Records of Early English Drama (REED)
Centre for Research in Early English Drama

REED Executive Board

Caroline Barron, Royal Holloway College, University of London; Peter Greenfield, University of Puget Sound; Alexandra F. Johnston, Victoria University, University of Toronto; Sally-Beth MacLean, University of Toronto; J.J. McGavin, University of Southampton; C.E. McGee, University of St. Jerome's College (chair); Alan H. Nelson, University of California, Berkeley; Barbara D. Palmer, University of Mary Washington; J.A.B. Somerset, University of Western Ontario; and Robert Tittler, Concordia University.

REED Senior Advisors

Ian Archer, Keble College, Oxford University; David Bevington, University of Chicago; Peter Clark, University of Helsinki; L.M. Clopper, Indiana University; John Craig, Simon Fraser University; Matthew Davies, Centre for Metropolitan History, London University; JoAnna Dutka, University of Toronto; Ian Lancashire, University of Toronto; Peter Meredith, University of Leeds; David Mills, University of Liverpool; David Palliser, University of Leeds; Richard Proudfoot, King's College, London.

REED Office

Professor Alexandra F Johnston, Director. ajohnsto@chass.utoronto.ca

Professor Sally-Beth MacLean, Associate Director and Executive Editor.s.maclean@utoronto.ca

REED is an international scholarly project that is establishing for the first time the broad context from which the great drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries grew. REED examines the historical MSS that provide external evidence of drama, secular music, and other communal entertainment and ceremony from the Middle Ages until 1642, when the Puritans closed the London theatres. Although the project is based at Victoria University in the University of Toronto (an institution renowned for its scholarship in medieval and early modern culture), REED's internal governance is provided by an Executive Board of senior scholars in early drama and related fields. Its advisors and collections editors are drawn from Canada, the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom. We will be providing regular reports on Executive Board activities and decisions here.

Within the University of Toronto, REED is associated with the Department of English, the Centre for Medieval Studies, and the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies. We are also pleased that this site is a part of the English Department's on-line initiative, The University of Toronto English Library.

Founded in 1975, REED has for the last 34 years worked to locate, transcribe, and edit all surviving documentary evidence of drama, minstrelsy, and public ceremonial in England before 1642. As well, two collections go beyond the original boundaries of our research to cover other parts of the British Isles, RED (Records of Early Drama): Scotland and Wales. Twenty-six collections of records have been completed since the first REED collection, York, appeared in 1979; the most recent, Lincolnshire, appeared in 2009. In addition, over 20 other editors are at work on other collections. PDF versions of the first twenty-four volumes in the REED collection are available through the Internet Archive.

For many years, REED also published a twice-yearly newsletter (REEDN), now superseded by a refereed journal, Early Theatre (ET/REED). Enquiries about back issues of the Newsletter should be sent to Melinda Gough, managing editor of Early Theatre. Enquiries about Early Theatre should go to the editor, Dr Helen Ostovich, Department of English, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Further information can be found on the ET/REED home page, www.earlytheatre.ca. Also associated with the project is the Studies in Early English Drama series (SEED). Its purpose is to publish, through the University of Toronto Press, book-length scholarly studies of all aspects of drama, music and ceremony in the British Isles before 1642 (the same period as is the focus of the REED project). (See the publications list for more information).

REED forms the core of the Centre for Research in Early English Drama at Victoria University, combining its specialized research collections and the rich resources of the University of Toronto library with the archives of the Poculi Ludique Societas (PLS), the oldest continuing performance troupe in early drama in the world. The PLS archives, including the props and costumes, are a fascinating source of study in themselves. Videos of over twenty years of productions of major dramas particularly from England together with a major photographic archive of these productions are available for study. Also now available on-line are modernized performance texts used by the PLS for past productions of the Castle of Perserverance and the N-Town Cycle and a fully-revised edition of the modern language text commissioned for the York Plays in 1998. As well, REED is making available on-line the Anglo-Latin Wordbook, a compilation of the Latin vocabulary glossed in the Bristol (1997), Cambridge (1989), Cheshire (2007), Cornwall (1999), Dorset (1999), Ecclesiastical London (2008), Herefordshire (1990), Kent: Diocese of Canterbury (2002), Lancashire (1991), Lincolnshire (2009), Oxford (2004), Shropshire (1994), Somerset (1996), Sussex (2000), Wales (2005), and Worcestershire (1990) collections. Although concentrated on the vocabulary of drama, pastime, and music, the Anglo-Latin Wordbook includes all Latin vocabulary appearing in those collections not found in the Oxford Latin Dictionary, or whose classical meaning has changed or become restricted in medieval or Renaissance usage. Other archival resources of the Centre include important microfilm collections of original documentation used by the REED project as well as an extensive collection of books and articles on palaeography, lexicography, patronage, and topography as well as early drama and music. For more information about the resources of the Victoria University Library, please visit its home page. If you are interested in visiting CREED to consult these resources, please write to the Director, Professor Alexandra Johnston. For further information about seeking access to unpublished transcripts held by REED editors, see the REED Executive motion on Fair Use.

