The Play(book)’s the Thing

Was Shakespeare the most famous dramatist of his day? Zachary Lesser, Edward W. Kane Professor of English, often poses this question to students in his Introduction to Shakespeare class. One way to generate an answer is to consult the Database of Early English Playbooks (DEEP), which Lesser co-created more than 20 years ago.

An interactive catalogue of every printed play produced in England, Scotland, and Ireland from the time when printing first began through 1660, DEEP—which first went online in 2007—has recently been revised and relaunched as DEEP 2.0, with support from Penn’s Price Lab for Digital Humanities.

To tackle that Shakespeare question, explains Lesser, a student can go into DEEP and set parameters to list all the editions of Shakespeare’s plays published from when he started working in the theater through his death in 1616. A few more keystrokes reveal whether there was another dramatist who had more editions printed, when Shakespeare’s name first started appearing on title pages, and how often he was named compared to other dramatists.

“You can trace that over time,” says Lesser, “and that provides an index to his growing fame.”

Lesser first contemplated developing a database of Early English playbooks in 1999 with fellow graduate student Alan Farmer, when they were both at Columbia University. “We started the project in Excel, hand-entering data because there was no digital resource available,” says Lesser. “Much of the information in that first version was already available in hard-copy bibliographies, but the book format made it impossible to search in the ways we wanted to.”

Soon, Lesser and Farmer found that fellow graduate students—and some professors—had questions their spreadsheet database could help answer, and they decided to make it publicly available. When Lesser joined Penn in 2006, he received funding to hire two undergraduate programmers to move the database online.

“DEEP is an incredible resource for book historians,” says Whitney Trettien, Associate Professor of English and the Price Lab’s Faculty Director. “It goes beyond the typical library catalogue, which might just list title, author, and date of publication, to help us see below the surface, identifying new patterns in the Early Modern book trade.”

The new DEEP is faster and more streamlined than the original version and includes new search capabilities, as well as updates to the data itself based on the latest research into Early Modern theater and book history. DEEP 2.0 is very much still DEEP, though, Lesser says, with all the features that have made it beloved by researchers over the years.

Among the questions it has helped address, says Trettien, is the significance of black letter type, the Gothic font often found in old books. “Some have argued that black letter—as opposed to a more familiar serif font like Times New Roman—hews more closely to nostalgic or vernacular traditions,” says Trettien, “because ephemeral works that were shared in taverns and on the streets, like songs, broadsides, and ballads, are often printed in black letter.” By including the field “black letter” in the dataset itself, she adds, DEEP allows scholars to address this question more systemically.

As a book historian, Trettien is also interested in the role of paratext in the Early Modern printed book, and again, DEEP can help solve those problems. “If you’re looking at a printed copy of a play,” she explains, “it will contain the play itself, but it might also have a dedication or notes by the publisher or even poems written by friends of the playwright, commending the playwright for how amazing his work is.” These paratexts tell us something about how the play circulated within the print world, she says, and DEEP tracks them all.

DEEP is an incredible resource for book historians. It goes beyond the typical library catalogue, which might just list title, author, and date of publication, to help us see below the surface.

Then there’s the notion of whether plays performed in indoor theaters differed from those performed outdoors. Scholars have argued that because indoor theaters cost more for customers to attend—and were therefore perceived as more prestigious—the plays staged in them catered to a different clientele. DEEP allows for a search of every play that names a specific type of theater on its title page; users can then find which playwrights appear most frequently alongside that type of theater, or whether they are named with an indication of high status, like “Gentleman” or Esquire.”

In essence, Lesser says, DEEP enables researchers to “very quickly get answers to questions that can then spark months of research.”

With 1,921 total records, DEEP is modest in size compared to the English Short-Title Catalog (ESTC) housed at the British Library, which is the primary database of all printed material in England in the Renaissance. “ESTC I would call broad but shallow,” says Lesser, “whereas ours is narrow but deep, so it works very well in tandem with others.”

For the first decade of DEEP’s online life, Lesser and Farmer frequently updated the database with additions and corrections, often prompted by user suggestions. Security problems with the site in 2017 essentially froze the database and blocked the researchers’ ability to edit the content. That, coupled with the fact that the field had evolved during the site’s lifetime, led Lesser and Farmer to conclude that a full overhaul was in order.

Keeping the project within Penn was critical to its success, says Lesser, who worked closely with Andy Janco, a research software engineer in Penn’s Research Data and Digital Scholarship group, to develop the revamped site. “As with any kind of scholarly collaboration, communication is crucial to getting it done,” says Lesser. “You need to find a developer who can speak your language—understanding what humanities faculty are doing and why they might want to do it—and teach you how to speak their language. That’s what we found with Andy.”

Some of the site’s changes allow for more granular searches—drilling down into instances of two different versions of one edition of a playbook, for example—while others address broader questions. “Let’s say you’re just wondering how many plays by, say, Richard Brome, made it into print,” explains Lesser. “You can click the ‘work’ view and get a list of all of his plays that survived in printed books.”

Beyond the minutiae of the update, what continues to distinguish DEEP, says Trettien, is its overall approach to the text. “I’m a book historian, not a Shakespearean,” she says, “but the way that this dataset thinks about the material text in relation to the social field in which it’s circulating is an inspiring model for other databases.”

As to whether Shakespeare was the most famous dramatist of his day? That, Lesser says, is still up for debate.