Guides: English Literatures: Drama

Researching Drama

Consult these sources to learn more about literary authors, periods, genres, texts, and their historical contexts.

The Cambridge History of American Theatre
LAU Stacks PN2221 .C37 1998 vol. 1-3
The Cambridge History of British Theatre
LAU Stacks PN2581 .C36 2004 vol. 1-3
Critical Survey of Drama
LAU Ref Stacks PN1625 .C68 2003 vol. 1-8
The Oxford Encyclopedia of Theater and Performance
LAU Ref Stacks PN2035 .O94 2003

Theatre in Context This link opens in a new window
O’Dell’s Annals of the New York Stage, the Oxford University Press Companion series, and Greenwood’s American Theatre Companies series are just a few of the many in-copyright sources included in the Theatre in Context Collection. Placed alongside thousands of playbills, posters, photographs, and related theatrical ephemera, users will be able to paint a more comprehensive picture of the life and evolution of dramatic works.

Primary Sources - Drama

19th Century British Pamphlets (within JSTOR) This link opens in a new window
A collection of significant 19th-century British pamphlets, which cover key political, social, technological, and environmental issues.
19th Century UK Periodicals This link opens in a new window
This database contains 1.2 million pages of periodicals published in Great Britain from 1800-1900. It includes publications on women, children, leisure and sport, humor, and material regarding the expansion of the British empire.
American Periodicals Series Online (1740 to 1940) This link opens in a new window
Digital images of historically significant American periodicals from 1740 to 1900, including literary and professional journals, children's and women's magazines, and popular magazines.
BBC Shakespeare Plays This link opens in a new window
Premier collection of BBC productions of Shakespeare's plays, available via streaming server and on mobile devices. The plays are chaptered by acts, which allows you to zoom directly to a desired segment.
British Periodicals This link opens in a new window
Facsimile page images and searchable full text for nearly 500 British periodicals published from the 17th through the early 20th centuries. Topics covered include literature, philosophy, history, science, the fine arts, archaeology, architecture, and the social sciences.
Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson Online This link opens in a new window
Presents a fully searchable version of Jonson's complete works, including all the original introductions, collations, and commentary. Includes a comprehensive body of essays and archives necessary for full study of Jonson’s life, performance history, and afterlife. Comprises around 90 old-spelling texts, 550 contextual documents, 80 essays, several hundred high-quality images, and 100 music scores; lists details of more than 1300 stage performances; and has a cross-linked bibliography of over 7000 items.

DEEP: Database of Early English Playbooks
Contains every playbook produced in England, Scotland, and Ireland from the beginning of printing through 1660 along with information about the original playbooks, their title-pages, paratextual matter, advertising features, bibliographic details, and theatrical backgrounds.

