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Case Studies

Testimonials

'Deep down, I like the idea of this Shelleyan universal anthology waiting to be dipped into by random hands.'

Edwin Morgan, Emeritus Professor of English, Glasgow University

Since the publication of English Poetry in 1992, scholars and students from around the world have been using Chadwyck-Healey literature resources as part of their research. Many users have found that, as well as allowing traditional forms of research to be carried out more quickly and conveniently, electronic resources also open up entirely new possibilities. The value of both the contents and search possibilities of Chadwyck-Healey literature resources is attested to by the range of researchers, teachers, students and librarians who are quoted below. For further reading, please consult our bibliography of articles, reviews and scholarship.

Case Studies

Daniel Karlin, 'Victorian Poetry and the English Poetry Full-Text Database: A Case Study'

Daniel Karlin, who is Professor of English at University College, London, describes his use of the Chadwyck-Healey Literature Collection English Poetry in compiling The Penguin Book of Victorian Verse (1997) as 'an extraordinary experience, and one which permanently changed [his] understanding of literary history'. Whereas existing received notions of the nature of Victorian poetry are based on an 'absurdly small and unrepresentative' canon, Professor Karlin was able to discover, and include in his anthology, many poets who had been completely forgotten. Electronic collections allow a new, more open kind of reading, he claims: 'the sameness of appearance of the texts made me more open, less prejudiced than I might otherwise have been; English Poetry doesn't allow you to judge a book by its cover.'

Readers should note that in 2000, after Professor Karlin had carried out his work, Chadwyck-Healey launched English Poetry, Second Edition, an expanded version of the collection that corrected many of the omissions noted in this article. New writers who were added in 2000 include previously neglected women poets, such as Amy Levy and Augusta Webster, and writers classified as novelists in the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, such as George Meredith and George Eliot. The entire contents of English Poetry, Second Edition are now included in Literature Online.

Read Professor Karlin's article in full.

Ewald Mengel and Carmen Müller, 'Literature Online (LION): A Virtuous Beast in the Electronic Jungle'

Published in English Via Various Media (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 1999)

Mengel's and Müller's article begins with a 'situation report' on scholarly usage of electronic literary texts, with negative conclusions - the main problem being that the majority of electronic texts available, such as those on Project Gutenberg, have no textual authority, and are therefore unsuitable for scholarly use. By contrast, however, Literature Online has been produced with the needs of the scholarly community in mind, and therefore represents 'an electronic paradise for the academic scholar and critic'. The authors proceed to give two examples of the new kinds of research made possible by Literature Online: firstly, an analysis of the representation of female self-confidence and submissiveness in eighteenth-century fiction, and secondly, a search for references to 'science' in Victorian poetry. The authors' conclusion is that, for scholars who are willing to adapt their approach to the new tools available, the electronic medium extends the scope of the questions that can be asked, and offers 'unplumbed seas' that are 'waiting to be discovered and mapped'.

Read extracts from 'Literature Online (LION): A Virtuous Beast in the Electronic Jungle'

Professor Mengel, who currently holds the Chair of English and American Language and Literature at the University of Vienna, was a member of the original Literature Online advisory board.

Richard Harp on using Literature Online to analyse historical word usage

Professor Richard Harp of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, is using Literature Online as a research tool for a current project that involves researching the meanings and the changes in meaning for certain key words between the 1500s and the 1700s. In a telephone interview, he told us that he finds Literature Online's rich array of primary texts and powerful search options extremely useful for this type of research. 'It is easy to find word variants because of the search capabilities of LION', Professor Harp says, thanks to the ability to browse through keywords offered by the 'Select from a list' function. Using the 'Keyword in Work' field in Search: Texts, a user can click on 'Select from a list' and select multiple variant forms such as 'frail' and 'fraile' or 'melancholy' and 'melancolie'. In addition, the availability of dictionaries in Literature Online allows one to look up, on the spot, the origins of words and variant spellings.

