Selected Resources for the Study of Early English Drama

On this page you will find links to a selection of external, open-access resources for the study of early English drama and its various historical, cultural, literary, and theatrical contexts.

From this page you can access the specially commissioned essays on early English drama and culture designed as a Critical Companion to the editions.

In addition, the Internet Shakespeare Editions also maintains pages of links to reliable sites on Shakespeare and the Renaissance, as well as a selection of reference works and articles on Shakespeare, which may also be of interest.

External Resources

Electronic Editions: Drama

• Internet Shakespeare Editions (ISE)

  Provides scholarly editions of Shakespeareʼs plays and poems, with fully annotated modern-spelling texts, as well as transcriptions and photo-facsimiles of early editions. The ISE also includes a database of performance materials (“Shakespeare in Performance”), a site for performance reviews (“Performance Chronicle”), and essays on Shakespeare and his world (“Life and Times”).

• Queenʼs Men Editions (QME)

  Provides scholarly editions of plays associated with the Queenʼs Men, with transcriptions of early editions and fully annotated modern-spelling texts with performance commentary. The QME also includes information about the Queenʼs Men company, and is linked to its partner site, Performing the Queenʼs Men, detailing modern performances of the plays.

• Richard Brome Online (RBO)

  Provides scholarly editions of plays by Richard Brome, including collaborative plays, with old-spelling transcriptions and fully annotated modern-spelling texts. RBO also includes video clips of workshopped scenes, a gallery of images, a bibliography of Brome editions and criticism, and a collection of newly commissioned critical essays.

• The Philological Museum

  Provides scholarly editions of Renaissance Neo-Latin texts (including many plays by English authors or staged in England) in modern English translation with annotations.

Electronic Editions: Other Literature

• The Acts and Monuments Online (TAMO)

  Provides a scholarly edition of the four editions of The Acts and Monuments published in John Foxeʼs lifetime (1563, 1570, 1576, 1583). TAMO allows users to browse and compare these diplomatic transcriptions, alongside critical materials, photo-facsimiles of woodcut illustrations, and translations of passages in Latin and Greek.

• English Broadside Ballad Archive

  Provides an archive of English broadside ballads published during the seventeenth century, with digitized photo-facsimiles, transcriptions, and audio recordings, extensively catalogued with advanced search functions.

• The Holinshed Project

  Provides a parallel-text electronic edition of the 1577 and 1587 versions of Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland.

• The Philological Museum

  Provides scholarly editions of Renaissance Neo-Latin texts in modern English translation with annotations.

Bibliographies

• English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC)

  Provides a database listing over 460,000 early printed materials published between 1473 and 1800, mainly (but not exclusively) in English and printed in Britain and North America, with links to holdings of major library collections.

• Universal Short Title Catalogue (USTC)

  Provides a collective database of all books published in Europe between the invention of printing and the end of the sixteenth century.

• DEEP: Database of Early English Playbooks

  Provides a database of detailed records of every playbook printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland from the beginning of printing through 1660, including information about title-pages, paratextual matter, advertising details, bibliographical details, and theatrical backgrounds.

• Origins of Early Modern Literature

  Provides a catalogue of mid-Tudor writing (1519–1579), with details about authors, printers, booksellers, dedicatees, entries in the Stationersʼ Register, format, typefaces, and foreign languages used. The catalogue also lists tables of contents, and details about genres, subjects, sources, and literary coteries.

• Renaissance Cultural Crossroads Catalogue (RCCC)

  Provides a searchable, analytical and annotated list of all translations out of and into all languages printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland before 1641.

• Bibliography of Online Neo-Latin Texts

  Provides an analytic bibliography of Latin texts written during the Renaissance and later that are freely available online.

Dictionaries and Reference Works

• Lexicons of Early Modern English (LEME)

  Provides an historical database of monolingual, bilingual, and polyglot dictionaries, lexical encyclopedias, hard-word glossaries, spelling lists, and lexically-valuable treatises surviving in print or manuscript from the Tudor, Stuart, Caroline, Commonwealth, and Restoration periods.