Donmar Shakespeare Trilogy on Screen This link opens in a new window
Part of Bloomsbury's Drama Online collection, Harriet Walter leads an all-female cast in these three productions of Julius Caesar, Henry IV and The Tempest, all set in a women's prison. Inspiration for these productions sprung from the real-life women who have experienced the criminal justice system.
Drama Online: National Theatre Collection This link opens in a new window
Drawing on 10 years of National Theatre Live broadcasts, alongside high-quality recordings never previously seen outside of the NT’s Archive, the National Theatre Collection makes this rich body of work available to students in schools, universities and libraries around the world. The collection contains 30 full length recordings of National Theatre performances.
Drama Online: Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) Live Collection This link opens in a new window
Bloomsbury's Drama Online: Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) Live Collection provides access to filmed Live performances of Shakespearean plays staged and acted by the Royal Shakespeare Company. This growing collection currently consists of 24 performances with more scheduled to be included throughout the year.
In 2013 the company began live screenings of its Shakespeare productions, captured here in The RSC Live Collection. In 2016-17 the company collaborated with Intel and The Imaginarium Studios to stage The Tempest, bringing performance capture to the Royal Shakespeare Theatre for the very first time.
Early American Imprints (Series I): Evans, 1639-1800 This link opens in a new window
Contains the full text of all known existing books, pamphlets and broadsides printed in the United States or in the British American colonies from 1639 through 1800.
When completed, the digital collection will include every item previously published in microform by Readex, plus more than 1,200 additional works located, catalogued and digitized since the microform effort was completed -- more than 36,000 works and 2,400,000 images.
Early American Imprints (Series II): Shaw-Shoemaker, 1801-1819 This link opens in a new window
Provides full-text access to the 36,000 American books, pamphlets and broadsides published in the first nineteen years of the 19th century.
Early English Books Online (EEBO) This link opens in a new window
Features page images of almost every work printed in the British Isles and North America, as well as works in English printed elsewhere from 1470-1700. From the first book printed in English through to the ages of Spenser, Shakespeare and of the English Civil War, EEBO's content draws on authoritative and respected short-title catalogues of the period and features a substantial number of text transcriptions.
Early English Books Online (EEBO) Text Creation Partnership (TCP) This link opens in a new window
A partner database to Early English Books Online. Provides a subset of fully searchable texts from the titles available in EEBO.
Any EEBO researcher can view the 250,000 page-image editions of EEBO titles, but only TCP partners can view these plus the corresponding full ASCII text.
Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) This link opens in a new window
Digital reproductions of every significant English- and foreign-language titles printed in Great Britain during the 18th century, along with thousands of important works from the Americas and elsewhere.
Covers the fields of history, literature, language, religion, social sciences, philosophy, law, geography, fine arts, science, and medicine. Cross-searchable with Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Global Shakespeares
Online access to performances of Shakespeare from many parts of the world.

Literature Online (LION) This link opens in a new window
Fully searchable library of more than 350,000 full-text works of English and American poetry, drama, and fiction with complementary criticism, reference resources, and websites. Includes over 800 clips of poets reading their own and other poets' work.
Allows you to:
--search both the MLA International Bibliography and the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature, with links to full-text articles from over 200 literature journals.
--find a list of works by or about a particular author
--search simultaneously across primary works and secondary sources
--access 1,550 author biographies

Includes full-text databases such as African-American Poetry, Twentieth-Century American Poetry, Early English Prose Fiction, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, English Drama, English Poetry.

Includes reference sources such as The Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English, Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism, Encyclopedia of the Novel, New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, Columbia Dictionary of Modern European Literature, the King James Bible, and Webster's Third New International Dictionary.

Nineteenth-Century British Periodicals. Series 1, 1800-1840
A microfilm collection of nineteenth-century periodicals, including titles such as The Monthly Literary Advertiser, The National Register, The Satirist; or, Censor of the Times, and The Christian Lady’s Magazine. Located in LAU Microforms.

Nineteenth Century Collections Online (NCCO) This link opens in a new window
Focusing on primary source collections of the nineteenth century, NCCO comprises a variety of material types--monographs, newspapers, pamphlets, manuscripts, ephemera, maps, statistics, and more--in one cross-searchable location. Collections include Asia and the West; British Politics and Society; British Theatre, Music and Literature: High & Popular Culture; and European Literature, 1790-1840.

Drama Indexes

Play Index
A selective index to English-language plays and translations since 1949.
Ottemiller's Index to Plays in Collections (8th ed.)
An author and title index to plays appearing in collections published since 1900.
Inter-Play
Index created by Portland State University. It is easily searchable by author and/or title and cites the Library of Congress call numbers of sources for the texts of plays.

Browsing Areas

The following sections are good for browsing for dramatic works and books on drama, which are shelved on the 5th floor of Lauinger Library.

PN 1600-3307 - Drama

PN 6110.5-6120 - Collections of Drama

PR 621-744 - English Drama

PR 1241-1273 - Collections of English Drama

PS 330-353 - American Drama

PS 623-635 - Collections of American Drama

Dramatic works can also be found scattered throughout the PR and PS sections; however, those titles are interspersed with other genres and non-fiction works.

Sample Subject Headings

Type

Form

Example

Author as Subject

Last name, First name

Wasserstein, Wendy

National/Regional Literature

Nationality/Region + Literature

English literature

Irish literature

African literature (English)

Caribbean literature (English)

Literary Genre

Genre

Drama

Melodrama

Passion - Plays

Nationality/Region + Genre

English drama

American drama