Introducing DEx: A Database of Dramatic Extracts

Abstract

Introducing DEx:A Database of Dramatic Extracts Laura Estill (bio) Early modern readers and playgoers often kept commonplace books and miscellanies, where they would copy poems, aphorisms, letters, recipes, accounts, and any number of things—including selections from plays. Although a renewed interest in miscellanies has produced valuable digital tools, including Adam Smyth's An Online Index of Poetry in Printed Miscellanies (1640-1682), the Folger Shakespeare Library's Union First Line Index of English Verse, 13th-19th Century, and Abigail Williams's forthcoming Digital Miscellanies Index, these resources often focus on print and poetry. Laura Estill's DEx: A Database of Dramatic Extracts will fill this gap by helping scholars find selections from plays copied into manuscripts.1 By offering transcriptions of these dramatic extracts, DEx will contribute to the ongoing opening of the archives facilitated by the digital turn. DEx builds on and complements Peter Beal's monumental Index of English Literary Manuscripts and forthcoming online Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts 1450-1700 by offering transcriptions and comparison to printed texts and also listing extracts from works by anonymous or lesser-known authors, such as Peter Hausted or William Peaps. Though we may overlook lesser-known plays and playwrights, early modern readers did not make the same distinction: consider Archbishop Sancroft (1617-93), who collected excerpts from Quarles's The Virgin Widow alongside quotations from Shakespeare and Fletcher. Extant manuscript evidence suggests that the phenomenon of copy selections from English plays began around the 1590s; as such, DEx focuses on seventeenth-century manuscripts. Although dramatic extracting continued in the Restoration, at the moment DEx catalogs only extracts from plays written and published before the closure of the theaters in 1642. That is to say, DEx includes manuscripts from the late seventeenth century that contain extracts from earlier works, such as BL MS Lansdowne 1185, which is a manuscript with eighty pages of Shakespearean extracts copied around 1700. The first iteration of DEx will allow users to search dramatic miscellanies, those manuscripts comprised primarily of selections from plays. Extant dramatic miscellanies contain thousands of extracts from dozens of early modern plays. [End Page 128] DEx users will be able to search and browse by playwright, by play, and by manuscript. The results will be displayed as a transcription with, where possible, act, scene, and line references and links to scholarly online editions of the plays, such as the Internet Shakespeare Editions, which will allow scholars to easily see the extract in the context of the full play. Scholars will also be able to sort results by folio number and click to the description of the manuscript from its repository (for instance, the British Library's Manuscripts Catalogue), to get a sense of the extract in its manuscript contexts. DEx's bibliography page will indicate all the sources used, including early modern print and manuscript as well as modern scholarly editions. DEx will also include a page of links to resources for manuscript study.2 DEx will offer full-text searching so that scholars can search the database by keyword or subject. DEx is an eXtensible Markup Language (XML) database that includes transcriptions encoding using the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). The transcriptions in DEx include original manuscript spellings and abbreviations with regularizations and expansions, which increases the usability of the full-text search: for instance, a search for "country" will also bring up results for "countrie" and "countrey." Manuscript compilers often changed the dramatic extracts they copied. DEx will allow users to compare the manuscript version of an extract to a print counterpart. For instance, one mid-seventeenth compiler took "'Tis a favour her betters sue for" (from J. W.'s The Valiant Scot [1637]) and changed it to "Thy bed is a favor betters sue for." Examples like this abound in seventeenth-century manuscripts—early modern readers had no compunction about adapting and altering dramatic extracts. Although the first release of DEx catalogs seventeenth-century dramatic miscellanies that contain extracts from Renaissance plays, in the future it could be expanded to include more manuscripts, such as commonplace books and verse miscellanies, extracts from Restoration plays, and eighteenth-century manuscripts. DEx will evolve as further dramatic extracts are discovered, more...