Research Guides: Theatre Studies: Finding Plays

Library Databases

A great collection of databases containing plays. Many also allow for monologue searching.

New Play Exchange This link opens in a new window
The New Play Exchange is a digital library of scripts by living writers which can be filtered by title, length, age level, genre, subject matter, production history, script availability, cast size and characteristics, playwright, and playwright demographics. The database includes a directory of organizations and one of people, which are faceted by role (dramaturgs and types of writers), gender identity, race/ethnic identity, sexual identity, and location. While the focus is currently North American, the intended scope is international.
Drama Online This link opens in a new window
Drama Online contains full texts and full-length filmed performances of plays ranging from Aeschylus to the present day, with supplementary material including first night program texts, critical analyses, and images from the Victoria and Albert Museum's archive of production photos. Includes the Core Collection, Critical Studies and Performance Practice, Nick Hern Books Modern Plays, National Theatre Collection, RSC Live Collection, and Aurora Metro Books, among others.
Contemporary World Drama This link opens in a new window
Contemporary World Drama examines contemporary theatre and drama from a global context. The collection brings together new work from our existing playwright partners alongside work from up-and-coming playwrights from around the world, including recently produced world premieres, previously unpublished works, etc. from every continent.
Twentieth Century North American Drama This link opens in a new window
From the late 1800s to the present by more than 200 playwrights from North America. Many are rare, hard-to-find, or out of print. Many previously unpublished plays.
North American Women's Drama This link opens in a new window
More than 1,500 plays by more than 300 playwrights, along with detailed information on related productions, theaters, production companies.
North American Indian Drama This link opens in a new window
Contains 172 plays by 33 playwrights, together with detailed, fielded information on related productions, theaters, production companies.
Black Drama, 3rd Edition This link opens in a new window
Contains the full text of plays, written from the 1850s to the present, from North America, English-speaking Africa, the Caribbean, and other African diaspora countries. Includes information on productions, theaters, and production companies.
Asian American Drama This link opens in a new window
Asian American Drama contains 252 plays by 42 playwrights, together with detailed information on productions, theaters, production companies. The database also includes selected playbills, production photographs and other ephemera. Some 50% of these plays have never been published before.
American Drama 1714-1915 This link opens in a new window
American Drama contains more than 1,500 dramatic works from the early eighteenth century up to the beginning of the twentieth, American Drama 1714–1915 contains plays in verse, farces, melodramas, minstrel shows, realist plays, frontier plays, temperance dialogues and a range of other genres are represented.
Nineteenth-Century American Drama: Popular Culture and Entertainment, 1820-1900 This link opens in a new window
Nineteenth-Century American Drama: Popular Culture and Entertainment, 1820-1900 includes a wide variety of works such as historical plays, melodramas, political satires, minstrel shows, comic operas, musical extravaganzas, parlor entertainments, adaptations of novels, and many others.
Latino Literature This link opens in a new window
Latino Literature is a searchable collection of poetry, fiction, and drama written in English and Spanish by Chicano, Cuban, Puerto Rican, Dominican, and other Latino writers working in the United States, including previously unpublished titles. The database also includes a collection of ephemera (playbills, brochures, photographs, postcards, etc.) and artwork.
Shakespeare Collection This link opens in a new window
The Shakespeare Collection provides access to general reference data, full-text scholarly periodicals, reprinted criticism, facsimile primary source material and the full-text annotated works from The Arden Shakespeare. Users can view page images of the First Folio, key Quartos, and major editions and adaptations of Shakespeare's works, plus works by Shakespeare's contemporaries and promptbooks from the 17th to the 20th century.
Early English Books Online (EEBO) This link opens in a new window
Early English Books Online (EEBO) 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. Searchable full text is also available for a subset of the collection.
Bertolt Brechts Werke This link opens in a new window
Authorized electronic edition of Brecht's works. This edition is based on Bertolt Brecht - Ausgewählte Werke in sechs Bänden - Jubiläumsausgabe um 100. Geburtstag, edited by Werner Hecht, Wolfgang Jeske and Jan Knopf, and collects Brecht's works and writings in six volumes with brief notes on each text.
Teatro Español del Siglo de Oro This link opens in a new window
Teatro Espanol del Siglo de Oro is a full-text database containing transcriptions of first or very early editions of important dramatic works from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain. For bibliographic information on specific editions transcribed, consult the Contents / Contenido link on the More Information / Más información page.
Literature Online (LION) This link opens in a new window
Literature Online includes full text of literary works in English from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. It also includes the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature, together with biographic and bibliographic reference materials for each author.
A fully searchable library of more than 350,000 works of English and American poetry, drama and prose. LION is the single most extensive and wide-ranging online collection of English and American literature.Resources included in this resource are: Bibliographies Biographies Columbia Companion to the 20th Century American Short Story Columbia Dictionary of Modern European Literature Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms Encyclopedia of African Literature Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century Encyclopedia of Latin American and Caribbean Literature, 1900-2003 Encyclopedia of Linguistics (2 vols.) Encyclopedia of the Novel Handbook of African American Literature New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics Oxford Companion to Irish Literature Penguin Classics Introductions Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory Routledge Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English (2nd Edition)