• REED Patrons and Performances

  Provides a wealth of historical data about professional performers on tour in England and Wales — through provincial towns, monasteries, and private residences — and their various patrons, before 1642.

• The Map of Early Modern London (MoEML)

  Provides an interactive map of the streets, sites, and significant boundaries of late sixteenth-century and early seventeenth-century London, linking encyclopedia-style articles, scholarly work, student work, editions, and literary texts to these various historical landmarks.

• Early Modern London Theatres (EMLoT)

  Provides a research database of records pertaining to the eight theatres north of the Thames: the Red Lion (1567), the Theatre (1576), the Curtain (1577), the Fortune (1600), the Red Bull (1604), the Boar's Head (1602), the Phoenix or Cockpit (1616), and Salisbury Court (1629).

• Lost Plays Database (LPD)

  Provides a wiki-style forum for information about lost plays in England, 1570–1642, including details drawn from the Stationersʼ Register, Hensloweʼs Diary, legal records, narrative and dramatic sources, scholarly commentary, and online database and digital archives.

Primary Sources

• Shakespeare in Quarto

  Provides bibliographical details for, and digital photo-facsimiles of, 107 copies of 21 plays by Shakespeare printed in quarto before 1642 from the British Libraryʼs collections. In addition to background information about Shakespeare and his world, his works and their afterlife, the site allows users to view and compare quartos side-by-side.

• Shakespeare Quartos Archive (SQA)

  Provides a digital archive of 32 copies of the early quartos of Shakespeareʼs Hamlet, with high-resolution photo-facsimiles and diplomatic transcriptions that may be viewed side-by-side.

• Henslowe-Alleyn Digitization Project

  Provides a digital archive of the Henslowe-Alleyn Papers, manuscript materials that include, among other treasures, Hensloweʼs Diary and Account-Book, the playtext of The Telltale, and the plot of The Second Part of the Seven Deadly Sins.

• Renaissance Festival Books

  Provides bibliographical details for, and digital photo-facsimiles of, 253 Renaissance and early modern festival books selected from the British Libraryʼs extensive collection, illustrating the magnificent festivals and ceremonies that took place in Europe between 1475 and 1700.

• Emblematica Online

  Provides an extensive bibliographical catalogue and digitized photo-facsimiles of two of the worldʼs largest and most important Renaissance emblem book collections held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (USA) and the Herzog August Bibliothek (Germany).

• English Emblem Book Project

  Provides digitized photo-facsimiles of 9 emblem books published in England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries held in the Pennsylvania State University Library collections, with a bibliography and a chronology of English emblem books to 1900 (excluding manuscripts).

• Folger Digital Image Collection

  Provides access to over 50,000 digital high-resolution images from the Folger Shakespeare Library collection, including books, theatre memorabilia, manuscripts, art, and more.

Performance

• Staging the Henrician Court

  Provides video footage of a complete performance of John Heywoodʼs The Play of the Weather staged in the Great Hall at Hampton Court Palace in 2009, as part of a wider research project on drama in the court of Henry VIII. The site also includes critical discussions of key research topics, excerpts from related historical texts, interviews with researchers and members of the theatrical production team, and the play script.

• Performing the Queenʼs Men

  Provides video clips of performances of plays associated with the Queenʼs Men, alongside production resources – such as actors parts, the plots of the plays, doubling charts, and interviews with the actors – and interactive modules for performance-based research.

• Global Shakespeares Video and Performance Archive

  Provides online access to video of Shakespeare performances from around the world, as well as critical essays and metadata contributed by scholars and educators in the field. The project, which incorporates the Shakespeare Performance in Asia portal, also includes scripts, interviews with directors and performers, and a glossary.

• RSC Performance Database

  Provides a database of Royal Shakespeare Company performance records giving production details including full cast lists. Entries are sorted by play title, production, year, theatre, artistic role, and name. The RSC also hosts selected collections of digitized performance materials, such as costume and prop designs, artwork, photographs, posters, and programmes.