For research purposes, we have divided up the British Isles geographically, with an editor or team of editors taking responsibility for each area. At the Toronto office the research and editorial team co-ordinate, check, and assemble the work of the collections editors, prepare glossaries and indexes, and see the finished editions through typesetting for publication by the University of Toronto Press.

Find out more about the Toronto REED team and the collections in progress.

REED has now moved into the electronic era in a dynamic, educationally exciting way. In active partnership with the University of Toronto Department of Geography, the University of Toronto Libraries, and the University of Western Ontario, we have produced an interdisciplinary educational web site based on REED research: Patrons and Performances Web Site. The co-directors of the site are Sally-Beth MacLean, Associate Director, REED, and Alan Somerset, Professor Emeritus, UWO. The web site currently features the cities and counties in 22 collections published in the REED series, linking cumulative patrons and travelling entertainers databases with new architectural, image-rich research data on early performance spaces and customized modern maps. The patrons and performances databases are unique research tools which combine essential biographical data for medieval and renaissance patrons of performers with key details for the tours of the performers themselves -- their names, numbers, tour stops, performance venues, rewards and expenses, audience, and the documentary sources for these details as given in relevant REED volumes. The databases have been previously available for use only at the REED Toronto office and the REED volumes are published only in print format. Because the web site is rich in period images (eg, maps, ground plans, photographs and illustrations of playing venues, and eventually patrons' portraits) and illustrative modern maps that can soon be used to create itineraries for individual professional companies such as Shakespeare's troupe, it brings resources to electronic classrooms at a more sophisticated level than the usual handful of miscellaneous slides. As another tier of research and teaching interest, we are adding visual evidence and architectural descriptions of all surviving performance venues, bringing images of hitherto unrecognised provincial theatrical spaces such as Dartington's Great Hall or St Mary's Guildhall, Coventry, into the classroom. The databases have content hitherto unavailable for undergraduate courses and can bring to life the careers of renaissance acting troupes outside the city of London as one of REED's primary contributions to the field of early theatre. The Patrons and Performances Web Site is made freely available in order to reach the widest group of users. The URL is http://link.library.utoronto.ca/reed/. We envisage the primary users of the web site to be:

1. educational institutions (high schools and universities), museums and libraries, to whom the web site will be of interest as both a reference work and also as a fully networkable and accessible collection of research resources which can be used in the classroom and for independent learning on guided programs;

2. individual students and researchers in the specific fields of early drama, theatre history, local history, urban history, historical geography, architecture, cultural studies, folk studies, and music.

With the help of an NEH Digital Humanities Start-up Grant in 2008/9, REED has begun the work of developing a new on-line initiative. eREED publications will make available fully searchable, open access digital editions of forthcoming REED collections. For the results of the first phase of this project, see the Download Scripts page.

As with everything else, the Web contains a great many sites about theatre and music, some valuable and interesting, and some less so! We have put together an annotated list of ones we've found to be particularly interesting or helpful, plus other useful research sites, on a page called "All the World's a Stage": WWW Links for Theatre History and Early Music. Categories of listings include Mediaeval and Early Modern Theatre, Shakespeare, Play Texts, Early Music, Early Dance, Palaeography, Archives and Libraries, as well as others. We are also very pleased to have assisted in making available to users on the Web Five 16th Century Latin Plays in English Translation.

We are pleased to begin to make available on the Web some of our in-house editorial resources. First of all, the revised 1990 edition of the REED Handbook for Editors, which was originally published in 1980. In addition, we have also uploaded the in-house guidelines for palaeographic checking, "Guidelines for Checking REED Records Text". They join the already-available REED Anglo-Latin Wordbook.

REED welcomes donations in support of its on-going research and publications. Please see our Donations page for more details.

In October 2006, a group of scholars and theatre artists from REED and PLS collaborated with colleagues in academia and the professional theatre in Canada and the United States on a major research-performance experiment called Shakespeare and the Queen's Men.

To demonstrate how the dramaturgy and staging techniques of the most influential company on the early Elizabethan stage influenced its greatest playwright, Shakespeare and the Queen's Men mounted historically informed performances of three plays from the Queen's Men's repertoire. All three were borrowed and adapted by Shakespeare in later masterpieces, including King Lear and The Merchant of Venice.

For more information about the on-going project's plans, visit their website, Performing the Queen's Men.