Professor Harp says he is 'impressed, in general, with the ability to read primary texts that no single library in the world would have': the database is 'wonderful to browse through', and his searches have led to many interesting and sometimes surprising discoveries. This also opens up new opportunities for students, who, he says, increasingly prefer the ease of access of electronic texts over print texts, and enjoy the experience of browsing through Literature Online's library of texts.

The greatest benefits of Literature Online, according to Harp, are its browsing features and the ability to assign students primary texts, without worrying about finding and ordering print copies. In fact, Harp says that students may not even need to buy any texts. If a class is studying Shakespeare, he comments, why not allow them to read the first folio in LION, rather than a modern, printed edition? For graduate students, Harp says that Literature Online is a 'godsend,' offering sophisticated searching tools across rare and important texts and opportunities to conduct literary research in relatively unexplored ways.

For researchers, Harp describes Literature Online as 'revolutionary': traditionally, literary scholars had to plan to get to a major research library at least once every couple of years; thanks to Literature Online, however, there is 'no need for a third mortgage on your home in order to go to England to read the original texts.' A considerable amount of time is wasted in library work, in tasks such as determining the exact title of an important work, and locating the correct volume. In the British Library, for example, researchers often have to submit a request and then wait until the next day to actually obtain the book. Sometimes the requester will have to wait only to be told that the book is unavailable: it was destroyed in the WWII bombings, or 'the mice have gotten it'. The availability of electronic copies of texts offers a convenient and time-saving solution for literary researchers.

Harp adds that for students in feminist studies, Literature Online is excellent because it allows one to search early primary texts for references of interest. For example, Harp searched for the key words 'defence' and 'women' in a Texts search and discovered very early incidences of these words, used in proximity, in a text from the 16th century. Not only will students be able to conduct original research, but they will be able to actually download these texts for reference. According to Harp, Literature Online is a perfect example of 'research innovation.'

Professor Harp is the founding co-editor of the Ben Jonson Journal, co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Ben Jonson, contributing editor of the Ben Jonson Encyclopedia, editor of the Norton Critical Edition of Ben Jonson's Plays and Masques, 2nd edition, and author of numerous articles on 16th- and 17th-century British and Irish literature.

Steven Connor, 'Exploring "New Territories" of Scholarly Enquiry with Literature Online'

Steven Connor, Professor of Modern Literature and Theory at Birkbeck College London, discusses Literature Online's vast depth and range of content and how it has enabled him to both review and revisit traditional areas of scholarly study, as well as exploring completely new themes, ideas and subjects.

In such a huge database - described by the poet Edwin Morgan as a 'Shelleyan universal anthology' - how can a researcher be sure they are finding all the relevant information they need? Professor Connor compares searching Literature Online to dropping a fishing line in a wildly-populated literary ocean: 'almost every search throws up a writer or text with some kind of local excellence or originality that you have never encountered before'. Over the course of his career 'fishing' through Literature Online, Professor Connor has used the database to identify many new objects and themes to study, including greasiness, spots, flies, corridors, bags, 'the vapours', and, more recently, 'sobbing'.

As he says, 'Literature Online helps you break free from the ways in which the landscape of cultural history has been mapped - allowing you to go far off-piste and to generate alternate topographies for that landscape, even whole new territories.' What's more, this painstaking process could also be without satisfaction: 'I would never actually have known how much of the available material I had actually located - whether I was aware of most of the relevant texts, half of them, or hardly any'. With Literature Online, however, the scholar can quickly and easily 'get through a lifetime of reading' and 'make your own scholarly luck'.

Read Professor Connor's case study in full.

The HyperHamlet Project at Basel University

Professors Balz Engler and Annelies Häcki Buhofer of Basel University, Switzerland, together with a team of researchers headed by Dr. Regula Hohl Trillini, are using Literature Online as a central research tool for an innovative project.

