The dataset comprises 264 volumes of digitised theatrical playbills published between 1660 – 1902 (mostly 19th century) from England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. Digitised from the British Library’s physical collection of over 500 volumes of playbills. The dataset contains text files (.TXT) in Optical Character Recognition (OCR) format. The playbills cover theatres in Bath (Royal), Bristol (Royal), Dublin (Royal), Edinburgh (miscellaneous), Hull (Royal), King’s Lynn, Liverpool (Royal), London (Covent Garden, Drury Lane, Lyceum , Princess’s, Old Vic, Olympic) , Manchester (Royal), Margate (Royal), Market Drayton, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Nottingham (Royal and miscellaneous), Plymouth (miscellaneous), Portsmouth, Scarborough, Stafford (Royal), Tyneside (Newcastle upon-Tyne), Windsor…