Fortune Theatre Records Prototype Digital Edition

(Detail of the Edward Alleyn stained-glass window in St Giles Cripplegate, 

showing a representation of the Fortune Theatre. Source:  (image file) Wikimedia Commons (external link) )

REED published its first print collection in 1979 and its last in 2015. In 2017, it published its first formal digital collection (external link) , a reenvisioning of REED’s research output that had been started with The Fortune Theatre Records: A Prototype Digital Edition. REED’s non-London print collections have been digitized and are available on Internet Archive. The published London collections have been digitally re-edited and are available on CWRC (Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory) as part of REED London Online (external link) . As of 2025, REED has published eight digital collections.

The Fortune Theatre Records: A Prototype Digital Edition featured a representative range of dramatic records that pertained to the Fortune Theatre on Golding Lane, north of the London City wall. The Fortune was built in 1600 and operated until the mid-17th century. The prototype project took this modest and coherent subset of London‐area REED research materials that had already been collected (by Jessica Freeman, the then REED Middlesex/Westminster collection editor) but that was not yet in REED’s established print-based editorial process and used them to develop and explore new protocols, workflows, data formats, and software that

would support more ambitious work in the future. This set of records served as a useful sample for the development of a new online production environment, the exploration and implementation of TEI markup of complex historical texts, the indexing of entities for faceted searching, and the linking of this data to related data in REED’s open access websites Patrons and Performances and Early Modern London Theatres.

Jason Boyd (Associate Professor, Department of English), who had come to TMU in August 2011 from a role as Senior Research Associate and Digital Projects Manager at REED, developed the customization of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange (P5 version) (external link)  for the edition and also acted as the edition’s TEI Editor. The design and implementation of the prototype digital edition was documented in a White Paper, which also included the TEI customization (Appendix C. Guidelines for REED at-codes Application and TEI P5 Markup). The White Paper can be accessed on Humanities Commons (external link) . 

The Fortune Theatre Records: A Prototype Digital Edition website was hosted by the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London (DDH-KCL) until 2018. From the outset of the project, the expectation had been that the hosting responsibility would eventually be transferred to REED; however, REED did not relaunch the website once the DDH-KCL had taken it offline, as it had already published its first digital collection in 2017 on REED Online (external link) .

One can still view The Fortune Theatre Records website via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, although the records are not accessible; however, a zip file of the TEI-XML version of the records and associated materials can still be downloaded from the ‘About’ page (external link) . In the unzipped folder, the records can be found via FortuneDirectory→fortunetheatre→tei→ records, and TEI templates and various XSLT conversion scripts are in the ‘tools’ subfolder. The materials in the zip file are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (external link) .

Screenshots of The Fortune Theatre Records website (via the Wayback Machine):

(Home page)

(About page, containing download link for Fortune Theatre TEI-XML records)

(Team and Sponsor page)

(Search landing page, showing the first 15 of the full list of 217 records, and the faceted search interface on the left)