All the World's a Stage:
REED's WWW Links for Theatre History and Early Music:
4. Play Texts

1. Some of the other, general theatre sites already cited, such as Justin's Theatre Links, include listings of available playtexts from various periods. Specialised sites presenting English mediaeval or early modern texts are: The Middle English Collection at the Electronic Text Center, UVa (including York and Townley plays as well as Everyman) and Anniina Jokinen's Luminarium site, rich in 17th century authors and playwrights.

2. Modernised texts used in performance by the PLS and suitable for classroom use are available for
   The Castle of Perseverance
   The Chester plays
   The N-Town plays and
   the York plays.
   Thanks are due to Alexandra Johnston, Chet Scoville, and Kim Yates for making these texts available.

3. Another valuable site for early modern material is Richard Bear's Renascence Editions site at the University of Oregon, especially the on-line non-critical teaching editions of early modern texts (including plays and works about music and the stage).

4. For non-English dramatic texts, the place to begin is Steve Wright's bibliography of texts in translation, Medieval European Drama in Translation. It's subdivided by the language of the original text and, in the words of its developer, aims to provide "an infinitely expandable online bibliography of published translations of early European drama". For mediaeval French theatre, in addition to the sites already listed above, there is the Université of Rennes' site, which includes a rich listing of on-line play texts. For links to classical texts from Spanish theatre, try Teatro de los Siglos de Oro. This site also contains other links of interest.

5. On-line critical editions of Shakespeare's plays, as well as a collection of old-spelling texts, are available as part of UVic's ISE project, the Internet Shakespeare Editions. If you are mainly in need of a ready finding aid for Shakespeare's plays, I suggest the on-line concordance at MIT's The Complete Works of Shakespeare On-line. It is more search-friendly than the other full-text sites I've tried.

6. Christopher Marlowe's plays can be found at The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe. This is part of Perseus Project, which focusses on classical antiquity, with a few forays into the Renaissance.

7. Many but not all of Thomas Middleton's plays can be found at Chris Cleary's site. Hopefully, the whole corpus will eventually be added.

8. A selection of Ben Jonson's plays and poetry can be found at Luminarium's Ben Jonson site.

9. For Renaissance Latin Drama the key site is Dana F Sutton's listing of on-line Neo-Latin play texts, offering "an analytic bibliography of Latin texts written during the Renaissance and later freely available to the general public on the Web". For English translations of some of the Latin drama performed in the Elizabethan period, visit Five Renaissance Latin Plays in Translation, Susannah and the Elders, Pammachius, Christus Xilonicus, Hecastus, and Andrisca. (These translations, made by the late Victoria College Professor Emeritus C.C. Love, combine readability with accuracy and could be adapted for performance. They represent only half the plays printed in the Comedies and Tragedies (edited by Nicholas Brylinger, Basle, 1540). When he died in May 1998, Professor Love was working on the rest, and we are now seeking for a scholar to carry forward this work: if you are interested, please write Professor Alexandra Johnston).