Imagine that you are interested in a writer connected with French theatre during the 17th or 18th century. Or perhaps you have the title of a play, opera or ballet, published or performed, and you want to know more. Or maybe it's a theatre company that interests you, or a theatre building.

Our aim is to provide you with a first point of reference that will help with all these queries. CESAR is intended to be both a resource guide and a work of primary reference. Under the first aspect, it will combine and organise disparate existing resources; under the second, it will make available resources that have not been readily accessible before, especially for scholars outside France.

Getting started

You will always find on your screen a menu offering quick links to the four main entry-points into the data: People - Places - Titles - Dates.

The entry-point for people, for example, begins with a full representation of the name as it is currently recorded in the database. Below that are the fields into which the name has been atomised. The editors have followed the principle that the better such data is broken down on entry, the greater will be our flexibility for re-presenting the data in different contexts. For example, a user interested in François-Thomas-Marie de Baculard, dit Baculard d'Arnaud will succeed in finding the record below under B, A or D. Similar breakdowns are used in the internal representation of play titles and theatre names.

The Skills checkboxes underneath the main data entered for each object in CESAR provide a fast, simple way to categorise entries. Users can then pull from the data (for example) a list of all female theatre writers alive in France between 1750 and 1800, or all male dancers alive in the year 1762. From any such list, they can then immediately recover the full record.

The buttons at the foot of the form provide access to additional data and resources. There are no practical limits to the information that may be made available here. The bibliographies, for example, might include preset links to the catalogs of the great libraries, such as [link]Toronto or [link]Oxford. Another link might take one to relevant entries in the online version of the Soleinne catalog currently being prepared, or to online "Current awareness" guides. Naturally, the Plays button will produce a list of an author's play titles (or the titles of performances in which an actor or dancer has appeared), and from there we will be able to consult the full record for that title.

Your Contributions to CESAR

How CESAR grows will depend on the contributions of its users. As you use the site, you will discover opportunities to add comments and correct information in the database. Please take advantage of this invitation; the editors will review contributions to the site on a regular basis to ensure accuracy and relevance. We also welcome large-scale additions to CESAR. If you have a dataset or bibliography that could be useful here, please contact us at editors@cesar.org.uk to discuss the possibilities. Likewise, if you have resources at hand and would like to take on a collaborative project, we will be delighted to share our wish-list with you, or consider your proposal. CESAR is a not-for-profit venture which the editors hope will benefit all students and scholars of the French stage. As CESAR's contributors become more broad-based, its contents will become richer and more useful to those interested in French Old Regime theater.

How CESAR is structured

The primary object in our database is an abstract entity we call a SCRIPT. It may be performed, in which case the details for each performance are recorded in a PERFORMANCE object, which contains additional details pertaining to the particular performance or series of performances (e.g., where and when it was performed and by whom).

A script may also be published, in which case the details are recorded in a PUBLICATION object. Publication details are recorded with the PUBLICATION object (e.g., where and when it was published, by whom, in what format).

A simplified schema looks like this :

In general, the editors have tried to create a fully relational, extensible data structure sufficiently flexible to represent the collective needs of scholars working in our area, based on an analysis of our own needs, but hoping also to anticipate needs that go beyond our own. We welcome your feedback on these matters.