HyperHamlet© is an online text corpus in the shape of a hypertext of Shakespeare's play, in which every line provides clickable access to text passages in which it is quoted. Verbal, visual, musical and multi-media responses to Hamlet from every imaginable cultural area - e.g. Russian short stories, 17th-century tracts, computer games, Sex and the City, Keats’ letters, Derrida’s essays, Garfield cartoons, French Romantic poetry and Star Trek, to name but a few - are coded and searchable for a number of parameters. The parameters have been chosen to make the emerging corpus potentially useful to linguists and historians as well as scholars in literary and cultural studies.

Both searches and suggestions for new entries are invited from the public domain.

The core corpus of HyperHamlet© will be created when the text of Hamlet is run, line by line, phrase by phrase, through Literature Online. Whatever references are recoverable by this method will by edited, stored and made accessible on HyperHamlet©.

This planned core corpus would be simply unimaginable without the rich array of primary texts and the search facilities of Literature Online, which represent not only a perfect example of "research innovation" (as Richard Harp's case study puts it) but which enable and almost enforce research innovation in its users. Features of Literature Online that are essential to HyperHamlet© include enabling the user to:

  • Access a single huge database which makes searches quick and inclusive enough to aim at a representative corpus.
  • Search words which are not adjacent but NEAR each other, which enables us to find modified quotations, possibly the most interesting part of the creative response to Hamlet.
  • Include obscure, out-of-print and rare texts in a scholarly edition and thus avoid a bias towards "famous quotations".
  • Reach exhaustive information about not-so-famous authors with a few clicks to speed up the editing process
  • Find a lot of material that covers the first three centuries of Hamlet reception, which is essential to establishing historical patterns and shifts.

Read the HyperHamlet© article in full.

Find out more about the HyperHamlet© project.

If you have used Literature Online or other Chadwyck-Healey services as part of your research, we would be very interested in hearing from you; please contact the Webmaster with your comments.

Testimonials

On Literature Online

Professor Stuart Curran, University of Pennsylvania:

Literature Online will allow any user to have access to a very fine rare book library. It is breaking down elitist barriers, giving all students, graduate and undergraduate alike, access to material they might otherwise not consult. While Literature Online's usefulness is self-evident for scholars, it will also undoubtedly play a major role in recasting the curriculum by removing the boundaries from which we select works for study. There has been nothing like Literature Online before, it gets down to the roots of literary transmission.

Dr David Worrall, Reader in English Literature, St Mary's, Strawberry Hill:

Literature Online decisively levels the field in the provision of English literary texts to students in institutions of higher education. No single university library, no matter how venerable or ancient - not even the national libraries - can offer the range of texts rapidly delivered by Literature Online with the click of a mouse. For staff, Literature Online will be a vast, fully searchable database. For students, Literature Online will be a hugely rich resource, free to them at the point of use. Not only will 'the book' no longer be 'out' of the library, virtual delivery makes perfect sense of our near 24-hour library opening hours.

Anne K. Barker, Humanities Librarian, Ellis Library, University of Missouri-Columbia:

LION is one of our most fun and useful resources. We've used it at the reference desk to find contemporary responses to 16th century author Thomas Burnet, to identify plays featuring Medea, to track down elusive quotations, to explore the significance of various themes in works or groups of authors. In seconds we've been able to answer questions that would otherwise have been arduous or impossible. Students seem to find the interface easy to navigate and I appreciate the vendor's responsiveness to suggestions.

George Justice, Asst. Prof. of English, University of Missouri-Columbia:

LION has allowed me to teach books I could formerly only refer to in class. The access it provides to all students also allows me to change course readings quickly in response to student interest.

Maurice Lee, Asst. Prof. of English, University of Missouri-Columbia:

I've found LION to be remarkably useful--in my research, in preparing for my classes, and as a resource for my students.

