Drama and Theater

Dedicated to celebrating excellence and supporting education in the theatre, the American Theatre Wing has been an integral and influential part of the theatrical community for the better part of seven decades. Features streaming video of their panel discussion series and interviews, featuring performers, directors, playwrights, designers and more.

GloPAD is a multimedia, multilingual, Web-accessible database containing digital images, texts, video clips, sound recordings, and complex media objects (such as 3-D images) related to the performing arts from around the world.

The National Theatre Collection makes recordings of shows available to UK schools and the global education sector.

Listen to recordings of various American dialects.

The Survey of English Dialects (SED) was a groundbreaking nationwide survey of the vernacular speech of England, undertaken by researchers based at the University of Leeds under the direction of Harold Orton. From 1950 to 1961 a team of fieldworkers collected data in a network of 313 localities across England, initially in the form of transcribed responses to a questionnaire containing over 1300 items. The informants were mostly farm labourers, predominantly male and generally over 65 years old as the aim of the survey was to capture the most conservative forms of folk-speech. Almost all the sites visited by the researchers were rural locations, as it was felt that traditional dialect was best preserved in isolated areas. It was initially the intention to include urban areas at a later date, but this plan had to be abandoned on economic grounds.

The speech accent archive uniformly presents a large set of speech samples from a variety of language backgrounds. Native and non-native speakers of English read the same paragraph and are carefully transcribed. The archive is used by people who wish to compare and analyze the accents of different English speakers.

Performance today holds the mirror up to a diverse and changing world. English speaking performers must have the skill and ability to acquire any accent or dialect (a regional variety of an accent) with the specific lilt, rhythms, intonations and sound changes intrinsic to each individual region a character represents. In order to do this, the performer must have access to authentic sources for hearing and seeing the gestural aspects of accent and dialect. The Visual Accent & Dialect Archive (VADA) is an archive of video clips from around the world, providing both aural and visual information about a dialect or accent. Other academic speech/accent libraries and archives on the web offer only the aural aspect of learning an accent.

The Global Shakespeares Video & Performance Archive is a collaborative project providing online access to performances of Shakespeare from many parts of the world as well as essays and metadata provided by scholars and educators in the field. The idea that Shakespeare is a global author has taken many forms since the building of the Globe playhouse. Our work honors the fact and demonstrates the diversity of the world-wide reception and production of Shakespeare’s plays in ways that we hope will nourish the remarkable array of new forms of cultural exchange that the digital age has made possible. Global Shakespeares is a participatory multi-centric networked model that offers wide access to international performances that are changing how we understand Shakespeare’s plays and the world.

Shakespeare in performance is now a core interest for all Shakespeareans: students, scholars, theatre professionals, and general audiences—anyone with a love of Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s Staging collects audio-visual materials related to the performance of Shakespeare’s plays from the time of Shakespeare to the present. Students writing about Shakespeare, teachers teaching Shakespeare, scholars researching Shakespeare, and performers staging new productions of Shakespeare’s work can all use the site to enrich their understanding of the performance aspects of these scripts.

Shakespeare & the Players is an online exhibition and scholarly resource of nearly 1,000 postcards featuring many famous English and American actors who performed Shakespeare’s plays for late Victorian and Edwardian audiences. The postcards date from around 1880 to 1914, encapsulating an important era in not just postcard history, but Shakespeare history and world history as well. The site showcases postcards featuring the dominating actors of the time in roles from some of the more popular and oft-performed plays, like Hamlet and Romeo & Juliet, as well as those from plays not often performed, like Cymbeline and The Merry Wives of Windsor.

Shakespeare Illustrated, a work in progress, explores nineteenth-century paintings, criticism and productions of Shakespeare's plays and their influences on one another.