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Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature

Subject support from Library Services for staff and students in Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature.

Websites

  • Internet Shakespeare Editions
    Online editions of Shakespeare’s works with supplementary and related materials. Includes pages on the Life and Times and Performance as well as reliable links to other online sources.
  • Understanding Shakespeare 
    Brilliant resource connecting digital texts from the Folger Shakespeare Library with articles on JSTOR. Pick a play, click on a line, instantly see JSTOR articles that reference that line.

 

 

 

  • ASIA (Asian Shakespeare Intercultural Archive) 
    A collaborative, multi-lingual online archive of performance materials providing resources for education and research in intercultural and Shakespeare performance.
  • AusStage 
    AusStage provides an accessible online resource for researching live performance in Australia. Development is led by a consortium of universities, government agencies, industry organisations and collecting institutions with funding from the Australian Research Council and other sources. Australian companies stage some of the most ambitious and innovative live performances, projecting images of Australian culture to audiences here and overseas. AusStage records the significance of these artistic collaborations and stimulates new approaches to collaborative research.
  • British Library Theatre Archive Project
    This website accompanies a major project to reinvestigate British theatre history 1945-1968, from the perspectives of both the theatregoer and the practitioner. The Project Team includes staff from both the British Library and De Montfort University.
  • DEEP : Database of Early English Playbooks 
    DEEP 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.
  • Internet Shakespeare Editions
    Online editions of Shakespeare’s works with supplementary and related materials. Includes pages on the Life and Times and Performance as well as reliable links to other online sources: http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Annex/links/index.html
  • REED (Records of Early English Drama) 
    Records of Early English Drama (REED) is an international scholarly project has worked to locate, transcribe, and edit historical documents containing evidence of drama, secular music, and other communal entertainment and ceremony from the Middle Ages until 1642, when the Puritans closed the London theatres. 
  • Richard Brome Online 
    An online edition of the Collected Works of the Caroline dramatist, Richard Brome. The edition not only makes the texts accessible to scholars and theatre practitioners, but also begins to explore their theatricality visually, serving as inspiration to encourage more frequent staging of Brome's works.
  • Romeo and Juliet Prompt Books 
    This site includes two fully-searchable databases containing information from approximately 170 prompt-books for productions of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. These productions range from the seventeenth century to the 1980s.This data was assembled by Jill Levenson during the preparation of her Oxford Shakespeare edition of the play.
  • RSC Performance Database
    Data about plays, productions and the creative and performing artists who have been involved with the RSC and its predecessors in Stratford-upon-Avon from 1879 to the present. Facility to search for performances of a play, by venue or date, or for people or roles. From the resulting list you will be guided to the performance record which gives details of the production including the full cast list. Contains list of reviews up to 1993.
  • Shakespeare Birthplace Trust 
    Online information regarding Shakespeare’s life, work and times. Includes link to the library and archive which holds the RSC Archive, including prompt books, reviews, photographs, programmes and other production records.
  • Shakespeare’s Globe Library, Research Discover Space
    Information regarding the workings and productions of the Globe with everything from backstage interviews to academic research papers.
  • Shakespearean London Theatres (ShaLT) 
    This project aims to increase public awareness of theatre sites from Shakespeare's period and to promote their enjoyment by producing, through a partnership between De Montfort University and the Victoria and Albert Museum, a map, a printed ShaLT Guide, interactive software, public talks, and downloadable short films that will enable the public to travel to the modern London locations of these theatres and learn about them.
  • ​Theatre Voice
    Online resource for audio material about British Theatre. Top critics discuss the latest shows and talk to leading actors, writers, directors and designers about their work.
  • Traffic of the Stage
    Traffic of the Stage is a  MS Access database containing information for UK Shakespeare productions 1996-2021 inclusive. The scope includes professional and amateur productions open to the public, ballets, operas, musicals, puppet versions, adaptations for children, apocrypha, plays which include Shakespeare as a character, plays which use Shakespearean themes. The slightest connection with Shakespeare warrants inclusion.
  • Copia: English Handwriting 1500-1700
    An online course designed for students and scholars of early modern English letters, history, theology, and philosophy--for anyone whose research will embrace original English manuscript sources in this period. 
  • DEEP : Database of Early English Playbooks 
    DEEP 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.
  • John Foxe's Acts and Monuments Online 
    Browse and compare the unabridged texts of the four editions of this massive work published in John Foxe’s lifetime (1563, 1570, 1576, 1583). Each edition changed significantly as Foxe sought to incorporate new material, answer his critics, and adjust its polemical force to the needs of the moment.
  • REED (Records of Early English Drama) 
    Records of Early English Drama (REED) is an international scholarly project has worked to locate, transcribe, and edit historical documents containing evidence of drama, secular music, and other communal entertainment and ceremony from the Middle Ages until 1642, when the Puritans closed the London theatres. 
  • Shakespearean London Theatres (ShaLT) 
    This project aims to increase public awareness of theatre sites from Shakespeare's period and to promote their enjoyment by producing, through a partnership between De Montfort University and the Victoria and Albert Museum, a map, a printed ShaLT Guide, interactive software, public talks, and downloadable short films that will enable the public to travel to the modern London locations of these theatres and learn about them.