Judith Aaron, Reference/ Instruction Librarian, Wallace Library, Wheaton College:

I am a major fan of LION; faculty and librarians here at Wheaton reflexively reach for MLA Int'l Bib online, and I'm on a mission to demonstrate the wonders of LION, both as a fantastic virtual library, and as an agile, easily searched, well-designed index to critical literature.

Michael Fagg, Social Science and Humanities Library Service, The University of Queensland Library:

Subscribing to the full suite of Literature Online has placed on the desktop of every academic, librarian and student at the University of Queensland one of the most comprehensive collections of literature imaginable. LION provides more than access to those great works that have been endlessly studied since their publication. Thousands of important minor works, long gone from the publishers' catalogues, are available for study. For students of the English language living a great distance from the libraries of Britain and America, Literature Online provides opportunities never before imagined.

Being able to search the texts for a name, a place or any word of interest is a function of LION which has opened new possibilities for our scholars. Searching by 'Literary Movement' and 'Literary Period' has given the new student the ability to easily discover works to complement their reading lists.

Electronic access to the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature caps off the complete study package. Having access to full text secondary sources only serves to enhance our library's ability to provide flexibility in information access and delivery.

Colin Morgan, Arts Librarian, Sydney Jones Library, University of Liverpool:

For me LION is the key online resource in English literature because it provides access to primary and secondary texts. I find searching both precise and intuitive; the data retrieved simple to manipulate and export. Access to full-text secondary material is a huge bonus. I can also rely on a quick connection to the database whenever I want to use it. I recommend LION to researchers, students, teachers and (of course) librarians.

Steve Bilton, Postgraduate Student, University of Durham:

As a regular user of Literature Online I am compelled to recommend it to any student of English Literature.

At first, the sheer wealth of material on site is daunting though one is immediately struck by both the quality and quantity of primary and secondary sources. Indeed, in my area of 'expertise', Renaissance Drama - a field in which it has proven notoriously difficult to conduct research away from the bookshops and libraries - I was pleasantly surprised at what Literature Online had to offer. Of course, the greats are there; Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson etc. - but what makes LION special is the inclusion of lesser-known lights such as Kyd [and] Fletcher [. . .].

The site is well presented, beautifully maintained and extremely user-friendly. In short, no student of English Literature should conduct their research without paying homage to the site.

On ABELL

Laura Fuderer, Subject Librarian for English and French Language and Literature, University of Notre Dame, Indiana

Until a few years ago I used to rely heavily on the MLAIB. I got to know ABELL better when I began contributing to it and realized its coverage of topics relating to literatures in English may be more extensive than MLAIB on at least three counts:

  • by covering periodicals from other disciplines it is more interdisciplinary (e.g. a lot of history journals and newsletters);
  • the periodicals include more single-author and society newsletters;
  • the editors stress book reviews, so there are more book citations than in MLAIB.

As a consequence I urge every student and scholar of English to use ABELL as well as MLAIB (which picks up dissertations), especially if they want to go all the way back to the 1920s online.

Evan Ira Farber, Librarian Emeritus of Earlham College, Richmond, Indiana:

It is very welcome news that Chadwyck-Healey is putting into electronic form the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature. It is a reference tool I have long depended upon, and also one that I have seen too many reference librarians ignore or discount. This is unfortunate because that view is based on a misconception: they think that the MLA International Bibliography covers everything they could want in English or American literature. I trust that this misperception will soon be corrected now that ABELL is available in electronic form.

First, before 1956, the MLAIB, while covering both English and American literature and language, focused on scholarship published in America. ABELL's coverage was international from the start, so for those crucial decades of literary critical theory from 1920 through 1955, it is an unparalleled source for British and Continental criticism. Second, the journals covered by ABELL differ from those covered by MLAIB, particularly in the early years. Finally, ABELL also includes book reviews which are often sources of excellent critical commentary.

Aside from, and in addition to, those differences, is the fact that every comparative study of the two bibliographies shows that the overlap between them is surprisingly far from complete. One study, for example, showed that in one year the MLAIB had thirteen entries for Stephen Crane and ABELL had fifteen, but only three were identical!

