Acknowledgements

This volume has been a long time in the making. Because we chose to publish it in an online, open access, bilingual format, we have accrued even more debts than usual for a project of this nature.

We are grateful, first of all, to our contributors and translators for the patience they have shown over the last four years as we worked to bring the volume to completion. Frankly, we have been astonished at their goodwill as we have made continuing demands on their time while informing them of our ever-receding publication horizon.

Second, we thank Agathe Sanjuan, the innovative Director of the Bibliothèque-Musée de la Comédie-Française who has been a supporter of this volume and of the Comédie-Française Registers Project (CFRP) since its inception. It has been an honor to work with her, and with the theater troupe whose history and archives inspire this volume. We are delighted that she has co-authored the concluding essay.

We are also deeply indebted to our colleagues at the MIT Press, who encouraged our desire to explore new online formats in unusual ways. They never rejected our proposals outright, and they have worked with us to realize some of our more outlandish ideas within the context of what was possible in the PubPub format. We are particularly grateful to Amy Brand, the Director of the MIT Press, for her enthusiasm for the project and her swift response at a critical moment. Justin Kehoe, our editor, has been ever-present and always ready to support our editorial whims. We marvel at the solutions that our designer, Catherine Ahearn, has created; this volume would be far less legible and attractive without her considerable visual virtuosity.

A grant from the MIT Global Languages Section made possible the open access publication of Databases, Revenues, and Repertory. Funding to Harvard University and the Université Paris Nanterre from the Partner University Fund (PUF) supporting French American Cultural Exchange in Education and the Arts (FACE Foundation & Cultural Services of the French Embassy) underwrote the volume’s bilingual translations. The CFRP, the inspiration for the essays in this volume, was made possible by major grants from the French Agence nationale de la recherche (ANR), the French Ministry of Culture, and the Florence Gould Foundation, a private American philanthropical institution committed to fostering Franco-American amity. To all of these generous funders, we express our deep gratitude.

Two international symposia and a workshop were at the origins of the volume: Remettre en jeu le passé. Métamorphoses du corpus des registres de la Comédie-Française 1680-1793/2013-2016 (Sorbonne & Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art, 14-16 December 2015); Early Modern Theatre Practices and the Digital Archive. The Comédie-Française Registers Project (1680-1793) (Harvard & MIT, 19-21 May 2016); and Economic Approaches to the registers of the Comédie-Française (MIT, 23 September 2016). Each of these gatherings benefitted from the support of the local host institutions, as well as grants from the FACE’s Partner University Fund and the French Agence nationale de la recherche.

Sylvaine Guyot & Jeffrey S. Ravel

Cambridge, Massachusetts

September 2020