VEP Early Modern Drama Collection

in Corpora

We have curated three corpora of drama-related texts. These corpora are differentiated by a widening definition of what constitutes ‘drama,’ and an extended cut-off date.  Each corpus is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Before downloading the corpora, read about the format of the text files here, and about our text processing workflow. Corpora are generated from Text Creation Partnership (TCP) XML files.

Please note that our download corpora do not contain texts from EEBO-TCP Phase II, which will not be in the public domain until five years after the completion of the TCP project for Phase II. However, you can download and explore metadata and Ubiqu+ity token-counts from both the Phase I and Phase II texts–and you can use Ubiqu+Ity to tag all of the files in any corpus with your own rules.

Early Modern Drama Corpora

Core Drama 1660
The ‘core’ group of Early Modern dramatic texts: professional and other plays intended for performance. Includes translations of plays and closet drama. Cut-off date: 1660.

There are 554 plays in this corpus, of which 471 are EEBO-TCP Phase I texts.

Only EEBO-TCP Phase I texts are available for download.

However, metadata and statistical analysis is available for all plays in the corpus from the Metadata Builder.

Expanded Drama 1660
This corpus expands the ‘Core Drama 1660’ corpus with a wider definition of what constitutes a dramatic text, to include masques and entertainments. Cut-off date: 1660.

There are 666 plays in this corpus, of which 569 are EEBO-TCP Phase I texts.

Only EEBO-TCP Phase I texts are available for download.

However, metadata and statistical analysis is available for all plays in the corpus from the Metadata Builder.

Expanded Drama 1700
This corpus aims to include one copy of all dramatic texts in print up to 1700: it contains professional and other plays intended for performance, translations, closet drama, masques, and entertainments.

There are 1,244 plays in this corpus, of which 1,008 are EEBO-TCP Phase I texts and 1 is an ECCO-TCP text.

Only EEBO-TCP Phase I texts and the ECCO-TCP text are available for download.

However, metadata and statistical analysis is available for all plays in the corpus from the Metadata Builder.

Additionally, you can download a list of All Known Texts. This is not a downloadable corpus, since in some cases it lists texts not available in the TCP. This list includes texts which appear more than once in the EEBO-TCP.

This list has 1,554 entries, of which 1,292 are TCP texts-of these, 1,046 are EEBO-TCP Phase I texts and 1 is an ECCO-TCP text.

Credits: Metadata was prepared by Jonathan Hope and Beth Ralston. XML files were processed and curated by Deidre Stuffer for release as plain text files.