Guides: Digital Archives: Drama and Theatre

Drama and Theatre Online

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Abbey Theatre Minute Book Collection
Digital reproductions with transcriptions of books containing the minutes from meetings of the Abbey Theatre's board of directors, 1904-1939. These cover a variety of issues, from choosing plays to determining how much to pay their actors. The collection includes information about leading figures from the Irish Literary Revival and beyond, e.g., W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory and John Millington Synge, Sean O'Casey, Lennox Robinson, Teresa Deevy, Sean O'Faolain, Frank O'Connor, and about great Irish actors such as Molly Allgood, Ria Mooney, Barry Fitzgerald, Cyril Cusack and more.
American Drama, 1714-1915
This collection contains 711 plays by American dramatists that chronicle the history and culture of America through its dramatic writing. It includes plays by dramatists such as Thomas Paine, Edward Hitchcock, and James Lawson. When complete, the collection will contain more than 2,000 plays.
Asian American Drama
252 plays by 42 playwrights, together with detailed, fielded information on related productions, theaters, production companies, and more.
Black Drama: 1850 to present, second edition
Contains approximately 1,462 plays by 233 playwrights, together with detailed, fielded information on related productions, theaters, production companies, and more. The database also includes selected playbills, production photographs and other ephemera related to the plays. Some 600 of the plays are published here for the first time, including a number by major authors.
DEEP: Database of Early English Playbooks
DEEP: Database of Early English Playbooks allows scholars and students to investigate the publishing, printing, and marketing of English Renaissance drama in ways not possible using any other print or electronic resource. An easy-to-use and highly customizable search engine of every playbook produced in England, Scotland, and Ireland from the beginning of printing through 1660, DEEP provides a wealth of information about the original playbooks, their title-pages, paratextual matter, advertising features, bibliographic details, and theatrical backgrounds.
Digital Theatre Plus
A digital video collection of British theatre productions containing full-length films of Shakespearean plays, modern dramas, and musicals, as well as behind the scenes insights.
Drama Online
Provides access to full-text plays and theater reference works. It features titles from the Methuen Drama, Arden Shakespeare and Faber lists to form a collection of the most studied, performed and critically acclaimed plays from the last two and a half thousand years. Drama Online also provides biographical information about each playwright as well as supporting critical and contextual resources on performance, theater craft, criticism and interpretation
Eighteenth century drama : censorship, society and the stage
Eighteenth Century Drama features the John Larpent Collection from the Huntington Library – a unique archive of almost every play submitted for licence between 1737 and 1824, as well as hundreds of documents that provide social context for the plays. Also included are the papers of prominent theatrical figures of the period, including correspondence, financial documents, and portraits.

EMMO: Early Modern Manuscripts Online
A project of the Folger Shakespeare Library to provide access to transcriptions, images, and metadata for manuscripts from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Entertainment Industry Magazine Archive
An archival research resource containing the essential primary sources for studying the history of the film and entertainment industries, from the era of vaudeville and silent movies through to 2000. The core US and UK trade magazines covering film, music, broadcasting and theater are all included, together with film fan magazines and music press titles. Magazines have been scanned cover-to-cover in high-resolution color, with granular indexing of all articles, covers, ads and reviews.
Internet Shakespeare Editions
Open-access, peer-reviewed Shakespeare resources. A non-profit scholarly website publishing in three main areas: plays and poems, Shakespeare's life and times, and Shakespeare in performance.
John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera
This collection offers unique insights into the changing nature of everyday life in Britain in the 18th, 19th, and early 20th-centuries. Categories include 19th-century entertainment, the booktrade, popular prints, crimes, murders and executions, and advertising.
National Theatre Collection
Online streaming video collection of theater performances and archival material. Drawing on 10 years of National Theatre Live broadcasts as well as recordings never previously seen outside of the National Theatre’s archive, the video content includes 19 video performances in the initial release and will expand in 2020 to 30 video performances. As a supplement to the filmed productions, exclusive digitized archival materials such as photographs, scripts, costume designs, and more will be available to provide behind-the-scenes background and contextual information.
New Play Exchange
Digital library of scripts by living writers. Designed and built with the needs of the entire new play sector in mind, the mission of the New Play Exchange is to provide an open, egalitarian platform on which writers all over the world can share their work and others can discover that work.
North American Indian Drama
Full text of plays by American Indian, First Nation, and Pacific Islanders playwrights of the 20th century; information about the plays and their production, and biographical data.
On the Boards TV
OntheBoards.tv…delivers full-length, high quality contemporary performance films. On the Boards is one of the first contemporary performance organizations to begin filming works by top caliber artists with multiple high-definition cameras, collaboratively editing the films with the artists, and delivering feature-length performance films to audiences around the globe. On the Boards have launched over 41 performance films by 42 different artists.

