Theater and Dance Research Guide 

What's Here

One can readily find plays in Orbis by title or author. Sometimes the resulting list of titles will include online versions. However, it can be useful to look specifically for an online edition or go directly into a collection of plays online, and occasionally the plays in these collections aren't listed in Orbis.

This page has two sections:

• Play Collections
• Individual Plays

For pointers on finding collections of plays (either online or in print), see Play Catalogs & Indexes.

You may also find it useful to look at the subject guides for literature(e.g., English literature, French literature).

Play Collections

American Drama 1714-1915

Full-text American plays from the colonial period through to the early 20th century. When complete, the collection will feature the complete texts of over 2,000 plays written by American dramatists.

Arden Shakespeare

Part of the Shakespeare Collection described below.

Black Drama (Second Edition)

This edition of Black Drama contains 1310 plays by 210 playwrights, together with detailed information on related productions, theaters, production companies, and more. Some 500 of the plays are published here for the first time.

Editions and Adaptations of Shakespeare

Contains eleven major editions from the First Folio of 1623 to the Cambridge edition of 1863-6, 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).

Electronic Text Archives -Theatre and Drama

Part of the WWW Virtual Library for Theatre and Drama. This site links to full-text electronic versions of plays from the English Renaissance, Spanish Golden Age, French Classical Era and other areas of interest.

English Drama (1280-1915)

English Drama combines the English Verse Drama and English Prose Drama databases.  It contains roughly 4,000 plays by 1,200 different authors. The database includes plays, masques, entertainments, and certain closet dramas.

English Server: Drama

This site contains a collection of original plays and screenplays, criticism and links to other sites concerned with theatre.

Federal Theatre Project Collection

The collection features stage and costume designs, still photographs, posters, administrative documents, and 68 scripts. The scripts are reproduced as images, not as searchable text documents.

Humanities Text Initiative

A very large database including texts from the Middle Ages to the early twentieth century. Look especially under Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse.

Internet Classics Archive

The Internet Classics Archives includes over 440 texts from Classical Greece and Rome, including translations of the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes (but as of Jan. 2001, none of the Roman playwrights). The translations do not appear to be dated -- probably most are old and so are in the public domain. Caveat lector!

Japanese Text Initiative

Includes sections with Noh and Kabuki plays, some with both Japanese and English versions.

Latin American Women Writers

Latin American Women Writers (LAWW) will contain approximately 100,000 pages of prose, poetry and drama by women writers from Mexico, Central, and South America when complete. In this prototype version there are about 4200 pages of prose and poetry. Drama will be added in the next release.

Literature Online with MLA

A fully searchable library of more than 349,000 works of English and American poetry, drama and prose, plus biographies, bibliographies and key criticism and reference resources. A search in this database also automatically searches the MLA Bibliography, ABELL (the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature), and selected Web resources.

Medieval Sourcebook

A source for a wide range of medieval texts. In the "Middle English" section (under Full Text Sources) there are links to full-text versions of Everyman, the Towneley Cycle Plays, and the York Cycle Plays. The plays of Roswitha are also available in the Christopher St. John translation. In addition, there are resources on studying medieval history, each major period of the Middle Ages, various countries, and special topics such as the Church, sex and gender, Jewish life, and politics.

Oxford Text Archive

The collection includes materials from all eras and many languages, and can be searched by author and title, and browsed by author, title and language. Texts can usually be downloaded.

North American Women's Drama

When complete North American Women's Drama will bring together more than 1,500 plays, along with related biographical, production, and theatrical information. The collection begins with the works of Mercy Otis Warren and Susanna Haswell Rowson in colonial times and will span the 19th and 20th centuries to the present. It is planned to include contemporary playwrights, such as Tina Howe, Beth Henley, Marsha Norman, Maria Irene Fornes, Megan Terry, and Paula Vogel.

Perseus Project

The multimedia database contains interactive sources and studies on Ancient Greece, including primary texts including Aeschylus, with an English translation by Herbert Wier Smyth. In terms of visual materials, Perseus has a library of over 4,000 vase, sculpture and coin images.

Shakespeare Collection

A comprehensive and authoritative online resource for Shakespearean research, bringing together general reference data, full-text scholarly periodicals, reprinted criticism, primary source material and the full text annotated works from The Arden Shakespeare.

Shakespeare - Complete Works

All of the plays are available for download, either by scene or as a whole. Be aware of the usual questions of textual editing.

Twentieth Century Drama

Twentieth Century Drama will contain plays in English from around the world from the 1890s to 2003. It features mostly copyrighted texts unavailable elsewhere in electronic form, including many out-of-print works that are difficult to obtain.

Twentieth Century North American Drama

This edition of Twentieth Century North American Drama contains 319 plays by 53 playwrights, together with detailed information on related productions, theaters, production companies, and more. The database also includes selected playbills, together with detailed, fielded information on related productions, theaters, production companies, and more.

E-versions of Individual Plays

To search for an individual play in an electronic (online or CD-ROM) format, try one of the following search techniques in Orbis:

• Search for the title of the play, followed by the word "electronic." For example, a title search for macbeth electronic brings up over two dozen entries under Macbeth [electronic resource]. Some but not all of these versions will be included in the collections listed above -- some are stand-alone CD-ROMs.
• Do a keyword search including "electronic." For instance, a Keyword search for the words All's well that ends well electronic brings up the title Shakespeare's All's well that ends well [electronic resource], which you would not have found using the first way.
• Search for the title of the play in the usual way. Then click on the Post Limit button, under Medium select "Electronic resource," and then click on the Select Limits button.