An updated Database of Early English Playbooks: DEEP 2.0

Was Shakespeare the most famous dramatist of his day? Zachary Lesser, Edward W. Kane Professor of English in the School of Arts & Sciences, 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."

"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.

This story is by Judy Hill. Read more at Omnia.