Theatre : Major Resources

The Billy Rose Theatre Division of The New York Public Library is one of the largest and most comprehensive archives devoted to the theatrical arts. Encompassing dramatic performance in all its diversity, the division is an indispensable resource for artists, writers, researchers, scholars, students, and the general public.

Notable holdings include collections related to specific theaters and theatre companies, playwrights, actors, and more, like David Garfield Research Files on the Actors Studio, James Baldwin Papers, and the Lucille Lortel Papers.

Black Drama contains approximately 1200 plays from the mid-1800s to the present by more than 200 playwrights from North America, English-speaking Africa, the Caribbean, and other African diaspora countries. Some 440 of the plays are published here for the first time, including a number by major authors.

Multimedia collection designed to support literature and drama courses; contains playtexts, audio plays, streaming video, and ebooks from theatre publishers and companies.

English Drama contains more than 3,900 plays in verse and prose from the late thirteenth century - the likely date of the Shrewsbury Fragments - to the early twentieth. It offers exhaustive coverage of the prodigious dramatic literature of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, as well as Restoration plays, medieval morality plays and mystery cycles, and nineteenth-century closet dramas, including works by major dramatists such as Ben Jonson, Aphra Behn, William Wycherley, Oliver Goldsmith, Richard Sheridan, Oscar Wilde and J. M. Synge.

The Ransom Center is an internationally renowned humanities research center at The University of Texas at Austin. The Performing Arts division of the Center holds one of the largest collections of American, British, and Irish playwright archives.

Notable holdings include collections dedicated to particular artists including James Baldwin, Samuel Beckett, Nell Gwyn, Lillian Hellman, Langston Hughes, David Mamet, Arthur Miller, Eugene O’Neill, Harold Pinter, Oscar Wilde, and Tennessee Williams, among others.

Database of full-text articles and books for the study of theater and the performing arts. Titles include: Art and the Performance of Memory, Avant Garde Theatre, TDR: The Drama Review, History of European Drama and Theatre, Modern Drama, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, Sourcebook on Feminist Theatre and Performance, Studies in Theatre and Performance, Theatre and the World, Theory and Performance, Who's Who in Contemporary World Theatre, World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre, and many more

Database of plays written from Antiquity to present, written in or translated into English, including mysteries, pageants, plays in verse, radio and television plays, and classic drama.

Coverage of the arts and entertainment industry, including dance, film, television, drama, theater, stagecraft, musical theater, broadcast arts, comedy, storytelling, opera, and more.

Located in the Wisconsin Historical Society.