From the Announcement:

The first stage of a project aiming to create the world’s single most important digital archive on early modern English theatre has been completed.

Experts from King’s College London and the University of Reading are currently making the largest collection of material on professional theatre and dramatic performance in the age of Shakespeare, available online.

From 25 November fascinating and extremely rare items will be available to view free at www.henslowe-alleyn.org.uk. These include the only surviving records of theatre box office receipts for any play by Shakespeare, and the 1600 contract to build the Fortune Theatre in London, listing the layout and design of the Globe Theatre, where Shakespeare’s company performed.

The original collection, housed at Dulwich College Archive in London, holds thousands of pages of manuscripts relating to its founder, the celebrated and eminent actor and entrepreneur Edward Alleyn ( 1566-1626 ) and of his father-in-law Philip Henslowe ( d. 1616 ), the most successful theatre impresario of the age.

The Henslowe-Alleyn Project, which began in 2004, has two objectives. Firstly, to protect and conserve the increasingly fragile manuscripts in Dulwich College, and, secondly, to make their fascinating contents freely and more widely available in an electronic format.

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“This website and electronic archive were not primarily designed to suit the needs of specialist scholars but to enrich and enhance the study of all those interested in early modern English drama and theatre and social history. We hope that the use of these manuscripts in electronic and digital form will not be confined to students and scholars but to a wide-ranging and ever-changing community of readers in a variety of ways.”

Source: King’s College London and the University of Reading

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 1st, 2009 and is filed under Archives and Special Collections, Arts and Humanities, Digitization Projects, Resources. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.