LibGuides: ENTH 3136: Shakespeare in Performance: Primary Sources

NYPL Library for the Performing Arts

About

The NYPL Library for the Performing Arts houses one of the most extensive research collections in theatre, film, dance, music, and recorded sound.

The Library is open for browsing of its circulating collections. To request access to special collections material, users will need to create a special collections account. It is encouraged that patrons to make an appointment with the relevant division.

The Library for the Performing Arts is located at 40 Lincoln Center Plaza (entrance at 111 Amsterdam between 64th and 65th) - between the Metropolitan Opera and the Lincoln Center Theater.

Divisions

Billy Rose Theatre Division: offers walk-in access to their general research collections. Researchers may access special collections by emailing theatre@nypl.org or by booking a virtual consultation with one of our librarians, who will make an appointment for you to visit the Library for the Performing Arts.
Jerome Robbins Dance Division: At this time they are not offering walk-in access to their research collections, but researchers can still access them by booking a virtual consultation with one of our librarians, who will make an appointment for you to visit the Library for the Performing Arts. For further inquiries you can contact dance@nypl.org.
Music Division: At this time, the Music Division is not offering walk-in access to our research collections, but researchers can still access them by booking a virtual consultation with one of our librarians, who will make an appointment for you to visit the Library for the Performing Arts. For more information you can email music@nypl.org.
Rodgers and Hammerstein Archive of Recorded Sound: At this time, they are not offering walk-in access to their research collections, but researchers can access them by booking a virtual consultation with one of our librarians, who will make an appointment for you to visit the Library for the Performing Arts. For more information you can email recordedsound@nypl.org.
Theatre on Film and Tape Archive (TOFT): offers walk-in access to their research collections, but for faster access we encourage researchers to make an appointment. For an appointment, please call (212) 870-1642 or email toft@nypl.org.

You can find the general regulations for researchers here.

NYPL Performing Arts Library: Digital Collection

Jerome Robbins Dance Division Audio and Moving Image Archive
Explore the Dance Division's digitized moving image and audio recordings.
NYPL Digital Collections
Digitized materials from New York Public Library's archival collections.

Digital Collections

General Collections

ARTstor
Searchable database of digital images and associated catalog data, with new image collections added several times a year. ARTstor covers many time periods and cultures, and documents the fields of architecture, painting, sculpture, photography, decorative arts, design, anthropology, ethnographic and women's studies, as well as many other forms of visual culture. Users can search, view, download and organize images.

Digital Public Library of America
Contains millions of items - photographs, manuscripts, books, sounds, moving images, and more—from libraries, archives, and museums around the United States. Users can browse and search the DPLA’s collections by timeline, map, format, and topic; save items to customized lists; and share their lists with others.

HathiTrust Digital Library
As a digital repository for the nation's great research libraries, HathiTrust brings together the immense collections of partner institutions. It provides long-term preservation and access services for public domain and in copyright content from a variety of sources, including Google, the Internet Archive, Microsoft, and in-house partner institution initiatives.

Library of Congress Search
Search across digitized materials from the Library of Congress, including materials previously included in American Memory. Facet on date and location to narrow down.
NYPL Digital Collections
Acts as a living database of items digitized from the New York Public Library’s collections. New materials are added every day, among them prints, photographs, maps, manuscripts, and streaming video. You can search images (with filters for date, genre, and other key features), or browse by collection.

Performing Arts and Shakespeare Collections

Berg fashion library
Provides integrated text and image content on world dress and fashion throughout history. Offers fully cross-searchable access to an expanding range of Berg content collections, including the Encyclopedia of world dress and fashion, e-books, e-journals, museum directory, reference works, images, and more. Browsable by time (1600 to date) and by place (click on world map).
British Black and Asian Shakespeare Performance Database
A free database that contains searchable information about practitioners, plays, theatre companies, and the roles played by black and Asian performers in the UK from 1930 to 2015. It draws on performance archives, production reviews, documentary evidence and personal interviews with practitioners and other members of BAME communities.

British Library: Shakespeare and the Renaissance
Explore the works of Shakespeare and Renaissance writers in relation to the social, political and cultural context in which they were written, and investigate the ways in which these works have been interpreted over the last four centuries.

Editions and adaptations of Shakespeare
Eleven major editions from the First Folio to the Cambridge edition of 1863-6, twenty-four separate contemporary printings of individual plays, selected apocrypha and related works and more than one hundred adaptations, sequels and burlesques from the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Folgers Shakespeare Library: Digital Image Collection
The Folger's Department of Photography and Digital Imaging provides researchers and the public access to the Library's world-class collection of rare books, manuscripts, and art through high-quality digital images. You can explore and enjoy the Library’s treasures through our online digital image collection, and download images up to 1536 pixels tall for free.
Performing Arts Databases at Library of Congress
Unique collections in performance by the Library of Congress.