Archive of Voices
A project of NYU's Tisch Drama, Archive of Voices holds a curated collection of plays by a multiplicity of underrepresented, marginalized, and minoritarian voices through the inclusion of LGBTQIA+, BIPOC, women's, and international voices. Plays in the Archive are currently searchable by title, playwright, and category, but the Archive is a living, changing, entity -- plays can be added, removed, or retagged, and tags can be updated. Note that not all plays in the Archive are available as online full text; some are in print through NYU Libraries.

Internet Sources

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).

Finding a Monologue or Scene

Most of our books of monologues have call numbers beginning with PN 2080 and are shelved on the 8th floor of Bobst Library. In the library's catalog, there is no specific subject heading for scene books. However, you can perform a keyword search in the catalog for the term monologues. You can also use the Play Index or one of the other databases listed below to search specifically for monologues or scenes.

Play Index This link opens in a new window
Use this source to locate plays published individually or in anthologies published from 1949 to the present. Play Index covers a wide range of plays written in or translated into English, including mysteries, pageants, plays in verse, puppet performances, radio and television plays, and classic drama.
Drama Online This link opens in a new window
Drama Online contains full texts and full-length filmed performances of plays ranging from Aeschylus to the present day, with supplementary material including first night program texts, critical analyses, and images from the Victoria and Albert Museum's archive of production photos. Includes the Core Collection, Critical Studies and Performance Practice, Nick Hern Books Modern Plays, National Theatre Collection, RSC Live Collection, and Aurora Metro Books, among others.
New Play Exchange This link opens in a new window
The New Play Exchange is a digital library of scripts by living writers which can be filtered by title, length, age level, genre, subject matter, production history, script availability, cast size and characteristics, playwright, and playwright demographics. The database includes a directory of organizations and one of people, which are faceted by role (dramaturgs and types of writers), gender identity, race/ethnic identity, sexual identity, and location. While the focus is currently North American, the intended scope is international.

A Guide to Older Plays

Otmillers Index to Plays online
Ottemiller's Index to Plays in Collections is the standard tool for finding full-length plays published in collections and anthologies in England between 1900-2011.
More information less...
EBook Central

Drury's Guide to best plays,
Available online and at Bobst: Z5781 .D8 1987 (non-circulating)
An index to one-act plays
Available online and at Bobst: Z5781.L8 1924
Chicorel theater index to plays in periodicals
Available online and at Bobst: Z5781 .C487 1973 (non-circulating)
Index to plays in periodicals, 1977-1987
Bobst: Z5781 .K43 1990
Play index (online)