Best Bets
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International Bibliography of Theatre & Dance (1984+)"a fully indexed, cross-referenced and annotated databank of over 60,000 journal articles, books, book articles and dissertation abstracts on all aspects of theatre and performance in 126 countries....contains more than 400 full-text titles, including more than 130 full-text journals...and more than 270 full-text books & monographs."
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Theatre in Context Collection (Alexander Street)North American Theatre Online recently changed names to Theatre in Context as well as migrating to a new platform. The old platform will continue to be available for a short time here
A comprehensive reference work covering all aspects of the Canadian and American Theatre. "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." -
Theatre in Video (Alexander Street)contains definitive performances of the world's leading plays, together with more than 100 film documentaries, online in streaming video.
Theatre Databases
Play Collections
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American Drama 1714–1915 (Chadwyck-Healey / Proquest)"Containing more than 1,500 dramatic works from the early eighteenth century up to the beginning of the twentieth, American Drama 1714–1915 reflects American dramatic writing in all its richness and diversity: plays in verse, farces, melodramas, minstrel shows, realist plays, frontier plays, temperance dialogues and a range of other genres are represented. Major dramatists include David Belasco, Rachel Crothers, Augustin Daly, Clyde Fitch, Edward Harrigan, James Herne, William Dean Howells and Joaquin Miller."
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Asian American Drama (Alexander Street)Contains 252 plays by 42 playwrights, together with detailed, fielded information on related productions, theaters, production companies, and more. Some 50% of these plays have never been published before. The database also includes selected playbills, production photographs and other ephemera related to the plays.
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Black Drama (Alexander Street)Contains approximately 1200 plays by 200 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 440 of the plays are published here for the first time, including a number by major authors.
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Eighteenth Century Drama (Adam Matthew) (1660-1824)"A unique archive of almost every play submitted for licence between 1737 and 1824, and hundreds of documents that provide social context for the plays"
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English Drama (Chadwyck-Healey / Proquest)"A unique collection of more than 3,900 plays in verse and prose tracing the development of drama in English from the medieval mystery cycles to the comedies of Oscar Wilde."
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Latino Literature (Alexander Street) (1850+)Full text of hundreds of novels, short stories, poetry, and plays by Chicano, Cuban, Puerto Rican, Dominican and other Latin writers working in the United States.
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North American Indian Drama (Alexander Street)" North American Indian Drama contains 256 plays by 49 playwrights representing the stories and creative energies of American Indian and First Nation playwrights of the twentieth century. More than half of the works are previously unpublished, and hard to find, representing groups such as Cherokee, Métis, Creek, Choctaw, Pembina Chippewa, Ojibway, Lenape, Comanche, Cree, Navajo, Rappahannock, Hawaiian/Samoan, and others. Together, the plays demonstrate Native theater’s diversity of tribal traditions and approaches to drama—melding conventional dramatic form with ancient storytelling and ritual performance elements, experimenting with traditional ideas of time and narrative, or challenging Western dramatic structure."
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North American Women's Drama (Alexander Street)"contains 1,517 plays by 330 playwrights, together with detailed, fielded information on related productions, theaters, production companies, and more."
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Twentieth Century North American Drama (Alexander Street)"contains 2,059 plays by 434 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."
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Twentieth-Century Drama (Chadwyck-Healey / Proquest)"Bringing together an unparalleled collection of the most important works from the last century from the English-speaking world, Twentieth Century Drama is the essential resource for the study and research of the drama of this influential period.
Featuring plays from noted playwrights as well as lesser known dramatists, the collection includes works by over 300 writers including Amiri Baraka, Noël Coward, Susan Glaspell, Langston Hughes, Brian Friel, David Mamet, Eugene O’Neill, John Osborne, Sean O’Casey, Harold Pinter, Bernard Shaw, Gertrude Stein, Tom Stoppard, Derek Walcott, August Wilson and Elizabeth Wong."
General Databases
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BBC Shakespeare Plays (Ambrose Video)"Featuring some of Britain's most distinguished theatrical talent Ambrose Video is proud to be the exclusive distributor of Shakespeare's plays which are so richly rewarding to our viewers."
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British Theatre, Music, & Literature: High & Popular Culture (Nineteenth Century Collections Online)"British Theatre, Music, and Literature: High and Popular Culture features a wide range of primary sources related to the arts in the Victorian era, from playbills and scripts to operas and complete scores."
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C19 : the nineteenth century index (Chadwyck Healey / ProQuest)"C19: The Nineteenth Century Index – the most comprehensive and dynamic source for discovering nineteenth-century books, periodicals, official documents, newspapers and archives."
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Early English Books Online (EEBO) (Chadwyck-Healey / ProQuest)contains digital facsimile page images of virtually every work printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and British North America and works in English printed elsewhere from 1473-1700.
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Literature Criticism Online (Gale)Excerpts and full text of articles and essays providing critical discussion of authors and their works.
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Literature Resource Center (Gale)Information on literary figures from all time periods of writing in such genres as fiction, nonfiction, poetry, drama, history, journalism, and more. Includes the Dictionary Of Literary Biography.
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MagillOnLiterature Plus (EBSCOhost)Critical analyses and brief plot summaries of the most studied works in the history of literature: long fiction, short fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama.
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Mango LanguagesLearn a new language from Mango Languages. Choose from more than 70 languages, including Latin American Spanish and English for speakers of other languages. Access Mango via your computer or download an app to your mobile device.
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MLA International Bibliography (EBSCOhost) (1926+)Indexes critical literary and language scholarship in journals and serials published worldwide.
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Play Finder in Lit Finder (Gale)Database of play citations as well as literature and poems. To search Play Finder, Search in LitFinder and set the Type of Work to Play.
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Shakespeare in Performance (Adam Matthew)"goes behind the scenes to shine a light on how Shakespeare’s plays have been interpreted by theatre companies, actors and directors across the centuries. The resource features prompt books from the world-famous collection at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC. These prompt books tell 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."
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Show Music on Record (Library of Congress)"provides a reference list for commercially-released show music recordings, starting with those captured on early cylinders in the late 19th century and continuing through compact disc productions of the early 21st century."
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Trade Catalogues and the American Home (Adam Matthew) (1850-1950)"Explore domestic consumerism, life and leisure in America between 1850-1950 with Trade Catalogues and the American Home. This resource presents a wealth of highly illustrated primary source documents that highlight commercial tastes and consumer trends, and provide a valuable visual record for a breadth of interdisciplinary study."