Shakespeare in performance: prompt books from the Folger Shakespeare Library
Prompt books for performances of Shakespeare's plays between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries, and supporting material for 17 selected plays. Documents are indexed by genre, country, theatre, associated names, and other key search terms. Also present: ephemera, photographs, illustrations, music scores, correspondence, and illustrations. Some were owned by famous actors such as Charles and John Philip Kemble, Henry Irving, Ellen Terry and Laurence Olivier. Others are extremely rare and old editions, in particular the 1670s Smock Alley prompt books from the Theatre Royal in Dublin, often marked up on copies of the original folios.
Shakespeare's Globe archive : theatres, players & performance
This collection of documents offers insights into the performance practice in the particular space of the reconstructed Globe Theatre. It details the way in which the theatre was constructed as a place of radical experiment. It documents over 200 performances through prompt books, wardrobe notes, programmes, publicity material, annual reports, show reports, photographs and architectural plans.

Periodicals (Newspapers & Magazines)

African American Periodicals, 1825-1995
African American periodicals, 1825-1995 enables users to search many periodicals by and about African Americans. The collection is based upon James P. Danky's African-American Newspapers and Periodicals: A National Bibliography (Harvard, 1998). Drawn from holdings of the Wisconsin Historical Society, African American Periodicals ranges over more than 150 years of American life, from slavery during the Antebellum Period to the modern era.
America's Historical Newspapers
For searching and browsing American newspapers published in three centuries, America's Historical Newspapers is the most comprehensive online resource available. Continually expanding, it offers searchable digital facsimiles of thousands of titles from all 50 states. With eyewitness reporting, editorials, letters, advertisements, obituaries and much more, this acclaimed collection uniquely chronicles the evolution of American culture and daily life from 1690 to the recent past. America's Historical Newspapers features Early American Newspapers, 1690-1922; 20th-Century American Newspapers, Series 1-3; and American Ethnic Newspapers. The latter includes African American Newspapers, 1827-1998, Hispanic American Newspapers, 1808-1980; and Ethnic American Newspapers from the Balch Collection, 1799-1971.
ProQuest Historical Newspapers
Full-text and full-image articles from major American newspapers: Atlanta Constitution, Baltimore Sun (1837-1985), Boston Globe, Call and Post (1934-1991), Chicago Tribune, Christian Science Monitor (1908-1997), Irish Times (1859-2009), Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Norfolk Journal and Guide (1921-2003), Philadelphia Tribune (1912-2001), San Francisco Chronicle (1865-1922), Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Scotsman (1817-1950). Every page in PDF files.
The Historical Guardian and Observer
The Guardian (1821-2003) and The Observer (1791-2003) offers full page and article images with searchable full text back to the first issue. The collection includes digital reproductions providing access to every page from every available issue.
The Times Digital Archive
Online, full-text facsimile of the Times (London) and its predecessors, The Daily universal register (1785-1787) and the Times, or, Daily universal register (1788). The archive supports research across multiple disciplines and areas of interest, including business, humanities, political science, philosophy, and numerous other subjects with coverage of all major international historical events.
Vogue Archive
A complete searchable archive of American Vogue, from the first issue in 1892 to the current month. Every article, cover, photo shoot, illustration and advertisement has been digitized to the highest standard, with rich indexing enabling you to find images by designer and brand names

A Note about Primary and Secondary Sources

Definitions

Primary sources are materials contemporaneous to the time you are researching, created by someone with first-hand experience of the phenomena that you are researching. Primary sources can come in any format, including newspaper articles, diaries, memoirs, letters, reports, scholarly articles, books (including works of fiction and non-fiction), films, artworks, laws, financial records, posters, photographs, and artifacts.

Archives are materials created by people or organizations, in the course of their every-day activity, which are preserved because of their historical significance or value for research. Another definition of archives: unique constellations of materials, collected and preserved because they contain important information and/or evidence of their creator's responsibilities and actions. All archival collections are comprised of primary sources, but not all primary sources are archival.

Finding primary sources in secondary-ish places

Because primary sources can come in any format, many databases and other places you would look for secondary sources are also good for finding primary sources. Examples of this include books in CLIO or HathiTrust and scholarly journal articles in JSTOR (which includes articles from the 19th century, helpful for researching the history of a given field or area of knowledge) or other databases. One way to find primary sources in these places is to limit by date to the period you're researching. Another is to use keywords (particularly in CLIO) such as memoir, autobiography, source*, documentary (which often refers to books of re-printed primary source materials), letters, etc.

In addition to the resources listed below, historical newspapers and other news media can be a great place to find primary sources from the time you're researching. See the News page of this guide for more on doing historical news research.

ENTH 3136: Shakespeare in Performance

Research Librarian

Finding Archival Collections

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