When you start compiling sources for your research paper, these places are important to search.
theatre research databases - best bets
These databases are the best places to start finding academic research articles for a theatre research paper assignment. You can search the databases by keyword, and the search results will give you a list of articles with their authors, titles, and the names of the journals they appear in.
Literature Online (LION)
- Literature OnlineA fully searchable Library of literary works of English and American poetry, drama and prose, plus biographies, bibliographies, key criticism and reference resources.
Academic Search Complete
- Academic Search Complete This link opens in a new windowMulti-disciplinary full-text database with more than 8,500 full-text periodicals, including more than 7,300 peer-reviewed journals. Indexes and abstracts more than 12,500 journals and a total of more than 13,200 publications including monographs, reports, and conference proceedings.
JSTOR
- JSTORSearchable full-text journal backfile collection. Individual titles are listed in the E-Journals A-Z.
Project Muse
- Project MuseThis database offers the online, full-text version of (many) current scholarly journals and (some) recent scholarly books on social science and humanities topics including many titles about the visual and performing arts and cultural studies.
library books
You will also need to read even more books about your playwrights, their work, and their influences in order to write an outstanding original research paper. Check the footnotes and references in the best research articles you find, as well as the notes and bibliographies in other books you already have in order to find good ideas for more books to read!
Just like for scripts you cannot find in our online resources or in the Libraries, you can request an interlibrary loan (ILL) for any books or articles you need that we don't already own, and the UK Libraries will borrow them for you from another library, and let you know when they arrive.
Oxford Companion to Theatre and Performance
The Oxford Companion to Theatre and PerformanceCall Number: available online to University of Kentucky researchers.
The Oxford Companion to Theatre and Performance is a database based on the Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance, and covers styles and movements, buildings, organizations, regions and traditions; it contains 2,400 entries and has a particularly strong focus on biographies of actors, playwrights, directors, and designers.
reviews
Search by names of playwrights and titles of plays in these news databases to find contemporary or historical reviews.
- New York Times Historical EditionSearchable full-text from ProQuest, with keyword searching and date limiting. This title is part of Proquest Historical Newspapers.
- New York TimesRead recent stories from the New York Times. Includes full text and, since May 2020, some selected images. Coverage: 1980-current
- Access World NewsFull-text of over 600 U.S. newspapers. Access World News also covers over 1,300 foreign English-language news resources. Spanish-language editions of the newspapers are also included.
- Nexis UniNexis Uni provides full-text access to over 15,000 news, business, and legal sources. The outstanding news coverage includes deep archives and up-to-the-minute stories in national and regional newspapers, wire services, broadcast transcripts, international news, and non-English language news services.
Playbill performance documentation
The largest Broadway database online.
- The Playbill VaultInformation about plays on Broadway.
Internet Broadway Database performance documentation
- Internet Broadway DatabaseIBDB (the Internet Broadway Database) presented by The Broadway League is the official database for Broadway theatre information. IBDB provides records of productions from the beginnings of New York theatre until today.
play scripts in print at UK Libraries
Scripts can be found on the second floor of the Lucille Caudill Little Fine Arts Library, in the shelves where call numbers begin with "PN," "PQ," "PR," "PS" and "PT." Monologues can be found under the call numbers beginning with PN 2080. It is fun to browse for plays in these sections of the library.
If you're looking for a specific play or playwright, you can look up the name or title in InfoKat Discovery to find an exact call number. Critical editions of plays are often located in William T. Young Library, so check locations carefully.
- InfoKat Discovery Library Catalog Search (UK Libraries Holdings)Searches the InfoKat Discovery catalog.
NPX: New Play Exchange
- New Play ExchangeThe New Play Exchange®, a National New Play Network project, is the world’s largest digital library of scripts by living writers. The NPX serves writers, producers, directors, artistic directors, literary managers, dramaturgs, publishers, agents, actors, professors, students, and theatre fans by providing an open platform on which writers all over the world can share their work and others can discover that work. The NPX's Core Development Committee is composed of representatives from Chicago Dramatists, Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas, The Playwrights' Center, and the Playwrights Foundation.
NPX is a digital library of scripts by living writers that includes tens of thousands of scripts by thousands of writers. Students can find plays for directing projects, inquire about rights and contact writers, and find monologues for auditions.
play scripts found in online databases
Play scripts can also be found online in many of the Libraries' subscription databases and other collections of resources:
- New Play ExchangeThe New Play Exchange®, a National New Play Network project, is the world’s largest digital library of scripts by living writers. The NPX serves writers, producers, directors, artistic directors, literary managers, dramaturgs, publishers, agents, actors, professors, students, and theatre fans by providing an open platform on which writers all over the world can share their work and others can discover that work. The NPX's Core Development Committee is composed of representatives from Chicago Dramatists, Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas, The Playwrights' Center, and the Playwrights Foundation.
- Non-Binary Monologues | Monologues for Non-Binary ActorsA volunteer-run project the organizers call a "labor of love" that publishes and shares monologues written for non-binary actors (actors whose identities lie outside the gender binary of male/female).
- Twentieth Century North American DramaAn Alexander Street Press / University of Chicago publication offering 2,059 plays by 434 playwrights, selected using leading bibliographies and with the editorial advice of scholars and the playwrights themselves. The plays are presented together with information on related productions, theaters, and production companies, and the database also includes some playbills, production photographs, and other ephemera related to the plays.
- Black DramaAn Alexander Street Press / University of Chicago publication that contains approximately 1,462 plays by 233 playwrights, together with detailed, fielded information on related productions, theaters, production companies, and more. The database also includes selected playbills, production photographs and other ephemera related to the plays.
- Literature OnlineLiterature Online is the leading online resource for the study and teaching of literature in English. In addition to it many many other features for studying English literature, it includes the full texts of 6238 volumes of drama by 1400 authors, with dates from 1280 through the 19th century. See the Texts section, then Drama, and there are many ways to limit and narrow in on the plays you are looking for.
- American Drama 1714-1915Containing more than 1,500 dramatic works from the early eighteenth century up to the beginning of the twentieth, American Drama 1714–1915 reflects American dramatic writing in all its richness and diversity: 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.
- American Variety StageCovering popular entertainment from 1870-1920, especially vaudeville, The American Variety Stage is a multimedia anthology selected from various Library of Congress holdings. Included are 334 English- and Yiddish-language playscripts, 146 theater playbills and programs, 61 motion pictures, 10 sound recordings and 143 photographs and 29 memorabilia items documenting the life and career of Harry Houdini.
- Internet Shakespeare EditionsThe Internet Shakespeare Editions (ISE) is a non-profit scholarly website publishing in three main areas: Shakespeare’s plays and poems, Shakespeare’s life and times, and Shakespeare in performance. They deliver open-access, peer-reviewed Shakespeare resources, freely available to anyone online. All plays are currently published in old-spelling versions, and twenty-two plays and most of the poems now appear in modern spelling.
play scripts not available through the UK Libraries
For scripts you cannot find in our online resources or in the Libraries, you can request an interlibrary loan (ILL), and the UK Libraries will borrow it for you from another library, and let you know when it arrives.