Playbill Vault
Online archive of information from Broadway shows. Often include digital covers of Playbills, cast lists, performance dates and other details.

Routledge Performance Archive
Provides exclusive access to an unprecedented and continually expanding range of streamed video and audio footage from performance practitioners past and present paired with relevant critical commentary delivered directly to the classroom, rehearsal hall, library and desktop or digital device
Shakespeare in Performance: Prompt Books from the Folger Shakespeare Library
Showcases rare and unique prompt books from the Folger Shakespeare Library, telling the story of Shakespeare’s plays as they were performed in theatres throughout Great Britain, the United States and internationally, between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries.
Shakespeare's Globe on Screen I (2008-2015)
This collection features over 20 films recorded live on the Globe stage from leading actors including Mark Rylance, Stephen Fry, and Roger Allam’s Olivier Award-winning role as Falstaff in Henry IV. Founded by the pioneering American actor and director Sam Wanamaker, Shakespeare's Globe is dedicated to the exploration of Shakespeare's work and the theatre for which he wrote.

Shakespeare's Globe on Screen 2
Shakespeare's Globe on Screen 2 (2016-2018) includes landmark productions from the theatre’s 2016, 2017 and 2018 seasons, including the first production from the indoor Jacobean theatre, the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. These films showcase the Globe’s two unique playing spaces on Bankside and how different artists respond to them. Each performance transports viewers directly into the standing yard of the world famous Globe or the magical candlelit interior of the captivating new Sam Wanamaker Playhouse.

Theatre in Video
Theatre in Video: Volume I contains hundreds of videos, including documentaries and definitive performances of the world's most important plays. From celebrated productions of Shakespeare to rare, in-depth footage of the work of Samuel Beckett, the collection covers a wide range of 20th century theatre history. Interviews with directors, designers, writers, and actors, along with excerpts of live performances deliver an authentic, behind-the-scenes look at hundreds of productions. Provides access to hundreds of the world's most important plays, documentaries, interviews, and instructional materials.
Theatre in Video, Volume II
Theatre in Video: Volume II brings together classic and contemporary plays and documentaries. With a greater focus on contemporary and international productions, Theater in Video: Volume II offers a simple way for libraries to acquire highly valued and often difficult-to-find performances. Users can view the works of widely studied playwrights and theatre artists from around the globe, including many new performances from Shakespeare's Globe Theatre collection (Opus Arte), Theatre Arts Films, the BBC, and TMW Media Group.
Victorian Popular Culture - Music Hall, Theatre & Popular Entertainment
The primary sources in this module not only celebrate well-known and popular forms of entertainment [such as variety, vaudeville and theater] but also highlights lesser-known activities and leisure interests. Advertising posters, guidebooks, admission tickets and handbills represent the diverse forms of entertainment available to growing numbers of people from the late Georgian period and throughout the Victorian and Edwardian era. ...Highlights from the collection include a set of early pantomime programmes; unique material from the May Moore Duprez archive; and visual material related to Belle Vue, Manchester's popular Zoological Gardens.

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Digital Archives: Drama and Theatre

Drama and Theatre Online