Folger Shakespeare LibraryHomepage of the library in Washington, DC. Home to the world’s largest and finest collection of Shakespeare materials and to major collections of other rare Renaissance books, manuscripts, and works of art.
Play ShakespeareCollection of historical facts and statistics relating to Shakespeare. Sections include Shakespeare's Biography, Play Chronology, Play Lengths, Biggest Roles, Shakespeare's Players, Elizabethan Theatres, and Scansion Overview.
Teaching ShakespeareFolger Education offers a world of online resources for teachers, from lesson plans to study guides to videos.
Discover research tools for studying texts.The Queen's Men was an all-star troupe of Elizabethan actors formed in 1583. This website "is designed to disseminate the project's performance research findings and to allow a wider audience access to the experiment through the publication of production resources, including video of the performances." Please ask a librarian for the username and password to the password protected portion of the website.
DEEP: Database of Early English PlaybooksAn easy-to-use and highly customizable search engine of every playbook produced in England, Scotland, and Ireland from the beginning of printing through 1660, DEEP provides a wealth of information about the original playbooks, their title-pages, paratextual matter, advertising features, bibliographic details, and theatrical backgrounds.
Shakespeare's CircuitsExplore over 500 instances of Shakespeare’s plays in the world outside the Anglophone centers of Great Britain, North America, and Australia.
East London Theatre ArchiveFrom the University of East London. A database of East London theatre ephemera from 1827 to the present day. Includes playbills and programmes to press cuttings and photographs. It also has themed essays to contextualise the material and maps showing theatre locations.
Victorian Illustrated Shakespeare ArchiveAn archive of the illustrations from four editions of Shakespeare's Complete Works published in the 19th century. The search funtionality is somewhat limited but you can browse by play or by editor and within each record, the illustrators are hyperlinked.
A Digital Anthology of Early Modern English Drama"A Digital Anthology of Early Modern English Drama is a hub for exploring over four hundred early modern English plays that were performed in London's professional theaters between 1576 and 1642. Browse plays written by Shakespeare’s contemporaries, explore the repertoire of London’s professional companies, read the first printed edition of one of our featured plays, or download the plays and their source code."
Early English Books Online (EEBO)Contains the full text of about 100,000 out of 125,000 titles listed in Pollard & Redgrave's Short-Title Catalogue (1475-1640) and Wing's Short-Title Catalogue (1641-1700).
Horace Howard Furness CollectionPart of the Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text & Image, includes primary and secondary texts that illuminate the theater, literature, and history of Shakespeare, Shakespearean texts, theatrical production, and criticism.
Illustrated Shakespeare CollectionThis online collection of selected electronic facsimiles seeks to share the marriage between book art and Shakespearean text with a wider audience. It also suggests the variety of responses by visual and book artists to the stimulus of Shakespeare’s words. This online collection, originally published in venues as disparate as Philadelphia and Leipzig, includes images produced by an array of technologies available in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
JSTORA scholarly journal archive. Economics, history, math, philosophy, political science, language and literature, sociology, botany, and ecology. Holdings: Varies; from the 1800s - late 2000s
*Note* - As of Jan. 2021, we have lost access to a number of Project Muse Journals. Articles from these publications are available through Interlibrary Loan
Project MUSE provides full text, subscription access to current content from scholarly journals in the humanities and social sciences.
English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC)"The English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) lists over 460,000 items published between 1473 and 1800 mainly, but not exclusively, in English published mainly in the British Isles and North America from the collections of the British Library and over 2,000 other libraries." From the British Library. Covers Wing, Pollard & Redgrave, and the 18th Century Short Title Catalogue.
World Shakespeare Bibliography OnlineProvides annotated entries for all important books, articles, book reviews, dissertations, theatrical productions, reviews of productions, audiovisual materials, electronic media, and other scholarly and popular materials related to Shakespeare and published or produced from 1962 to the present.
Oxford Dictionary of the RenaissanceThis dictionary provides rich detail on all aspects of the Renaissance in 14th to 17th century Europe. It includes comprehensive coverage of the art, literature, science, culture, philosophy, religion, economics, history, and conflict of the period.