Theatre and Drama

Audio Drama: The L.A. Theatre Works Collection delivers over than three hundred important dramatic works in streaming audio from the curated archive of the nation’s premiere radio theatre company, L.A. Theatre Works. The plays - which include some of the most significant dramatic literature of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries - are performed by leading actors from around the world and recorded specifically for online listening.

Includes plays by Shakespeare, Chekhov, Arthur Miller, and more.

North American Theatre Online is a comprehensive reference work covering all aspects of the Canadian and American Theatre. It includes some 40,000 pages of major reference materials, together with records to approximately 30,000 plays, 57,000 people, 5,400 theatres, 22,000 productions, and 2,500 production companies. Each year more than 20,000 new records will be added. The collection also includes approximately 10,500 images, playbills, postcards, scrapbooks and other resources.

OntheBoards.tv is an on-demand website for HD-quality contemporary performance films available for streaming, download or mobile viewing. Launched in January 2010, this first-of-its-kind site brings contemporary work to a wider public by filming top caliber performances with multiple high-definition cameras, editing the film collaboratively with the artists, and delivering them online as feature-length performance films. OntheBoards.tv has more than doubled in size with plans to continue adding multiple new performance films each year. Filmed at On the Boards, as well as in peer theaters across the country, the performances present a snapshot of the best new works by current leaders in dance, theater and music. The films consist of compelling international and northwest contemporary performance, including works by artists who are rarely seen in the US and works that will never be performed again.

Initial Funding for OntheBoards.tv provided by The Wallace Foundation. With additional support from: DanceUSA, National Endowment for the Arts, The Paul G. Allen Foundation and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation

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. These rare documents were sourced from the British Library and other renowned institutions, and curated by experts in British arts history.

This unparalleled collection provides a detailed look at the state of the British art world with, for example, not only manuscripts and compositions, but also documents such as personal letters, annotated programs, meeting minutes, and financial records, offering scholars an unmatched glimpse into the inner workings of the arts world and life in Victorian Britain.

Collections in this Archive

• Archives of the Royal Literary Fund
• Drury Lane under Sheridan, 1776-1812: Manuscript Plays and Correspondence
• English Stage after the Restoration, 1733-1822
• Popular Literature in 18th and 19th Century Britain, Parts Three-Ten: The Barry Ono Collection of Bloods and Penny Dreadfuls
• Popular Literature in 18th and 19th Century Britain, Part Two: The Sabine Baring-Gould and Thomas Crampton Collections

Nineteenth Century

NOTE: This product is the updated version of: http://www.lib.umich.edu/database/link/28611

Black Drama, now it its expanded second edition, contains the full text of more than 1,460 plays written
from the mid-1800s to the present by more than 250 playwrights from North America, English-speaking
Africa, the Caribbean, and other African diaspora countries. Many of the works are rare, hard to find, or
out of print. James Vernon Hatch, the playwright, historian, and curator of the landmark Hatch-Billops
Collection, is the project’s editorial advisor. Over 40% of the collection consists of previously unpublished
plays by writers such as Langston Hughes, Ed Bullins, Willis Richardson, Amiri Baraka, Randolph
Edmonds, Zora Neale Hurston, and many others.

Each play is extensively and deeply indexed, allowing both keyword and multi-fielded searching. The
plays are accompanied by reference materials, significant ancillary information, a rich performance
database, and images. The result is an exceptionally deep and unified collection that illustrates the many
purposes that black theater has served: to give testimony to the ancient foundations of black culture; to
protest injustices; to project emerging images of the New Black; and to give voice to the many and varied
expressions of black creativity.

The works from early twentieth-century America include key writings of the Harlem Renaissance, works
performed for the Federal Theatre Project, and plays by critically acclaimed dramatists through the
1940s. Included are the plays of Langston Hughes, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Zora Neale Hurston, Ira
Aldridge, Shirley Graham, W.E.B. Du Bois, Randolph Edmonds, Georgia Douglas Johnson, May Miller,
Willis Richardson, Eulalie Spence, and many others. The plays address a wide range of struggles and
triumphs, including migration to Northern cities, mothers keeping families together, exploitation by white
land owners, interracial unity, racial violence, civil rights activism, and the black war hero.

