Drama Texts Collection | Alexander Street
Drama Texts Collection

Drama Texts Collection

A foundational collection of dramatic texts for any institution wanting to teach the basics of drama.  With 13,500 plays it is the largest assembly of essential texts for Theatre students and teachers alike. 

The collection spans nearly a millennium of dramatic writing covering the historical canon of Western theatre from its earliest days right up to the key figures of the early 21st century. It provides the most studied and performed plays of canonical playwrights as well as their less well-known contemporaries, allowing for a comprehensive survey. 

Many of the plays in Drama Texts Collection are rare or in copyright—you won’t find them free on the web. Some have never been published anywhere else, in any format, so you won’t see these works in print or find them in any library. Our strong relationships with the playwright community enable Alexander Street to gain access to these never-before-published works. At last, students and scholars can read and study all the important plays of each writer, even those that have been produced but which have been unavailable for scholarship.

Not Just Words On a Page

Drama Texts Collection also delivers a rich additional database of related ephemera, including posters, playbills, photos, theatre diagrams—an important component of Alexander Street Drama, because drama instruction is not merely the study of words on a page. Many of these items are drawn from the private collections of the playwrights themselves and are available nowhere else online. 

Platform Details

Gauge usage with COUNTER-compliant statistics and full compatibility with discovery systems such as Primo, Summon, and EDS.
Enjoy in-class, on-campus, and remote-access

 

Drama Texts Collection combines the complete drama texts of ten Alexander Street and Chadwyck Healey collections: