Handbooks and Companions
Scholarly handbooks and companions are an excellent starting point for your research. They provide thorough overviews of the main issues and questions in a given research field, and are often written by leading scholars. They are also useful to get a sense of the range of recent scholarship in a field.
The Oxford Companion to Theatre and Performance by ISBN: 9780199574193Publication Date: 2010-09-17The Oxford Companion to Theatre and Performance is based on the celebrated Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance, and covers styles and movements, buildings, organizations, regions and traditions; it has a particularly strong focus on biographies of actors, playwrights, directors, anddesigners. New entries cover the people and companies who have come into prominence since the publication of the Encyclopedia.The Companion includes all the most popular and accessible information from the Encyclopedia, concentrating primarily on the personalities involved in producing threatre, as well as overviews of the genres within which they work. It has 2,400 entries presented in a far more compact and portableformat. The timeline of historical and cultural events in the world of theatre and performance has been significantly updated, along with the extensive bibliography, and an appendix of useful weblinks has been added, which is supported and accessible through a companion website.The Companion provides an informative and accessible package aimed at both the theatre-going public as at specialists and professionals in the field.
Online Reference Works
General Reference
Credo Reference Unlimited: Contains a number of theater encyclopedias and dictionaries.
Literature Resource Center: Provides access to biographies, bibliographies and critical analyses of authors from every age and literary discipline. Includes articles from Contemporary Authors, Contemporary Literary Criticism, Dictionary of Literary Biography, and much more."Authors by type" searches may be limited to genres such as "domestic dramas," "dramatic monologues," "Elizabethan drama," and other dramatic themes.
Theater-Specific Resources
Dramatist's Play Service: Complete Catalog of Plays. Provides acting editions of plays and assists with licensing of performances.
Play Index: Provides citations to plays published individually or in collections from 1949 to date. Covers wide range of plays written in or translated into English, including one-act plays, pageants, plays in verse, radio or television plays, and classic drama.
Playbill Online: Theatre news, listings, and some reference including awards.
Dictionaries and Encyclopedias
Try these Library Search links for full lists of items in the library catalog with the following subject headings: