Just wanted to let people know about a site that tries to add text search to some of the BL playbill data that has been made publically available: http://blplaybills.org.
The catalogues covered are digitised volumes of theatrical English, Scottish, and Irish playbills between 1600 - 1902 (https://data.bl.uk/playbills/):
Playbills 1 - 107
Playbills 109 - 123
Playbills 126,129,131
Playbills 134 - 137
Playbills 139 - 143
Playbills 146, 147, 150, 151, 152, 161, 166, 168, 175, 178
Playbills 179 - 187
Playbills 193, 199, 204, 212, 213, 218, 225, 233, 234, 252
Playbills 262 - 264
Playbills 266, 276, 278, 280, 282, 285, 287, 291, 297, 306, 324, 325, 327, 329, 330, 348, 358
Playbills 400 - 404
Playbills 406 - 410
Playbills 412 - 417
Playbills 420
Playbills 424 - 427
Playbills 429
Playbills 126, 129 and 166 are currently missing.
General notes about the site:
- The text was generated using optical character recognition (OCR) software - so it can be quite rough
- You can search for phrases, and these do not need to be in quote marks; exact matches are returned first, then partial matches
- You can view/download a hires version of the playbill
- You can view the catalogue the playbill belongs to in the BL viewer
- You can copy the OCR text to the clipboard
- You can filter the results by date, theatre, location, catalogue
Hope it proves helpful.