Records of Early English Drama

The Records of Early English Drama (REED) is a performance history research project, based at the University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It was founded in 1976 by a group of international scholars interested in understanding “the native tradition of English playmaking that apparently flourished in late medieval provincial towns” and formed the context for the development of the English Renaissance theatre, including the work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. REED’s primary focus is to locate, transcribe, edit, and publish historical documents from England, Wales, and Scotland containing evidence of drama, secular music, and other communal entertainment and mimetic ceremony from the late Middle Ages until 1642, when the Puritans closed the London public theatres.

From its inception in 1976 to 2016, REED published twenty-seven print collections of records edited by over thirty international scholars. REED is also engaged in creating a collection of free digital resources for research and education including Patrons and Performances (2003) and Early Modern London Theatres (2011). In March 2017, REED moved to digital publication of records with the launch of REED Online, a publication site where records will be freely available.

During a 1970-71 research trip in York, England, to study manuscripts related to the York cycle of biblical plays (also known as the York Mystery Plays), Alexandra F. Johnston, an early drama scholar from the University of Toronto, came across a manuscript transcription of a 1433 indenture agreement between the leaders of the medieval Mercers' Guild and their pageant masters. The document contained details of a medieval pageant wagon and sophisticated staging unknown to researchers of the time. Johnston also met Margaret Dorrell, an Australian graduate student at the University of Leeds, who was working on a similar project related to the York records; the two women decided to collaborate.

Within the next two years, Johnston and Dorrell met other scholars of medieval and Renaissance drama working independently on manuscripts from other English cities (David Galloway of the University of New Brunswick on Norwich, Reginald Ingram of the University of British Columbia on Coventry, and Lawrence Clopper of Indiana University Bloomington on Chester). The idea of a scholarly publishing project to find, transcribe, and edit documentary evidence of performance arose from these meetings and was met with interest by the individual researchers and their academic communities.

...
Wikipedia