There is no question in my mind that every academic library supporting serious work - and certainly graduate work - in English or American literature should make both ABELL and MLAIB available to users. As Michael Marcuse notes in his Reference Guide for English Studies (University of California Press, 1990): 'All current comparisons between the two bibliographies conclude by recommending that the scholar always consult both.' That advice is even sounder now that ABELL is available in electronic form.

On English Poetry

Andrew Brown, in The Independent:

English Poetry [. . .] allows you to discover in minutes what would have taken years. [. . .] The disks are not a translation of an existing resource into a new medium. They are a new creation.

On Early English Prose Fiction

Dr David Margolies, Reader in English, Goldsmiths College, University of London:

The texts of Early English Prose Fiction are essential to understand the development of narrative in English. What came to be recognised as the dominant characteristic of English fiction, realism, was only one of a rich diversity of approaches in fiction's early years. The collection shows the evolution of English prose, covering the change from a predominantly oral culture, where prose fiction can be understood as 'written speech', to a literary culture dependent on strictly literary conventions. As well as the evolution of genre, the collection shows the development of narrative technique. Many things we now take for granted can be seen as narrative problems that early fiction had to solve - such as how the author should deal with a character's reiteration of events that have already been related to the reader, or whether the reader should experience an emotional piece of correspondence when it is being written or on delivery. The fiction in the collection also offers an invaluable guide to the attitudes of everyday life, and provides a basis for understanding the high culture of the period. Shakespeare's plays, for example, have a very different feel when seen in the context of the fiction that was part of his milieu.

The material of Early English Prose Fiction, besides its value for a scholarly understanding of the early stages of English fiction, displays a delight in the fictionality of fiction, a pleasure of imagination that many readers may have forgotten is an essential part of literature.

Prof. Dr. Holger Klein, Chair of English Literature, Universität Salzburg:

From a linguistic point of view, Early English Prose Fiction largely covers Early Modern English and provides a unique opportunity for broadly based indepth study of forms and developments in the language, especially in the fields of grammar and syntax, morphology, lexis and semantics. The selection has been carried out with a view to continuous coverage, though the realities of literary production in the period, with its periods of slack and of massed publication, is of necessity reflected: the volume of prose fiction coming from the presses increased towards the end of the sixteenth and again enormously towards the end of the seventeenth century, and no selection could neglect this trend. Yet most decades are well represented. Twentieth-century texts and theory have widened our concepts of not only what the novel but what prose fiction in general may encompass. At the formative stages of what one should (refining Ian Watt's expression) term 'The Rise of the Realist Novel in the West' there was a welter of trends, experiments and hybrid forms of great interest not only for the evolution of the major types but also for general analyses of structure and narrative technique. While providing the basis for new looks at the history of prose fiction and in particular the novel in England, the collection also greatly enhances the possibilities of comparative literary studies in the Renaissance and Baroque periods in Britain and continental European countries by enlarging the English material readily available.

For cultural studies centred on Britain from the late Middle Ages to the beginnings of the Augustan age, the database provides a rich fund of materials hitherto not easily available. Of all literary genres, prose fiction presents in most detail and concreteness the individual in a social environment - natural and man-made surroundings, economic, social and political situations, structures and institutions, the inventions and devices of civilisation, everyday habits and customs in the framework of individual and family life as well as in the scale of social groupings or indeed society as a whole at particular points in time. Fiction may not necessarily present objective data for the immediate use of social and economic historians; but it does enable scholars to obtain images of life, to feel the pulse of past periods precisely in those areas that are incidental to the authors' plots but can be taken as indicative of the very stuff of life.

