This splendidly informative set of volumes is a major new resource for those studying early modern drama. I was sent the first five volumes, covering the years 1533–66, 1567–89, 1590–97, 1598–1602, and 1603–08. Further installments will take the story to 1642. While the Wiggins and Richardson undertaking will not replace standard reference works by W. W. Greg, E. K. Chambers, Gerald Bentley, or Alfred Harbage and Samuel Schoenbaum, it will quickly become the first port of call for those needing certain kinds of information about British drama in the early modern period. So what do these volumes offer? The first sentence of the introduction to volume 1 reads: “This is an enumerative, descriptive, and analytical catalogue of identifiable dramatic works, both extant and lost, written by English, Welsh, Irish, and Scottish authors, in all languages during the 110 years between 1 January 1533 and 31 December 1642” (ix).

Let me unpack some aspects of that sentence. First, by “dramatic works” Wiggins and Richardson mean not only plays — both printed and manuscript plays — that were created by British authors, but also such things as entertainments drawing on popular material, like the exploits of Robin Hood; civic and royal pageants; dialogues; plays, sometimes performed in English, by British companies touring on the Continent; translations of foreign plays by British authors; and masques and some tilts. More than most extant reference works, British Drama, 1533–1642 thus capaciously expands the dramatic canon both in geographical and in generic terms. Insistently performative in orientation, these volumes focus on events more than texts, authors, or theater companies, aspiring to nothing less than recording the full range of dramatic activity that occurred in Britain or by traveling British players abroad between 1533 and 1642. In the process, Wiggins and Richardson deliberately flatten the differences between one kind of dramatic activity and another, a brief interlude receiving the same careful attention as The Spanish Tragedy. William Shakespeare is not set apart from his peers; instead, his plays become just one event amid the myriad kinds of dramatic entertainments that occurred in the year each of his plays is presumed to have been composed.

While these volumes do not provide essays on individual authors, theater companies, or other aspects of the broader performative culture, they do offer up an incredible array of information about the individual events enumerated and described in the catalogue. Each entry includes (and here I compress considerably) date of composition, genre, a list of all the titles given to the play in early print or manuscript sources, the author(s) when known, the source of the evidence from which knowledge of lost plays was established, early stage history, act and scene designations from original texts, all the roles (figures) appearing in the work, any allegorical roles, positive evidence of doubling, stage directions and speech prefixes, setting, sources, languages in which the play was written or which it contains, formal features such as prologues and dumb shows, and evidence for staging, including music and sound, props, costumes and make-up, early stage and textual history, partial list of modern editions, and references for the information contained in the entry.

Accessing all of this information in a way that allows for easy searching, cross-referencing, and establishing patterns across time periods, theater companies, and genres will require the completion of the promised electronic edition, discussed further below. What the print edition offers is an impressive compilation of theatrical data drawn from prior reference works, both established ones, like Greg’s A Bibliography of the English Printed Drama to the Restoration (1939–59), and more recent ones, like Peter Beal’s Index of English Literary Manuscripts, volume 1 (1980), to which Wiggins and Richardson have added the impressive fruits of their own research. The result is an up-to-date reference tool that draws on new discoveries in attribution studies, history of the book, manuscript culture, and performance and theater history, and combines them in a novel but standardized way. While other reference works may give more detail about any one aspect of a dramatic event (Greg, for example, may offer more bibliographic detail about print history), none offers a more comprehensive range of information on every single event it includes.

Some helpful and ingenious typographical aids organize these material for readers. For example, titles of extant works are given in black type in a black-bordered white box; partial texts in black text in a gray box; and lost plays in white text in a black box. This allows readers flipping through a given volume to get some idea, for example, of the proportion of extant plays to lost plays. For works with multiple texts, like Dr. Faustus, black boxes summarize the main differences between the texts for items such as play title, role, scene designations, or formal elements such as prologues or songs, saving scholars from making statements about a play that are particular to one version only. Sanserif type is used to indicate authorial commentary on the material in each entry, supposedly separating speculation and interpretation from what Wiggins and Richardson present as fact. Moreover, the front of each volume provides a list of entries for all the dramatic items mentioned in that volume divided by year of composition. At the back of each are several indexes: a valuable index of all the historical people mentioned in the volume, including printers, property makers, actors, audience members, manuscript owners, etc.; an index of historical places related to performance, publication, and the external history of the play, but not to locations within the fictions; and, finally, an index of all the dramatic works in the volume, with their variant titles entered separately, all listed alphabetically. The opening catalogue lets one look across a year for unfamiliar alongside familiar plays; the final index lets one search for known items under whatever name one is most familiar with.

