Theatre Research Resources

Online Playscripts

• Asian American Drama Online
• Black Drama 2nd Edition
• Black Drama 3rd Edition
• Contemporary World Drama
• Drama Online
• Eighteenth Century Drama: Censorship, Society and the Stage
• English Drama
• New Play Exchange
• North American Indian Drama
• North American Women’s Drama
• Twentieth-Century Drama

Finding Plays

• Play Index

Literary Criticism

• Literature Criticism Online
• Literature Resource Center

Theatre & Drama Databases

• Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (ABELL)
• International Bibliography of Theatre and Dance (IBTD)
• Performing Arts Periodicals Database
• MLA International Bibliography
• Design & Applied Arts Index

General Databases

• JSTOR

Magazine & Newspaper Databases

• Entertainment Industry Magazine Archive
• Nexis Uni
• ProQuest Historical Newspapers
• ProQuest Historical Black Newspapers
• More newspaper databases

More Theatre databases

• ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
• UIUC Theatre Dissertations in IDEALS
• Networked Digital Library Theses and Dissertations

Streaming Audio & Video Collections

• Audio Drama: L.A. Theatre Works
• BBC Shakespeare Plays Online
• Broadway HD
• Digital Theatre+
• Fashion Studies Online
• National Theatre Collection: Volumes 1 & 2
• Shakespeare’s Globe on Screen (2008-2015)
• Shakespeare’s Globe on Screen 2 (2016-2018)
• Theatre in Video
• More Streaming Audio and Video Resources

Digital Image Collections

• JSTOR Images (formerly known as Artstor)
• Motley Collection of Theatre History and Costume Design
• Portraits of Actors Collection
• More listed in the Theatre Research Guide

Digital Primary Source Collections

• Eighteenth Century Drama: Censorship, Society and the Stage
• National Theatre Collection
• Royal Shakespeare Company Archives
• Shakespeare in Performance: Prompt Books from the Folger Shakespeare Library
• Shakespeare’s Globe Archive: Theatres, Players & Performance
• The Nineteenth Century Stage
• Victorian Popular Culture

• Dictionary of Literary Biography
• The Cambridge Guide to Theatre
• Playbill
• Foreign Language Dictionaries
• Online Reference Collection

Citation Guides

• MPAL’s guide to Citing Sources in the Performing Arts
• Citing Sources from Teaching, Learning, and Academic Support
• Citation Managers
• Chicago Manual of Style
• MLA Handbook

How-To Guides

• Create Playlists in Theatre in Video
• Find Journal Articles
• Find Playscripts, Monologues, and Dialogues
• Find Performance Reviews

Topic Guides

• Theatre Research
• Accents and Dialects for the Stage and Screen
• Costume Design
• Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility in the Performing Arts
• Indigenous Theatre Resources
• Krannert Center for the Performing Arts
• Funding (grants, awards, scholarships, fellowships)
• Musical Theatre
• Stage Lighting

• Help Using the Library
• International Student Guide to Using MPAL
• Locating Items in MPAL
• New Student Guide to Using MPAL
• Savvy Researcher Workshops
• Technology at MPAL
• Video Tutorials

• Literature & Languages Library
• Rare Book & Manuscript Library