We'll Hear A Play

Contents: About the database | Who is this for? | Navigation | Why use this database? | Recommended resources | About the metadata | About me | Contact me | Tech

About the database

This is a database of freely-accessible readings and performances of early modern plays online. It includes archival recordings of famous 20th-century actors, audio dramas, filmed performances by talented students, modern digital theatre performances via webcam, and more. I have limited the collection to full readings, no clips.

The plays represented here are all from the early modern period; they began to be published in the early 1500s, and the last one dates from 1660. The genres include comedies, histories, tragedies, interludes, and mystery and morality plays, among others; you can hear the works of playwrights like William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, and Elizabethan Tanfield Cary; you can also hear early modern translations of classical plays, like John Studley’s version of the Senecan revenge drama Medea and Mary Sidney Herbert’s translation of the French tragedy Antonius (a probable inspiration for Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra).

I have especially tried to spotlight webcam performances by theatre troupes like The Show Must Go Online, JaYo Théâtre, and Beyond Shakespeare. All three initially emerged during the pandemic and have continued to flourish online; this new field of digital theatre offers many affordances for scholars and enthusiasts alike, both increasing accessibility (completely free and available from the comfort of your home!) and enabling audiences to discover more obscure plays.

Who is this for?

This database can be used as a resource for

• students hoping to make theatre more enjoyable and accessible by listening to recordings as well as reading texts
• enthusiasts wanting to find readings of non-Shakespeare texts
• scholars interested in digital theatre
• high school and undergraduate teachers offering students the opportunity to engage with multiple free performances
• reading groups looking for scripts and previous performances for inspiration

The database is intended to encourage casual use, play, and spontaneity. Try clicking around and see what you discover!

Navigation

Under “Browse,” you can browse through the 400+ performances indexed here, all available for free online; this page also includes a search bar which will allow you to filter by particular terms.

If you want ideas for possible searches, head over to “Browse by Category”. Here, you’ll find word clouds acting as visual representations of the most common items in particular metadata categories. For example, in the “Authors” word cloud, you might notice that Thomas Middleton’s plays are a popular choice for online productions, although Shakespeare is the most well-represented playwright of all… and if you check out the “Modern Performance Date” word cloud, you might notice that 2020 and 2021 saw an enormous increase in digital productions as in-person theatres closed down.

The “Modern Timeline” sorts all available videos by their modern performance date. So, for example, you’ll see a 1938 Orson Welles recording of The Merchant of Venice very early on, but you’ll have to scroll down for a while to find performances from the 2000s.

The “Historical Timeline,” on the other hand, sorts all available videos by their publication date, so that a play originally published in 1523 will appear before a play published in 1600.

The “Map” shows you the geographical locations of the theatre troupes which are represented in the database. Click on a number to see more information about the plays performed in that location.

Why use this database?

We live in a golden age for digital theatre, with the avid drama enthusiast being able to access remarkable filmed stage performances via subscription services like Digital Theatre, Drama Online, and Marquee TV as well as theatre archives like the Globe Player and National Theatre at Home. Yet the prices for many of these performances may render them inaccessible for ordinary hobbyists or teachers hoping to introduce students to a variety of productions. It’s particularly challenging because high prices may require teachers to only show one performance and implicitly endorse a singular version of the play, even though seeing multiple interpretations allows students to achieve a broader understanding of the playful, multivarious nature of how actors bring drama to life.

As Stephen O’Neill notes in Shakespeare and YouTube, modern scholars have long had theoretical access to many free performances online–but in practice, the Youtube archive can be cluttered and difficult to navigate. A casual search will offer many clips or trailers rather than full performances, and since YouTube is largely dependent on search (and early modern plays are not favored by the algorithms), a would-be playwatcher can generally only find a play if they already know what they are looking for. There is limited opportunity for the equivalent of “browsing” performances as one might browse through a library–seeing a wide variety of different options, exploring each one, and experimenting.

I wanted an easy-to-use database that would allow me to quickly gather different performances of the same play; the ability to see plays organized by their year of first publication to get a sense of which time periods were best-represented online; and the ability to search by author to find, e.g., multiple performances of Marlowe. I hope that this database will fill these needs for others too.

Recommended resources

I was inspired by MIT’s Global Shakespeares, which offers foreign-language performances of Shakespeare around the globe, as well as by Dr. Claire Bourne’s list of performances and by Shakespeare Streams . I also found myself thinking about articles like “Where to Watch Every Shakespeare Play” - individual performance sources inevitably can offer only a selection of plays, but I think there is a great sense of satisfaction in a more comprehensive, “completionist” archive.

Of course, no archive can offer performances for every early modern play, nor have I tried! But you can find every Shakespeare play here and a great many more.

In addition to the Youtube archive, this website draws upon the extensive open-source projects of DEEP Database of Early English Playbooks and EarlyPrint, which you can learn more about below.

About the metadata

For modern performances, I’ve gathered relevant metadata on troupes and performance dates from Youtube, but in order to ensure consistent and reliable metadata for titles, authors, original publication dates, and genres, I have matched each performance with data taken from the invaluable resource DEEP Database of Early English Playbooks, created by Alan B. Farmer and Zachary Lesser.

DEEP is an extraordinary open-source effort to bring together bibliographic information on all extant English playbooks and make it not only searchable but downloadable for interested researchers; their work inspired this much smaller-scale project, since I found myself frequently resorting to the site as a resource and wishing that a similarly simple search existed for online performances. Check out the DEEP website and learn more about their underlying sources at https://deepplaybooks.org/.

Where possible, I have also added links to scripts on EarlyPrint, a Northwestern University and Washington University in St. Louis project which houses the EEBO-TCP archive. These scripts are not the scripts used in performance; instead, they are transcriptions of the first published editions of each play, with modernized spelling. Learners may find it valuable to compare these published scripts with the text used in modern performances. (Scripts with the original spelling are also available via the EarlyPrint website.)

About me

My name is Miranda Hannasch, and I’m a PhD student and Black Mountain Institute Literary Fellow at the University of Nevada - Las Vegas.

My work focuses on early modern and 18th-century drama and its intertexts, with a particular interest in genderbending, miscellanies, songbooks, and how digital humanities projects can make early modern texts more accessible to students and lifelong learners.

Contact me

This website is a work-in-progress, so please don’t hesitate to get in touch - I would be grateful for any feedback on this database’s current navigational tools and organization, so that I can improve functionality and add any requested features or tagging. Are there any other types of metadata you’d like to see? Performances I should add or remove? Errors you’ve noticed? Modifications you’d need in order to use this website with a class? Any other suggestions you’d feel comfortable sharing?

If you have the chance, please let me know via this form or find me on Bluesky at earlymodernmalkin.