American works from the later twentieth century cover the Black Arts movement of the sixties and
seventies, works performed by the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School (BARTS), The Negro Ensemble
Company, and other companies. The collection includes plays by Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), James
Baldwin, Ossie Davis, Charles Fuller, Ron Milner, Adrienne Kennedy, Anna Deavere Smith, Alice
Childress, Charles Smith, Dael Orlandersmith, Ntozake Shange, Melvin Van Peebles, Joseph Walker,
Richard Wesley, and August Wilson, to name a few. The plays explore themes including civil rights,
desegregation, and a wide range of ideologies—integrationist and separatist, revolutionary and
nationalist.

African and Caribbean drama is represented by a wide collection of plays from Ghana, Uganda, Sierra
Leone, Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, the West Indies, the United Kingdom, and other parts of the world.
It includes works by writers such as David Edgecombe, Bode Sewande, Ngugi wa Thiong'o , Femi
Osofisan, Zakes Mda, John Ruganda, Dennis Scott, Zulu Sofola, Paul Boakye, Errol John, Fatima Dike,
Clifford Sealy, Joe de Graft, Richard Rive, Bole Butake, Matsemela Manaka, Errol Hill, and Derrick
Walcott. The plays deal with the social and political ills stemming from colonialism, slavery, and
apartheid; the struggle for independence; African history; and neocolonialism. Of particular interest is
material written as “Township Theatre” in South Africa under apartheid and during the development of
black grassroots urban theatre.

Full digital version of the Times Literary Supplement, 1902-2005.Offers comprehensive coverage of the latest and most important publications, in every subject, in several languages – as well as reviewing current theatre, cinema, music, and exhibitions.

The Listener was a weekly publication, established by the BBC in 1929 as the medium for reproducing radio - and later, television - programmes in print. It is our only record and means of accessing the content of many early broadcasts.

1929-1991

Streaming video of all the plays of Shakespeare. Originally broadcast on BBC2 between 1978 and 1985.

Contains eleven major editions from the First Folio of 1623 to the Cambridge edition of 1863–66, twenty-eight separate contemporary printings of individual plays and poems, selected apocrypha, and related works. In addition, it contains more than one hundred adaptations, sequels and burlesques from the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including the whole of Bell's Acting Edition of Shakespeare's Plays (1774).

Editorial Policy: No attempt has been made to standardise the different conventions adopted by the various editors of Shakespeare's texts. The user should refer to the editors' own introductions for explanations of their particular practices. Act and scene numbering follows the source texts throughout; the user will inevitably encounter irregularities, particularly in early editions, where attributions to Shakespeare may be found to be at variance with modern consensus.

The Editions: The contents have been chosen under the guidance of two Executive Editors with further advice from an international Editorial Advisory Board of Shakespeare scholars to provide a balanced collection of editions and adaptations from the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Many of the adaptations included in the database will be unfamiliar even to Shakespearean scholars and, in order to provide some guidance as to the provenance and stage history of these works, brief notes have been included at the beginning of each play, for which we are indebted to Professor Michael Dobson of the Roehampton Institute.

The Texts: In the great majority of cases, texts have been captured entire, with all introductions, prefaces, appendices, indices, notes editorial and authorial, essays, tables, figures, illustrations etc. reproduced in full. Half-title pages, publisher's advertisements and decorations have not been captured. Hypertext links have been created to connect editorial matter to the texts whenever possible. 

English Drama contains more than 3,900 plays in verse and prose from the late thirteenth century - the likely date of the Shrewsbury Fragments - to the early twentieth. It offers exhaustive coverage of the prodigious dramatic literature of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, as well as Restoration plays, medieval morality plays and mystery cycles, and nineteenth-century closet dramas. In addition to works by major dramatists such as Ben Jonson, Aphra Behn, William Wycherley, Oliver Goldsmith, Richard Sheridan, Oscar Wilde and J. M. Synge, English Drama includes the dramatic writings of many more neglected writers long inaccessible in print form. A full list of works included in the collection is given in the bibliography. Contains contents of both the English Prose Drama Database (DLPS version) and the English Verse Drama Database (DLPS version).