New Article Databases and Modifications to Existing Electronic Resources: July 2020

Drama Texts Collection allows you to search the following Alexander Street Drama Collections simultaneously:

• American Drama (Chadwyck-Healey)
• Asian American Drama
• Black Drama, 3rd Edition
• Contemporary World Drama
• English Drama (Chadwyck-Healey)
• Latin American Drama
• North American Indian Drama, 2nd Edition
• North American Women’s Drama, 2nd Edition
• Twentieth Century Drama (Chadwyck-Healey)
• Twentieth Century North American Drama, 2nd Edition

Containing more than 1,500 dramatic works from the colonial period to the beginning of the twentieth century, American Drama 1714–1915 is the largest electronic collection of American dramatic writing of its kind. It provides literary researchers and historians with a comprehensive survey of American dramaturgy from its origins up to the era of sensational melodrama and manners comedy exemplified by the work of such playwrights as David Belasco, Clyde Fitch and William Vaughn Moody.

Early landmark texts represented in the collection include Robert Hunter's satire Androboros (1714), the earliest printed American play, and Thomas Godfrey's tragedy The Prince of Parthia (1765), the first American play professionally performed on an American stage. Highlights from the nineteenth century include George Aiken's stage adaptation of Uncle Tom's Cabin, one of the most popular dramatic works of its period both in America and Europe, The Escape; or, A Leap for Freedom (1857) by William Wells Brown, and The Octoroon (1859), widely recognized as Dion Boucicault's most important American-themed play.

American Drama 1714–1915 provides exhaustive coverage of the printed record of African American drama to 1915, allowing users to cross-search plays by Ira Aldridge, William Wells Brown, F. B. Coffin, Will Marion Cook, Paul Laurence Dunbar, W. E. B. Du Bois, Pauline E. Hopkins, Jesse Shipp and Katherine Davis Chapman Tillman with the complete canon of American drama.

Frequently-studied plays by major dramatists are placed in the context provided by the dramatic writings of lesser-known contemporaries and canonical authors not primarily remembered for their dramatic works, such as Louisa May Alcott and Emma Lazarus.

Black Drama, now in its expanded third edition, contains the full text of more than 1,700 plays written 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. Many of the works are rare, hard to find, or out of print. More than 40 percent of the collection consists of previously unpublished plays by writers such as Langston Hughes, Ed Bullins, Willis Richardson, Amiri Baraka, Randolph Edmonds, Zora Neale Hurston, and many others.

*Many of the works are rare, hard to find, or out of print and each play is extensively indexed

This collection examines the richness and diversity of contemporary theatre and drama from a global context. Contemporary World Drama brings together new work from our existing playwright partners alongside work from up-and-coming playwrights from around the world, including recently produced world premieres, previously unpublished works, etc. from every continent.

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. In addition to works by major dramatists such as Ben Jonson, Aphra Behn, William Wycherley, Oliver Goldsmith, Richard Sheridan, Oscar Wilde and J. M. Synge, English Drama includes the dramatic writings of many more neglected writers long inaccessible in print form.

Latin American Drama is a one-of-a-kind database with plays written by Latin American playwrights in the 19th-21st centuries. Besides serving as a rich resource for literature scholars, the collection also supports the study of American history, ethnic diversity, immigrations issues, and political history.

Twentieth-Century Drama contains the essential collection of published plays from throughout the English-speaking world, covering the history of modern drama from the 1890s to the present day. The collection's contents range from canonical authors such as George Bernard Shaw, Langston Hughes, Sean O'Casey, Noël Coward, Eugene O'Neill, Harold Pinter, Neil Simon, Tom Stoppard and Thornton Wilder, to off-Broadway experimentation and South African township theatre.

No other electronic collection offers such diversity: Twentieth-Century Drama is a truly global collection, containing an extensive collection of play texts by over 300 principal authors from North America and Canada, Britain and Ireland, India, Africa, Australia and the Caribbean. The collection's breadth of content and powerful search options allow users to open up connections between classic plays such as Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan (1923), Thornton Wilder's Our Town (1938), August Wilson's Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (1984), David Mamet's Speed-the-Plow (1987), Harold Pinter's The Homecoming (1965) or Brian Friel's Dancing at Lughnasa (1990) and less well-known texts drawn from the full range of modern theatrical traditions. Areas such as postcolonial writing, women's theatre, and community theatre are given full representation, and Naturalist, Expressionist and absurdist works appear alongside popular comedies, melodramas, farces and thrillers.