Records of Early English Drama

The Records of Early English Drama is an international scholarly project, aiming to establish, for the first time, the broad context from which the great drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries grew, by examining the historical manuscripts that provide external evidence of drama, secular music, and other communal entertainment and ceremony from the Middle Ages until 1642, when the Puritans closed the London theatres. It t works to locate, transcribe, and edit all surviving documentary evidence of drama, minstrelsy, and public ceremonial in England during the period.