The Records of Early English Drama is pleased to announce a new open access resource for teaching, research, and further development. The Rose
Playhouse Prototype, edited by Sally-Beth MacLean, is an integrated digital edition of historical records relating to Philip Henslowe's Rose playhouse, the first of its kind on the south bank of the Thames. The text is linked with
images of original manuscript sources from the London Metropolitan Archives and The National Archives, Kew, as well as with relevant images on the Henslowe-Alleyn Digitisation Project website. Appendix 1, 'Early Little Rose Property Records,' with an
introduction and full transcriptions, has been contributed by William Ingram. The records, historical introduction, and notes include links to other open access datasets such as The
Token Books of St Saviour Southwark and the Lost Plays Database. The prototype is intended to stimulate interest in the production of London area playhouse
editions for the REED series.
The Rose Playhouse Prototype is now available on REED
Online at https://ereed.library.utoronto.ca and https://ereed.library.utoronto.ca/collections/rosep/.
Byron Moldofsky, the cartographer, has developed a historically-informed GIS map of Southwark and the Bankside
in the context of the wider pre-1642 London area interoperable with locations named in the Rose Playhouse text. A
complementary proof of concept Rose Playhouse Timeline Demo has been uploaded to the REED Project website, also linked to records in the Rose Playhouse Prototype edition.
At a future stage, funding permitting, we plan to add a user interface that will include a timeline widget to allow users to highlight and/or track changes to features referred to in
the records over the active lifespan of the Rose playhouse. Features such as contemporary roads and lanes, polygons delimiting property boundaries, identifiable sewer lines, and layers to indicate manor, ward, and parish boundaries will then be accessible
as the user requests.
The timeline demo is now available at https://reed.utoronto.ca/rose-playhouse-timeline-demo/
