LibGuides: Theatre: Plays

Plays Online

Some of these databases have lists of plays with where they're published, but many include the full text of plays.

To find plays as ebooks in CLIO, try a search for online books. You can always limit by language, publication date, and put in a search term (e.g., "monologues") to help narrow your search

CLIO ebook search

Asian American Drama
Asian American Drama brings together more than 250 plays representing the various ethnicities within the Asian American community. Along with many works by writers of Japanese, Filipino, Vietnamese, and Chinese descent, the collection includes plays by writers of Hawaiian, Indian, Thai, Korean, Persian, and Malaysian ancestry, along with related biographical, production, and theatrical information. The collection begins in the late nineteenth century and continues to the writings of contemporary playwrights. Some 50% of the plays have never been published before. The database also includes selected playbills, production photographs and other ephemera related to the plays.
Black Drama
Contains over 1,200 plays by 300 playwrights from North America, Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, Australia, and other locations, including some of the great names in drama (Zora Neale Hurston, August Wilson, Ossie Davis, Sonia Sanchez, Langston Hughes). Also included, selectively, are production photographs, as well as images of playbills and other ephemera. Many of the plays are previously unpublished.
Digital Theatre Plus
Provides online access to a digital streaming video collection of unique films of current, leading British theatre productions. Includes behind-the-scenes documentaries as well as teaching and learning resources to facilitate a deeper understanding of the productions and texts. Learning resources include a detailed introduction, plot summary, character biographies, a relationship map, language analysis, scene study, performance background and historical context for each play.
Drama Online
Drama Online is a digital library of plays from Aeschylus to the present day. It also includes critical analysis, contextual information, A-Z reference and practical texts.
Includes the full text of plays from across the history of the theatre, ranging from Aeschylus to the present day, in addition to some video production of plays and audio recordings. Includes non-English-language works in translation, scholarly and critical editions, first night program texts, and critical analysis and contextual information. Critical interpretations, theatre history surveys and major reference works on authors, movements, practitioners, periods and genres are included alongside performance and practitioner texts, acting and backstage guides. Also includes images from the Victoria and Albert Museum's archive of production photos.
Early English Books Online
Contains full-text page images of of about 100,000 of the 1250,000 titles listed in Pollard & Redgrave's Short-Title Catalogue (1475-1640) and Wing's Short-Title Catalogue (1641-1700) and their revised editions, as well as the Thomason Tracts (1640-1661) collection. Also includes a growing collection of searchable full text provided by the EEBO Text Creation Partnership.
Eighteenth century drama: censorship, society and the stage
Eighteenth Century Drama features the John Larpent Collection from the Huntington Library -- a unique archive of almost every play submitted for licence between 1737 and 1824, as well as hundreds of documents that provide social context for the plays. Explore the Larpent plays, papers of prominent theatrical figures of the period, including correspondence, financial documents, and portraits. Cross-reference this with essential searchable databases created from information in The London Stage 1729-1800 and A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers & Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660-1800.
English Drama
4,000 plays by 1,200 authors from the late thirteenth century to the early twentieth century (1280-1915).
Latino literature
Brings together more than 100,000 pages pages of poetry, fiction, and over 450 plays written in English and Spanish by hundreds of Chicano, Cuban, Puerto Rican, Dominican, and other Latino authors working in the United States. Among the gems of the collection are nearly 800 items (poems, novels, and plays) that have never been published before. Researchers will also find numerous Chicano folk tales and audio files of selected poems and plays. The vast majority of works are from the period spanning the Chicano Renaissance to the present day. Roughly 30% of the database is made up of previously unpublished or rare materials.
New Play Exchange / National New Play Network
Digital library of scripts by living writers which can be filtered by title, length, age level, genre, subject matter, production history, script availability, cast size and characteristics, playwright, and playwright demographics. Includes a directory of organizations and one of people, which are faceted by role (dramaturgs and types of writers), gender identity, race/ethnic identity, sexual identity, and location. While the focus is currently North American, the intended scope is international.
North American Indian Drama
Full text of plays by American Indian and First Nation playwrights of the 20th century, information about the plays and their production, and biographical data. The collection represents groups across the United States and Canada , including Cherokee, Métis, Creek, Choctaw, Pembina Chippewa, Ojibway, Hawaiian/Samoan, Comanche, Cree, Navajo, Rappahannock , and others. Also includes issues of the Native playwrights' newsletter.
North American women's drama
North American Women's Drama brings together more than 1,500 plays by more than 300 playwrights, along with detailed, fielded information on related productions, theaters, production companies, and more. The collection begins with the works of Mercy Otis Warren and Susanna Haswell Rowson in colonial times and spans the 19th and 20th centuries to the present. It includes playwrights such as Marsha Norman, Beth Henley, Susan Glaspell, Sophie Treadwell, Gertrude Stein, Maria Irene Fornes, Emily Mann, Zora Neale Hurston, Jane Martin, Lynn Nottage, Theresa Rebeck, Nora Ephron, Susan Sontag, Edna Ferber, Alice Childress, Rachel Crothers, Megan Terry, and many more.
Play Index
Index to more than 30,000 plays written from Antiquity to the present and published from 1949 to the present; includes mysteries, pageants, plays in verse, puppet performances, radio and television plays, and classic drama. Unique search limits include gender and number of cast members, genre, document type, and grade interest level.
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.
Twentieth-century drama
Featuring plays from noted playwrights as well as lesser known dramatists, the collection includes works by over 300 writers including Amiri Baraka, Noël Coward, Susan Glaspell, Langston Hughes, Brian Friel, David Mamet, Eugene O’Neill, John Osborne, Sean O’Casey, Harold Pinter, Bernard Shaw, Neil Simon, Gertrude Stein, Tom Stoppard, Derek Walcott, August Wilson and Elizabeth Wong.
Twentieth century North American drama
Twentieth Century North American Drama contains 2,059 plays by 434 playwrights, and more than 150 of the plays are published here for the first time, including a number by major authors. This collection offers a unique window into the economic, historical, social, and political psyche of two countries. Scholars and students who use the database will have a new way to study the signal events of the twentieth century—including the Depression, the role of women, the Cold War, and more—through the plays and performances of writers who lived through these decades.

In the stacks

In the Stacks

Plays are shelved with literature, which means they're normally broken down into the nationality of the author. A selected list of Library of Congress literature subject headings:

PA Classical literature, Greek & Roman
PG Slavic literature
PJ Semitic literature
PK Indo-Iranian
PL Eastern Asia, Africa, Oceania
PN General
PQ French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese
PR English
PS American
PT German & related

Search Tip: When browsing or searching titles, remember that plays are often collected in anthologies. Try searching the work’s title as a keyword. You may also wish to consult a reference source such as Ottemiller's Index to Plays in Collections, or look through other drama indexes in CLIO.

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In the stacks

In the Stacks