Pantomime in Draft: Carlo Antonio Delpini's School for Necromancy

Documentation is usually lacking for the process of conception of performances, whether text-based or not. Because of the nature of English pantomime as a genre, the origins of its productions tend to be particularly obscure. The form is known chiefly through elaborate advertisements in eighteenth-century newspapers, but comparatively few scenarios were ever published. Fragmentary music and some illustrations survive, but they are usually not easy to connect with a particular story. We seldom know much about what actually happened onstage and even less about how decisions concerning content were made. Almost all evidence derives from sketchy reports of performance, not from textual evidence at the draft stage. Ironic as the use of texts in regard to a non-text-based performance may be, a manuscript in the British Library offers us the opportunity of following along as a major exponent of the form created an outline proposal for a pantomime.