DEEP: Database of Early English Playbooks

This is an archived version of DEEP. For the current version, with updated data, please visit https://deepplaybooks.org/

DEEP Update History

As new features are added to DEEP, they will be highlighted here, along with any other important announcements. A history of all major changes can be found below the horizontal rule.


7/15/2016: DEEP data now available for download, see here. You are free to use the data underlying DEEP according to a Creative Commons license BY-NC-SA. We ask that you also contact us to inform us of the use you make of the data.

7/1/2016: All DEEP records now have permanent URLs, of the form http://deep.sas.upenn.edu/[DEEP#]
The first quarto of Hamlet, e.g., is http://deep.sas.upenn.edu/347 — you can thus search by DEEP # simply by entering the URL.

6/14/2016: DEEP #s have been updated and rationalized. The DEEP #s for single-play playbooks now run in sequence by play, chronologically from the date of the first edition. The DEEP #s for Collections begin at 5000, and Plays in Collection take the DEEP # of their collection, followed by a decimal value indicating their placement in the collection. Click here to download a spreadsheet that cross-indexes the old DEEP #s to the current ones.

7/27/15: The dates of publication and printers for several playbooks published before 1560 have been updated to reflect changes suggested by Peter Blayney in The Stationers' Company and the Printers of London, 1501-1557, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013), Appendix K, vol. 2, pp. 1027-71. The plays affected by these changes include Hycke Scorner (Greg 3), The Summoning of Everyman (Greg 4), Magnificence (Greg 11), The Play of the Weather (Greg 15), A Play of Love (Greg 16), Somebody, Avarice, and Minister (Greg 25), John the Evangelist (Greg 26), Lusty Juventus (Greg 41), and Jacob and Esau (Greg 51).

9/16/14: Plays in the "Beaumont and Fletcher canon" have been updated to reflect the author attributions in Fredson Bowers, gen. ed., The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, vol. 10 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996), 751-52, except where these have been superseded by Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino, with MacDonald P. Jackson, John Jowett, Valerie Wayne, and Adrian Weiss, eds., Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture: A Companion to the Collected Works (Oxford: Clarendon, 2007).

1/6/09: Search by Imprint Location (the location of any bookshop named on the title page) is now available in Advanced Search.

1/6/09: Search by Paratextual Material in Advanced Search now breaks out both Explicit and Errata as options.

1/6/09: Expanded display has been modified: if a colophon is present, it now appears under Stationer Information; Imprint Location has been added to Stationer Information; and Company of First Production and Company Attribution (both for professional companies only) have been added to Reference Information.

11/25/08: The Bibliographic Sources for DEEP have been moved into their own section of the website, and information on sources has been removed from the section on How to Use DEEP.

9/25/08: Search by the company that originally performed a play -- Company (First Production) -- is now available in Advanced Search.

7/25/08: Search by Format is now available in Advanced Search, and the Edition Number search now allows you to search for all "Second-plus" editions as well as individual edition numbers.

7/21/08: Modern-spelling search of All Title-Page Text is now available in Advanced Search.

11/04/07: DEEP begins beta-testing. Beta-testing is the process whereby electronic resources are tested by a small group of users to discover any bugs and to alert the creators to any necessary changes, before the site is made available to the wider public. Please explore the website and, if you see any errors or have any suggestions for improvements, let us know by using the Contact Us form.