Research Guides: Theater: Find Plays and Monologues

Find Playscripts

E-Z Borrow
Search nearby libraries for books that are either currently unavailable or not owned by Temple. Available copies may be requested online and should be ready for pick-up within 3-5 work days.

WorldCat This link opens in a new window
WorldCat allows you search the collections of libraries in your community and thousands more around the world

CRL Catalog
Search the Center for Research Libraries' vast collections of books, newspapers, microforms, journals, foreign dissertations, and other materials, and request items via ILLIAD.

Find Playscripts Online

Lady Macbeth Puck

American Drama (1714-1915) This link opens in a new window
Provides full-text to playscripts of over 1,500 American plays, representing both richness and diversity of the writing. Exhaustive coverage of African American drama to 1915. Includes melodramas, farces, naturalist and realist drama, social and domestic satires and comedies, frontier plays, Civil War drama, Little Theatre Movement, verse drama, dialogues and rhetorical exercises, temperance plays and dialogues, minstrel shows, and adaptations of Shakespeare.
Film Scripts Online This link opens in a new window
Provides written scripts to 1,000 feature-length films that are award-winners, critically acclaimed, historically or sociologically significant.
Black Drama This link opens in a new window
Black Drama contains the full text plays written from the mid-1800s to the present by playwrights from North America, English-speaking Africa, the Caribbean, and other African diaspora countries. This collection also includes previously unpublished plays by writers such as Langston Hughes, Ed Bullins, Willis Richardson, Femi Euba, Amiri Baraka, Randolph Edmonds, Zora Neale Hurston, and many others.
Black Drama: Second Edition This link opens in a new window
Black Drama, Second contains plays by playwrights, together with detailed, fielded information on related productions, theaters, production companies, and more. The database also includes selected playbills, production photographs and other ephemera related to the plays.
Drama Online This link opens in a new window
Drama Online is a digital library of plays from Aeschylus to the present day. It also includes analysis, contextual information, A-Z reference and practical texts.
Early American Imprints, Series I: Evans (1639-1800) This link opens in a new window
Concurrent user limit: unlimited
Early American Imprints, Series I: Evans (1639-1800) Provides full-text access to books, pamphlets and broadsides printed in America from 1639-1800. This database includes works located, catalogued and digitized since the completion of the earlier microfilmed set, Early American Imprints, 1639-1800, which was also based on Charles Evans' American Bibliography.
Early American Imprints, Series II: Shaw-Shoemaker (1801-1819) This link opens in a new window
Concurrent user limit: unlimited
Early American Imprints, Series II: Shaw-Shoemaker (1801-1819) Provides full-text access to books, pamphlets, and broadsides published in America from 1801 through 1819. It also contains state papers and government materials, including published reports; presidential letters and messages, congressional, state and territorial resolutions.
Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) This link opens in a new window
Concurrent user limit: unlimited
Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) is a digital edition of The Eighteenth Century microfilm set, which includes English-language and foreign-language titles printed in the United Kingdom, along with works from the Americas, between 1701 and 1800. Consists of books, pamphlets, broadsides, ephemera.
Early English Books Online (EEBO) This link opens in a new window
Concurrent user limit: unlimited
Early English Books Online (EEBO) contains page images of every work printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and British North America and works in English printed elsewhere from 1473–1700.
English Drama (1280-1915) This link opens in a new window
English Drama contains plays in verse and prose from the late thirteenth century - the likely date of the Shrewsbury Fragments - to the early twentieth. It offers coverage of the dramatic literature of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, as well as Restoration plays, medieval morality plays and mystery cycles, and nineteenth-century closet dramas.
Latin American Women Writers This link opens in a new window
Latin American Women Writers contains literature by Latin American women from the colonial period in the 17th century forward to the present. The database presents the works in their original languages and includes literary works, memoirs, letters, and essays.
Latino Literature This link opens in a new window
Latino Literature contains pages of poetry, fiction, and plays written in English and Spanish by Chicano, Cuban, Puerto Rican, Dominican, and other Latino authors working in the United States.
Literature Online (LION) This link opens in a new window
Provides full-text of plays as well as links to relevant journal articles and reference works.

Project Gutenberg
"the first producer of free electronic books (ebooks)."

Twentieth Century North American Drama This link opens in a new window
Twentieth Century North American Drama contains the full text of plays as well as related productions, theaters, and production companies, and selected playbills, production photographs and other related ephemera. Each play is indexed, allowing both keyword and multi-fielded searching.

Sites for Monologues

In addition to the library's online catalog and databases, there are sites that are helpful in finding monologues. Here are a few.

Actorama
A searchable database of over 500 monologues.
Colin's Movie monologue Page
Monologue Archives
Monologues from classic plays.
Monologue Directory
From Actorpoint.
Shakespeare's Monologues

Find Monologues Online

Cleopatra Olivia Sanger, monologue artist Richard III

How To Find Monologues

1. You can just search monologues in Library Search, directly from the library's home page. If you already know the play that contains the monologue that you want, then you can find the play in Temple's Library Search for Books .
2. You can ask for the monologue collection which is on permanent reserve at the Library’s Circulation Desk. (not available Fall 2020).
3. Search monologue in "Black Drama", "Black Drama Second Edition" or "Twentieth Century North American Drama".

4. Drama Online also has a monologue search. Click on "Plays" and near the upper right there is a red link "Find monologues".