The Henslowe-Alleyn Digitisation Project, http://www.henslowe-alleyn.org.uk, was launched in November 2009, making available online at no cost the most important single archive of manuscripts on professional theatre and dramatic performance in early modern England, the age of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, Middleton, Heywood, Dekker, Chettle, and so many of their contemporaries.

This electronic archive and website has just been updated to offer easier access to high-quality digital images of over 2000 manuscript pages at Dulwich College of Philip Henslowe and the great actor Edward Alleyn, including:

–every page of Henslowe’s world-famous ‘Diary’, recording box-office receipts and payments to dramatists, actors, censors, costumers and theatre personnel
–every page of Alleyn’s 1616-1622 Diary, itemising every daily expense for goods, materials, labour, travel, legal matters, food and drink
–The contract to build the Fortune playhouse and the deed of partnership to build the Rose playhouse
–The only surviving actor’s ‘part’ or script of the age of Shakespeare
–One of only five extant backstage ‘plots’ of the age
–A complete manuscript text of the play The Telltale showing the typical layout and style of dramatic manuscripts of the age
–Ben Jonson’s autograph manuscript of two poems
–Alleyn’s draft letter to his father-in-law John Donne
–hundreds of pages of deeds, letters patent, leases, receipts, and bills, as well as correspondence among Henslowe, Alleyn and political and religious leaders.

Also included are succinct essays by leading scholars on fifteen of the most important documents. For example, Prof. Susan Cerasano and Julian Bowsher, senior archaeologist at the Museum of London, discuss how the excavations at the Rose playhouse site in London have changed our views of early modern playhouses: http://www.henslowe-alleyn.org.uk/essays/rosecontract.html

We hope to add transcripts of documents and a searchable index soon. We believe that, even at this stage, this project will be of interest not only to specialist scholars but to all those interested in early modern English drama and theatre history, as well as in social, economic, regional, architectural and legal history, palaeography and manuscript studies.

Grace Ioppolo
Director, Henslowe-Alleyn Digitisation Project