The Social Network of Early English Drama: A Digital Humanities Lesson Plan

The Folger Shakespeare Library\u27s recently launched Digital Anthology of Early Modern English Drama (EMED) provides searchable, TEI-encoded, digital editions of 403 English plays first staged in London between1576 and 1642. A central task for participants at the Folger\u27s 2016 summer workshop Beyond Access: Early Modern Digital Texts in the Classroom was to devise pedagogical uses for the Digital Anthology. Our team focused on the metadata that the editors of the anthology attached to each play—its chronology, author, printer, publisher, and the theater company that initially staged it—in order to foreground an aspect of these dramas that is crucial yet very difficult to teach at the undergraduate level: the social network in which they took shape as both performances and texts