarding contracts between actors and the heads of the companies; contracts with the lessors of the playhouses; contracts with municipal or with ecclesiastical authorities for religious festivities and the Corpus; receipts for performances at the royal palace; documents reporting expenditures or inventories of costumes and plays; inquisitorial processes or lawsuits that sometimes offer interesting information for the history of Spanish classical theater, etc. In these documents we can often find titles of plays, which can sometimes be difficult for researchers to track due to the vast number of plays in the Golden Age corpus. The objective of the CATCOM project is to collect, classify, and critically analyze the information on these titles, and make it available to researchers in the form of a database that will make it easier to access a calendar of performances, offer information on these performances (name of the company who performed the play, town where it took place, type of theatrical space where it was performed), locate titles and relate them to alternative titles of the same play and adaptations, and provide a current state of the question regarding their authorship. The large amount of information concerning the performance of plays in early modern Spain makes the use of digital tools especially valuable, as the database becomes an extremely useful instrument that enables researchers to connect data in ways that would otherwise be extremely difficult (or even impossible) to do. By gathering, comparing, and analyzing all this information in a single database, we can sometimes detect interesting and relevant issues that the dispersion of documents made difficult to perceive, which then allows researchers to offer a solution to these problems.

On our web page we explain the methodology of the project in the section titled "Projects" (http://www.uv.es/dicat/catcom_en.html), and we offer a selection of our database (http://catcom.uv.es/). In short, our research focuses on two essential issues:

1. 1. Critically treating the data in order to create a digital calendar of performances.

2. 2. Identifying the titles that are mentioned in the documents with particular plays and their authors, which can present some difficulties specific to early modern Spanish theater.

The documents we work with are not usually of a literary nature, but rather are legal and historical documents. Therefore, it is necessary to identify the titles that are mentioned with specific plays, which often present one or more alternative titles, or have controversial attributions. Most of the time references to performances do not include the attribution of the play to a specific playwright, or if they do, it is not always reliable. It is necessary to confront these problems in order to differentiate different entries in the calendar of performances. Naturally we cannot always solve the problems...