Have a question about Theatre research? Send a question to Glenda Griffin, the Theatre Librarian.
Play Index
Play Index
Citations to tens of thousands of plays published individually or in collections from 1949 to the present. Includes hundreds of monologues, ranging from classic and historical to contemporary, written in or translated into English. For each play, details are provided such as plot summary, musical requirements, and set and scenery considerations. Narrow your search by genre, style, age-level appropriateness, cast size, or number of male/female roles.
Online Video Collections
Ambrose Video
Collection of online films, including the complete BBC Shakespeare Plays, as well as numerous titles in history and the sciences (including astronomy, biology, chemistry, environmental science, geology, meteorology, and physics). Closed-captioning provided in all videos; after selecting a video, roll over the video player and click the "CC" button at the upper right.
Academic Video Online
Thousands of hours of streaming video in most disciplines. Many videos include interactive text transcripts.
Films on Demand
Read Quick-Start: How to Link to a Film, or Films on Demand: A Guide for SHSU Users
Films on Demand provides instant access to thousands of educational films, ranging from almost every academic discipline to life-skills content. The Films Media Group (FMG) serves the education community through its four brands: Films for the Humanities & Sciences, Cambridge Educational, Shopware, and Meridian. Select films include closed-captioning and/or interactive text transcripts. Roll over the video player and click "CC" button at upper right for captions.Theatre in Video
Definitive performances of the world's leading plays, as well as film documentaries, representing hundreds of leading playwrights, actors and directors. Many videos include interactive text transcripts.
Article and Reference Databases
Vogue Archive (1892-present)
For costume reference: Entire run of Vogue magazine from 1892-present, including text, images, captions, advertisements, covers, and fold-outs. Useful for researching fashion design and marketing, popular culture, photography and visual arts, gender, social history, designing period costumes, and more.
Academic Search Complete
Provides full text for thousands of academic, social sciences, humanities, general science, education, and multi-cultural journals, along with indexing and abstracts for thousands more.
Contemporary Authors
For more than 30 years, Contemporary Authors (CA) has been the primary resource for information on modern authors, including those who were active prior to 1960 and whose works continue to influence contemporary literature. A bio-bibliographical guide, CA covers may current writers in a wide range of media.
Contemporary Literary Criticism
Contemporary Literary Criticism (CLC) is the world's leading resource for information on modern literature. CLC Select presents significant published criticism on the works of novelists, poets, playwrights, short story writers, and other creative writers now living or who died after December 31, 1959.
Dictionary of Literary Biography
Selected essays from the Dictionary of Literary Biography (DLB) that outline the lives and careers of authors from all eras and genres and summarize the critical response to their work.
Dictionary of National Biography
(number of simultaneous users is limited)
Biographies of the men and women who shaped all aspects of Britain's past since the fourth century BC.Gale Virtual Reference Library (GVRL)
Collection of reference books in almost all subjects, which are searchable together or individually. For a list of titles currently available, click on "Title List" at top right or on "Show All" at left of screen.
JSTOR
Huge collection of full-text articles in back issues of journals in most subject areas. Review dates and journals included by subject and alphabetically.
Literary Reference Center
A comprehensive database of information on thousands of authors and their works across literary disciplines and timeframes. Contains thousands of plot summaries, synopses, work overviews, literary criticism articles/essays, author biographies and interviews, literary journals, book reviews, classic and contemporary poems and short stories, classic texts, and much more. Also includes a wide range of leading encyclopedias and other works in literary studies.
Literature Resource Center
Literature Resource Center provides access to biographies, bibliographies, and critical analyses of authors from every age and literary discipline. Combining Gale Group's core literary databases in a single online service, the Literature Resource Center covers novelists, poets, essayists, journalists, and other writers, with in-depth coverage of the most-studied authors.
OmniFile Full Text, Mega Edition
Provides indexing, abstracts, and full text for journals in almost all subject areas.
Oxford English Dictionary (OED)
The Oxford English Dictionary is the accepted authority on the evolution of the English language over the last millennium. It is an unsurpassed guide to the meaning, history, and pronunciation of over half a million words, both present and past. It traces the usage of words through millions of quotations from a wide range of international English language sources, from classic literature and specialist periodicals to film scripts and cookery books.
Oxford Reference
(number of simultaneous users is limited)
Oxford Reference combines quick reference coverage of the full subject spectrum with the rich resources of the Oxford Companions from ready-reference to comprehensive scholarly articles. See the titles in Oxford Reference.
Additional Tools
Reference Universe
Reference Universe is a meta-search engine for many of the library's reference books, both online and print. Reference Universe searches the complete index of each reference book. Searches return a hit for every relevant index entry, as well as the title and call number for every reference book containing a hit.
EndNote Web
Introduction & Instructions; Create an account off-campus with PC.
EndNote is a Web-based bibliography and database manager that allows users to create their own personal database by importing references from text files or online databases. They can use these references in writing their papers and automatically format the paper and the bibliography in seconds.
