For the past seven years Colgate professor Susan Cerasano has been working on a project that aims to create the world’s most important digital archive on early modern English theater.
The first stage of this major scholarly endeavor is complete and now available.
Cerasano is a member of the advisory board for the Henslowe-Alleyn Digitization Project, which is led by a team of experts from King’s College London, The Museum of London, UCLA, and the University of Reading.
They all have been working on making the largest collection of manuscript material on professional theater and dramatic performance in the age of Shakespeare and many other leading playwrights available online.
These include the only surviving records of theater box office receipts for any play by Shakespeare, the 1600 contract to build the Fortune Theatre in London, and notes of payments to playwrights including Ben Jonson and Thomas Middleton.
The original collection, housed at the Dulwich College Archive in London, holds thousands of pages of manuscripts relating to its founder, the celebrated actor and entrepreneur Edward Alleyn (1566-1626), and of his father-in-law Philip Henslowe (d. 1616), the most successful theater impresario of the age.
Cerasano, chief academic consultant for the project, wrote biographies of Alleyn and Henslowe as well as three foundational essays for the website. She also helped plan and choose materials for the database.
“This project is an excellent example of how today’s technology can relate to historic documents,” she said. “It will not only make further study much more widely accessible, but also is critically important for conservation purposes.”
She pointed out that what is available today is just the first phase of the digitization project. When complete, Cerasano believes it will be of the magnitude of the Medici Archive Project.
Cerasano has worked with the Dulwich College Archive for more than 20 years, and has written numerous essays on Henslowe and Alleyn. She authored biographies of both men for the New Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, one of the definitive historical sources in the United Kingdom, and is currently editing the diary of Alleyn for Oxford University Press.
The Edgar W.B. Fairchild Professor of literature, Cerasano has been a member of the English department at Colgate since 1981. She teaches courses in Shakespeare (and his contemporaries), drama, and Renaissance literature.