So, what can one learn from these volumes that it is less easy or perhaps impossible to learn from the earlier reference works in the field? What are the advantages and disadvantages of the choices Wiggins and Richardson have made? First, because reference works like Chambers’s The Elizabethan Stage start their story in the year 1558, Wiggins and Richardson do a great service by beginning in 1533, a choice they justify by arguing that the Reformation marked a significant turn in sixteenth-century drama. Whether or not one agrees with this premise, volume 1, which goes to 1566, contains accounts of works many of us know only slenderly, if at all. By including extensive information about lost and partial plays, it reveals a great deal about dramatic activity before the opening of the professional London theaters. For example, we see the popularity of dramatic events focused on biblical themes from the partially extant The Creation of Eve (1533) to The Two Sins of King David, a lost interlude from 1562 or earlier, and on classical topics like the lost Hercules, furens (1528–41) to the astonishing array of classical items, some extant and some now lost, found in 1566 alone, including works on Agamemnon, Medea, Octavia, Hercules, Marcus Geminus, Procne, Appius and Virginia, and Jocasta. We also see that Stirling Castle hosted numerous theatrical events, reminding us of a thriving Scottish theater culture.

For those like James Shapiro who write about the culture that surrounds Shakespeare’s plays in a given year, like 1599 or 1606, the Wiggins and Richardson volumes, with their year-by-year chronological focus, will be a tremendous aid, allowing for a deep dive into dramatic production of all sorts in any given time period. And for those with the time to browse more widely, moving through all the entries in any volume turns up a wealth of information connected to one’s own passions. I am interested in London comedy, and reading through volumes 4 and 5 turned up a range of lost plays that clearly have London settings and deal with contemporary or mythic London life, like the lost 1598 Mother Redcap, surmised to be about a London inn and an alewife of that name; the lost 1598 Fair Maid of London about which almost nothing is certainly known; the lost Beech’s Tragedy from 1600 that retails the true story of a London murder and dismemberment made famous as one of the two plots of Two Lamentable Tragedies (1594–98); or The Boss of Billingsgate, a lost play from 1603 about which, in sanserif, Wiggins writes, “The Boss of Billingsgate was a fountain. The play could have dramatized how it came into existence (a legacy from Mayor Richard Whittington), or alternatively the boss could have served as a geographical focus for a number of interlocking stories” (5:33).

For those concerned with performance, the information included about costume, props, and makeup is exciting. Whose attention, for example, would not be captured by an account of a picture of a woman whose face turns yellow if she is sexually tempted and black if she succumbs, a prop that Wiggins speculates (2:63) would have been necessary for the lost play Lady Barbara, performed at court in 1571 by Sir Robert Lane’s Men. Among the many props cataloged for particular plays are weapons, animals, small portable objects, large portable objects, food and drink, musical instruments, money, and scenery.

The flood of information available in these volumes is also, however, the source of their greatest liability: namely, the absence of search tools, especially electronic ones, and indexes that would allow a reader efficiently to access and assemble this information for his or her own purposes. To take a small example, all references to the works contained in each volume are listed in the various indexes by entry number, not page number. If an entry is very long, as for Hamlet (ten pages), searching through the entry to find a person or place can be a slow process. The ability to search by entry and by page would be useful, even in the print edition. Moreover, there is no index for props, costumes, and formal features like prologues or allegorical figures, and no index arranged by name of author(s). Some of us, surely, still will want to search these volumes for particular writers or stage companies. With proper search tools one could do much, much more with the splendid content they contain. For example, discovering that a urinal is a prop in Fair Em (3:33), one could enter urinal as a search term to see if it turns up as a prop in other plays; or one could search across all entries for more common props, such as altars or mirrors. Each scholar will have his or her own wish list of the things that it would be possible to do with this edition were electronic search tools in place. In the preface to volume 1, Wiggins says from the beginning the catalogue was intended to be “electronically searchable in a sophisticated way” (vii), and that the electronic version “will be issued at a later stage” under the supervision of Catherine Richardson and Mark Merry (viii). One can only hope that that “later stage” comes soon.

There are other drawbacks. For a reference tool interested in the text as a performance document, British Drama might have paid more consistent attention to actors in early performances when we have information on that question. And when plays are given generic designations, both as indicated in the period and then as used in modern criticism, it was odd not to find terms like domestic tragedy, revenge tragedy, or London comedy employed to indicate current generic categorizations. Very occasionally, expected cross-references were missing. For example, while the entry for Two Lamentable Tragedies recounts the confused textual history (3:304–05) linking this 1595 play with two possibly related plays, Beech’s Tragedy (1600) and The Orphans’ Tragedy (1601), that history is also mentioned in the entry for the latter play (4:329), but not the former (4:190–91), leading the reader to think that only one dramatic version of Beech’s murder was staged in the period.

These, however, are minor caveats. British Drama, 1533–1642 is an incredibly ambitious and informative addition to the panoply of reference works available for the early modern period. Oxford University Press is to be commended for printing it with such care. It is only to be hoped that the press will also quickly issue the searchable electronic edition.