On Eighteenth-Century Fiction

Dr Tom Keymer, St Anne's College, Oxford:

'I wish You would add an Index Rerum that when the reader recollects any incident he may easily find it,' wrote Samuel Johnson to Richardson in 1751: 'I beg that this Edition by which I suppose Posterity is to abide, may want nothing that can facilitate its use.' Johnson was not the only reader to press for an index, and as he did so Richardson was already beginning to equip his editions with an elaborate secondary apparatus: prefaces and postscripts; cross-references and explanatory footnotes; lists of characters and abstracts of plots; tables of similes, allusions and sentiments; even, in Clarissa's third edition, a table to the table of sentiments. Yet, for all this desperate accumulation of paratextual aids, Richardson's millions of words of fiction continued to evade the control of their readers - and even the author himself. 'I am a very irregular writer,' as he mournfully acknowledged the same year.

Richardson could never have imagined the possibilities of electronic access, or the extent to which the search options of Eighteenth-Century Fiction might indeed 'facilitate … use' of the kinds envisaged in Johnson's letter. Yet here are innovations he would surely have wished to embrace. Not only a novelist but one of the leading printers of eighteenth-century London, he worked at the cutting edge of publishing technology, and his texts (like those of Sterne after him) make experimental use of the press's full resources. The third edition of Clarissa has indeed been seen as itself a kind of proto-hypertext, which by flagging newly added material with marginal bullets acknowledges the fluid, unstable and developing state of the work while also enabling readers to recover the basic outline of earlier versions.

Concordances to prose fiction are rare things, most of all for this key period of the novel's development, and Eighteenth-Century Fiction now makes it possible to trace and analyse the details of a writer's language as never before. In certain test cases (not only Clarissa but also the politically sensitive Gulliver's Travels, which in its first edition was - in Swift's words - 'basely mangled, and abused, and added to, and blotted out by the printer'), users will be able to display different editions of the same work simultaneously on screen, to study the dynamics of revision or censorship with an ease and thoroughness never before achieved. By using proximity operators to search for key combinations of words, scholars will also see with new clarity the sheer allusiveness of such material. Key in the relevant words, and future editors of Clarissa need not miss the way in which Lovelace's contempt for those who 'undertake, for the sake of a paltry fee, to make white black, and black white' implies a quiet reference to Gulliver's Travels: 'I said there was a Society of Men among us, bred up from their Youth in the Art of proving . . . that White is Black, and Black is White, according as they are paid.'

Dr John Mullan, University College London:

[T]he availability of what was once popular alongside what it still widely studied will open the paths of influence to new examination. It is not however, only this wider study of buried influences that the database will facilitate. It will also allow the examination of the language and devices of the most famous and resourceful novelists (where necessary, in the different editions of novels that were much changed by their authors). Some of the best-known novels seem relatively chartless; texts like Moll Flanders or Pamela do not even provide the chapter divisions or headings that were later to become conventional. This [collection] will allow the researcher to trace patterns of diction and allusion within individual texts, or the works of a particular author. With electronic access to the language of novels, we will be able to explore the influence of novels on our language.

Dr Judith Hawley, Royal Holloway College, University of London:

Having new access to neglected works, including many by women writers, readers will be able to assess canonical texts such as Moll Flanders and Tom Jones alongside lesser known books which contributed to the trends and tastes of the times. Patterns of themes, forms, genre and language-use can be tracked with the aid of this database. Not a substitute for reading and thinking, but a tool to support imaginative analysis and sophisticated research, this database will be an invaluable resource for work in libraries and classrooms.

John Richetti, University of Pennsylvania:

Just about the entire range of significant British eighteenth-century novels [. . .] the choice of texts and editions is everything that a student of the period and the genre could desire.

On Twentieth-Century Drama

Trevor R. Griffiths, Professor of Theatre Studies, London Metropolitan University:

Anyone with an interest in drama is beset by the relatively short runs of plays and by their relatively brief life span in print. Scholarly editions may fill the gap for the canonical plays of earlier periods but the scripts of even the most popular twentieth-century plays often did not survive long in print after their first run was over.

