“What Was Theatre in 1609?” aims to build a digital archive of the theatrical artistry associated with each of the approximately 131 surviving plays that English courtier Sir John Harington collected and listed in his family miscellany in 1609. An exceedingly rare document, Harington’s list provides scholars with the opportunity to take the measure of early modern English theatre from the perspective of a living witness (one who happened to be an active theatregoer and amateur critic to boot). Given the wide range of authors and genres he tallies, the results of this audit are bound to diverge significantly from the general understanding of what the stage comprised, both as a practice and as a concept, by the end of the first decade of the 17th century.

Using the Harington corpus as its basis, the project will produce the first digital collection of early modern English theatricality. Built in OCHRE, the University of Chicago’s in-house research platform, the database will capture and catalogue theatrical "bits," using illustrations, sound files, textual extracts, and material objects to evidence how they were performed. To best serve the Shakespearean stage’s many publics, the web interface will be designed for optimal searchability and linked to an extensive digital index. The plays that Harington collected will serve as a textual backdrop, while each unit of theatrical content will be rendered in a printable, trading card format that plays on a museum’s placard-and-vitrine display.