I've spent most of my time this past week going through the playbills data and matching up the plays you guys have transcribed to their original playwrights. As I thought the best results would come from me manually researching each title, you can imagine it's been quite time-consuming! The results are finally done though, and hopefully provide a good basis for us to compare future titles to, as a lot of the same playwrights crop up again and again. I've made a few charts of the most prolific playwrights, and will do a longer write up in the future on the more "interesting" characters, as some of them certainly had exciting lives! It was also great to see some (very minor!) variety in a female playwright -- Elizabeth Inchbald/Simpson -- making the top ten.
There are a few titles that I've not been able to crack yet, so I'd love to throw them out to the community to see if anyone has any information or can get to the bottom of their origins! Let me know how you think it's best to do this -- I might comment on this thread every few days with a new title, or can do separate posts or put them out on Twitter.