The value of this collection is that it makes a very wide selection of twentieth-century play texts available in a fully searchable form for researchers, students, actors and directors. No single library could match the coverage provided by this collection, which enables its readers to access significant works that have long been unavailable except in the most specialised libraries. It restores once important but now neglected figures to the canon, and opens up the possibility of new productions to revive dormant reputations and explore the challenges of works from the whole of the twentieth century.

If I identify a text that I want to research, say Joe Corrie's In Time O' Strife (1927) or Michelene Wandor's Care and Control (1977), I would quickly discover that both plays are long out of print and basically inaccessible other than through major research libraries or second-hand booksellers. If they are on this database, however, not only can I access them direct from my home or office but I can search them for key terms, and expedite my research by searching for – in Corrie's case – other one-act plays of the period, other political works by Scottish authors, other plays about coal-mining or industrial relations, or – in Wandor's case – other plays dealing with women's rights, lesbianism or motherhood. We can find which plays were published in a given year, or performed by the same company, what kinds of language they use, how many people were in the cast, and which actors created the roles. The range of possibilities is literally endless, from searches for the prevalence of French windows in comedies of the 1930s, or plays with ghosts or librarians in their casts, to very detailed searches on linguistic patterns or types of stage directions.

Ian Clarke, former Senior Lecturer and Director of Drama, Loughborough University

It is a sad fact, but true, that play texts from the latter half of the twentieth century, even by established authors like John Arden, can quickly go out of print or become unavailable. Few significant texts from the early part of the century, apart from those by some notable playwrights, are available in print, and most are thus only in accessible in copyright libraries or those with specialist collections. These are not available to most undergraduate students, and frequently inconvenient for academics to visit regularly. The Chadwyck-Healey Twentieth-Century Drama Collection changes all this. It will enable, when completed, immediate access to a carefully chosen selection of 2,500 twentieth-century plays from an academic's own office or a student's own university or college library, or even study bedroom. The benefits of this are enormous. I have, for instance, only previously been able to consult Miles Malleson's two rare anti-First-World-War plays in the British Library; now I can do so from my desk, some 250 miles from London.

Whereas in a standard search engine, one can tap in, say, 'Shakespeare' and find every time that word is found, the huge advantage of the Chadwyck-Healey collection is the editors' indexing. This enables delimiting hits by using the opportunities for further search criteria, such as gender, nationality and ethnicity of author, performance and/or publication date; one can limit one's search to the director, theatre company, designer, or subject matter of any play. What is of particular use to a Theatre Studies student seeking an audition or a short performance piece is the monologue search function, which indexes any speech of 250 words or more. Again the editors' indexing can further refine the search criteria, to limit your search by gender, subject, and so on.

The Find Monologues search can come up with surprising and intriguing results. The first hit for male speeches on Biblical themes comes up with a speech by 'The Whale' in Bridie's Jonah and the Whale, which, for those on the receiving end of auditions, would make a distinct change from hearing 'The quality of mercy' or 'O! that this too too solid flesh' yet again. More seriously, introducing 'Ireland' into the subject search box will guide you to plays by Lady Gregory, Hyde, Shaw, Synge, Yeats, Arden, D'Arcy and O'Casey. 'Osborne' in the playwright box will, amongst other things, guide you to Look Back in Anger for Jimmy's tirades as well as Alison's gentler speeches, and also to Archie's drunken ramblings in The Entertainer. Entering 'Pip' in the speaker box in combination with 'Wesker' will direct you to his notorious diatribe on the working class ('You breed babies and you eat chips with everything.')

A little practice makes this an easy and interesting tool to use. For instance, a student or academic engaged with dramaturgy could easily compare the use and function of lengthy speeches in realist texts of the earlier part of the twentieth century with speeches of similar length in the latter part of the century by authors deliberately refuting realist convention. Previously this would have been an almost impossible task on a comprehensive scale; this electronic collection of texts and its innovative indexing now make it a very feasible one.

 

 

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