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  • Cambridge Works of Ben Jonson Online 
  • DEEP : Database of Early English Playbooks 
    DEEP 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.
  • DEx: A Database of Dramatic Extracts 
    DEx is an online, searchable database of dramatic extracts found in seventeenth-century manuscripts. DEx is published by Iter: Gateway to the Middle Ages and Renaissance.
  • Early Modern Literary Studies
    Selected electronic texts of fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth century materials which are on the Internet, as well as others which have bearing upon this time period.
  • The Enfolded Hamlet 
    Produced by Bernice Kliman. Allows readers to read the Folio or 2nd Quarto texts of Hamlet separately, or as a conflated single text.
  • Internet Shakespeare Editions 
    Online editions of Shakespeare’s works with supplementary and related materials. Includes pages on the Life and Times and Performance as well as reliable links to other online sources: http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Annex/links/index.html
  • Luminarium 
    An online anthology of English Literature covering the Medieval to the Restoration period. Contains useful essays and articles on the literature of the period and pages of further study on individual authors.
  • Open Source Shakespeare
    Open Source Shakespeare attempts to be the best free web site containing Shakespeare's complete works. It is intended for scholars, thespians, and Shakespeare lovers of every kind. OSS includes the 1864 Globe Edition of the complete works, which was the definitive single-volume Shakespeare edition for over a half-century. It is also searchable.
  • Romeo and Juliet Prompt Books 
    This site includes two fully-searchable databases containing information from approximately 170 prompt-books for productions of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. These productions range from the seventeenth century to the 1980s.This data was assembled by Jill Levenson during the preparation of her Oxford Shakespeare edition of the play.
  • Shakespeare in Quarto 
    British Library’s web site with 107 copies of the 21 plays by Shakespeare printed in quarto before the 1642 theatre closures. Facility for viewing texts side by side, details on the period and the history of the plays in print and performance.
  • Shakespeare’s Words
    The site integrates the full text of the plays and poems with the entire Glossary database, allowing you to search for any word or phrase in Shakespeare's works, and in particular to find all instances of all words that can pose a difficulty to the modern reader.
  • University of Warwick Centre for the Study of the Renaissance
    Teaching and learning tool for contextualising the period and for engaging with the playtexts. Resources on Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, John Webster and Thomas Middleton.
  • Victorian Illustrated Shakespeare Archive 
    Focusing in on illustrations from the Victorian age (1837-1901), Michael John Goodman carefully scanned and cataloged images from four major editions of Shakespeare’s work produced during the period. By organizing the public domain works, he gives academics and enthusiasts the opportunity to see how artists brought Shakespeare’s words to life. Easily searchable by title, character, genre, location, and illustrator, VISA is an easy to use resource that allows for quick side by side comparisons.

 

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