Drama, Music, & Popular Culture

Bodleian Ballads (Bodleian Library, Oxford U., 1999- )

Digital archive of 30K broadsides for popular songs of 16c through 20c (formerly Bodleian Broadside Ballads)

Boydell Shakespeare Gallery (Romantic Illustration Network, 2015)

Frederick Burwick’s images of engravings of Shakespeare scenes painted for Boydell’s gallery, 1789-1805

British Theatre, Music, and Literature (Gale NCCO, 2013)

Primary source archive of “high and popular culture,” with playbills, scripts, opera scores, etc. from 1733-1968

Catalog of Musical Sources (Répertoire Intl. des Sources Musicales) 

Searchable index with bibliographic info for 1.1M+ music MSS, mainly from 1600 to 1800

Children’s Literature and Childhood (Gale NCCO, 2015)

Legal, educational, and sociological documents offering context for 19c growth of children’s literature

Crime, Punishment, and Popular Culture, 1790-1920 (Gale, 2015)

2M+ pages of UK/US criminal justice docs, including trial transcripts, police reports, detective novels, etc.

Drama Online (Bloomsbury, 2017- )

Full texts of 2,300+ classic and contemporary plays plus reference guides, recorded performances, etc.

Dying Speeches and Bloody Murders (Harvard Law Library, 2013)

500 broadsides from library’s collections featuring 18c/19c British criminals’ gallows speeches

Editions and Adaptations of Shakespeare (ProQuest, 2001)

Offers 11 major eds. of Shakespeare from 1st Folio through 1866, plus apocrypha, adaptations, etc.

Eighteenth-Century Drama (Adam Matthew, 2016)

Digitization of Huntington’s Larpent Collection, with 2,500 plays from 1737-1824 plus letters, diaries, censor logs

EBBA: English Broadside Ballad Archive (UC Santa Barbara, 2003- )

Patricia Fumerton et al.’s ongoing effort to collect surviving street ballads; mostly from 17c, but some 18c and 19c

English Drama (ProQuest, 1996- )

Full texts of 3,900 British plays in public domain from 13c through early 20c; selects only one ed. per play

Europeana Music (European Union, 2008- )

Archive of recordings, sheet music, and images from collections across Europe

Europeana Sport (European Union, 2008- )

Documents and images chronicling history of sports across Europe

John Johnson Ephemera Collection (Oxford U./ProQuest, 2009)

68K docs from Bodleian archive of 19c British printed ephemera; free in UK, subscribers-only elsewhere

Journal of John Waldie: Theatre Commentaries, 1799-1830 (UCLA, 2008)

Frederick Burwick’s ed. of drama buff’s meticulous journal entries on performances in London, Paris, etc.

London Low Life (Adam Matthew, 2010)

Interactive tool using Lilly Library (Indiana U.) materials to help students and scholars experience 19c underworld

Price One Penny: Cheap Literature, 1837-60 (Marie Léger-St-Jean, 2011- )

Bibliography of and introduction to early Victorian penny fiction; includes full texts of 3 “penny bloods”

Religion, Spirituality, Reform, and Society (Gale NCCO, 2014)

Primary source collection of private and public texts on faith, skepticism, and religious reform

Romantic-Era Songs (San Jose State U., 2013)

Paul Douglass and Frederick Burwick’s online repository of song lyrics from early 19c

Shakespeare in Performance (Adam Matthew, 2016)

1,000 actors’ prompt books from the Folger Shakespeare Library archive

Victorian Popular Culture (Adam Matthew, 2009)

Primary sources on popular entertainments in US, UK, and Europe, 1779-1930

The Word on the Street (National Library of Scotland, 2004)

Commentary, transcriptions, and pdfs for 1,800 Scottish broadsides at NLS from 1650 to 1910