What does this page do?

What is the most useful thing to put under the heading "Dramaturgy Resources"? It seems to me that there's already enough lists of sources of information around. What's the use of a list if I don't know what I'm supposed to do with the things that are listed? The question I'm more interested in is: How is the internet useful for dramaturgy? What can you do with it? So this page is being changed from a catgorized list of web sites to a sort of hypertext essay on how the web can be used for dramaturgy.

See also Examples of Dramaturgical Work.

Finding background information

One dramaturgical task is to find background information for a theatrical performance. Often one needs to find background information on a historical period, or a certain industry. Of course, I can't predict every possible thing you might want to look up, so I will point you to two lists of links.

For historical background a good place to start is the Index of Resources for Historians which is a large list of serious historical resources. This may take a while to download, but it gives some good pointers.

Dean Tudor, a professor in the School of Journalism at Ryerson Polytechnic University in Toronto, has compiled a list of sources of information which he has acurately named Megasources. Again, this is a long list and will take a long time to load. As it is primarily intended for journalism students, it sticks mostly to sites which can get you the basic information on a subject fast. The narrower the category, the more helpful the link is likely to be.

Finding Contemporary Scripts

There are a number of sites on the internet which allow one to search for and/or download new scripts.

The Playwrights Union of Canada allows you to search a database of over 1600 scripts based on style, number of characters, etc. The Dramatic Exchange is a database of new scripts which one can be downloaded. The Goldsmith's Playlist has similar search features, and many of the scripts are available for dowload.

Public Domain Scripts and Texts

• Archives of Public Domain Texts. Mostly FTP sites.
  1. Online Book Initiative. (ftp)
  2. Oxford Text Archives. (ftp)
  3. Internet Wiretap Library.
     • FTP site
     • Gopher site
  4. Etext Archives at U Michigan. (gopher)
  5. The Perseus Project. (html index)
  6. Project Gutenberg. (html index)
  7. Association des Bibliophiles Universels (html index)
  8. The Tech at MIT. - HTML format text.
     • Shakespeare
     • Classics

Sites About Public Domain Text on the Net

1. Savetz's Index.
2. B&R Samizdat Express.
3. Center for Electronic Text in the Humanities.

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Sites About Dramaturgy

1. Dramaturgy Northwest home page. So far, the most extensive site on the web dealing with the idea of dramaturgy.
2. My own What is Dramaturgy? page.
3. Dramaturgy page at Yale School of Drama

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General Theatre Resources

• Theatre Central. This was once the best theatre resource on the web, with a list of hundreds of resources, a directory of theatre profesionals on the net, a theatre journal, listings, a call board. Now it has been bought out by Playbill Online and all that seems to be left are the directories of sites and of email addresses.

© Copyright 1996-1997 Winston D. Neutel. All rights reserved.

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