Research Guides: Plays and Playwrights: Electronic Resources

Selected Databases

Performing Arts Periodicals Database This link opens in a new window
Description: draws its current content from more than 130 international performing arts periodicals and covers nearly all aspects of the world of the performing arts. Many of the titles include extensive retrospective coverage.
America: History and Life with Full Text This link opens in a new window
Covers books, dissertations and articles from over 2,000 journals published world-wide. Since 1988, also contains reviews of films and videos.
Arts and Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI) This link opens in a new window
Description: A&HC covers over 1,150 of the world's leading arts and humanities journals in a broad range of disciplines. Also covers individually selected, relevant items from over 5,000 of the world's leading science and social sciences journals.
MLA International Bibliography (MLAIB) This link opens in a new window
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Description: Useful for finding critical works about a writer and his/her work. Does not include reviews.
Coverage: Indexes journal articles, books, collections and festschriften, audiovisual materials, reference works, conference papers and proceedings on literature, language, linguistics, folklore and film. Covers sources in many languages, 1963-present.
ProQuest Central This link opens in a new window
Description: This is a good source for finding contemporary reviews. To find reviews of a performance or publication, do an Advanced search, enter the play's name and/or author, and specify "Review" as the "Document type."
Coverage: Offers citations and some full-text articles from a wide range of English language academic journals and news magazines, including New York Times and the Village Voice among others. Years of coverage Great for more current reviews
Historical Newspapers (ProQuest) This link opens in a new window
Search the PDF full text and image archives of more than 100 major U.S. and African American newspapers.

Highlights include: Atlanta Constitution (1868-1945), Atlanta Daily World (1931-2003), Baltimore Afro-American (1893-1988), Chicago Tribune (1849-1986), Christian Science Monitor (1908-2004), Los Angeles Times (1881-1995), New York Amsterdam News (1922-1993), Pittsburgh Courier (1911-2002), The Chicago Defender (1910 - 1975), The New York Times (1851-2014), The New York Tribune (1841-1922), The New York Tribune (1900-1910), San Francisco Chronicle (1869-1922), The Wall Street Journal (1889-2000), The Washington Post (1877-2001), St. Petersburg Times / Tampa Bay Times (1901-2009), Korea Times (1956-2016)
Literature Resource Center This link opens in a new window
The foundation of the Literature Resource Center is built on three hallmark author databases: Contemporary Authors Online, offering biographical coverage of more than 100,000 writers; Contemporary Literary Criticism Select, featuring entries on all authors appearing in CLC since vol. 95 of the print series and complete profiles of 266 most studied authors from editions prior to vol. 95; and Dictionary of Literary Biography Online, containing more than 10,000 biocritical essays on authors and their works written by academic scholars.
Play Index This link opens in a new window
Search over 30,000 plays written from Antiquity to the present and published from 1949 to the present. 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. Search for plays by title; author; subject (sisters, culture conflict, marriage); style (symbolism, experimental theater); genre (comedy, melodrama, musical); cast type.
Literature Criticism Online This link opens in a new window
Literature Criticism Online includes the contents of several multidisciplinary series, including Contemporary Literary Criticism and Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. The collection includes biographical essays and selected literary criticism for authors from the classical period to the present day.
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)
International Bibliography of Theater & Dance with Full Text This link opens in a new window
The International Index to Performing Arts Indexes journal articles, books, book chapters, dissertations, and monographs in theatre and the performing arts and covers 1984 to present.

Online Plays

These databases includes full text of plays, selected playbills, production photographs and other ephemera.

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.
Shakespeare Collection This link opens in a new window
Use Basic search to limit to full text of plays. Provides access to general reference data, full-text scholarly periodicals, reprinted criticism, primary source material and the full-text annotated works from The Arden Shakespeare, the world's most recognized scholarly edition.
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 No. Amer. Many are rare, hard-to-find, or out of print. Many previously unpublished plays. The plays are accompanied by reference materials, performance information, and images.
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.
North American Indian Drama This link opens in a new window
This edition of North American Indian Drama contains 256 plays by 49 playwrights. More than half of the works are previously unpublished, and hard to find, representing groups such as Cherokee, Métis, Creek, Choctaw, Pembina Chippewa, Ojibway, Lenape, Comanche, Cree, Navajo, Rappahannock, Hawaiian/Samoan, and others
Theatre in Context Collection This link opens in a new window
detailed reference information on all aspects American theatre from colonial times to the present. Reference materials pertaining to plays, people, theaters, productions and production companies as well as images, playbills, and other related resources.
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, fielded information on related productions, theaters, production companies, and more.
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
brings together more than 250 plays, along with related biographical, production, and theatrical information.
Early English Books Online (EEBO) This link opens in a new window
includes the total surviving published record of the English-speaking world for 227 years in digital format. It reproduces images of over 125,000 books, pamphlets and broadsides published in England and her colonies in any language between 1475 and 1700.
Latino Literature This link opens in a new window
contains approximately 186 plays and 33,000 pages of prose and poetry by Chicano, Cuban, Puerto Rican, Dominican and other Latin writers working in the United States.
American Drama 1714-1915 This link opens in a new window
Containing 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. Major dramatists include David Belasco, Rachel Crothers, Augustin Daly, Clyde Fitch, Edward Harrigan, James Herne, William Dean Howells and Joaquin Miller.
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, which collects Brecht's works and writings in six volumes with brief notes on each text.
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.
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.
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)

The Writer's Legal Guide

To find other books like this one, search the library's catalog.

The writer's legal guide : an authors guild desk reference
ISBN: 1581152302