About the Project

About the Project

(Grace Ioppolo)

The Henslowe-Alleyn Papers, Past, Present and Future

For over two hundred and fifty years, most of the Henslowe-Alleyn papers remained
unbound and stored in the chest in which they had lain since the founding of the
College by Edward Alleyn in 1619. Many individual documents, both large and
small, were left in their original condition: folded up into small packets (a
form of storage which preceded the use of envelopes). The volume comprising
Henslowe’s Diary began to be borrowed from the library during the 18th and 19th
centuries by the scholars Edmond Malone, John Payne Collier, and J. O.
Halliwell-Phillips, among others. In fact, during this time, some of its pages
were removed or otherwise destroyed (fragments have since been sold or auctioned
and are now at the British Library, Bodleian Library, Belvoir Castle, and the Folger Shakespeare
Library). In the early 19th century, staff at Dulwich were successful in
reclaiming the play The Telltale and the plot of the
Second Part of the Seven Deadly Sins from an auction, but over the
years many other items were dispersed (and have not yet been definitively
identified), including about one hundred play manuscripts and a number of
printed books bequeathed to the College in 1687 by the actor and bibliophile
William Cartwright the younger.

In the 1870s, the Governors of Dulwich College asked George Warner, an expert at
the British Museum, to catalogue the manuscripts. Warner spent many years
assessing the contents of the archive as he found it, expertly opening,
repairing and ordering the documents in the archive, finally having them bound
into a set of 36 volumes which he named the ‘Alleyn Papers’. He left the
muniments, some of which are extremely large in size, unbound. In 1881, he
published The Catalogue of the Manuscripts and Muniments of Alleyn’s
College of God’s Gift at Dulwich (London: Longmans, Green, and Co.).
Further discoveries at the archive were listed by Francis Bickley in the Second
Series of The Catalogue of the Manuscripts and Muniments of Alleyn’s
College of God’s Gift at Dulwich (London: privately printed, 1903).

Half of these manuscript volumes and most of the muniments concern the private
affairs and non-theatrical businesses of the Henslowe and Alleyn families, as
well as the history of Dulwich College since its inception. It is the other half
of these volumes, representing the theatrical affairs of Henslowe and Alleyn,
that are the subject of this website and electronic archive.

Less than half of the theatrical items in the Henslowe-Alleyn Papers have ever
been transcribed, and these transcriptions are largely available only in
out-of-print editions. R. A. Foakes’s 1977 photographic facsimile edition of two
volumes of manuscripts (The Henslowe Papers) had a limited
printing and only covers 20% of the relevant archive. The 2002 reprinting of
Foakes’s standard 1961 edition of Henslowe's Diary (Cambridge
University Press) has widely encouraged scholars to pursue other material in the
Dulwich archive. The archive is of value also to Museum of London
archaeologists, who are now using new technology, such as radar scanning, to
examine the original sites in Southwark and Shoreditch of various early modern
playhouses, including the Theatre, the Globe, and the Rose, and who are radically
re-evaluating their data about the building of these playhouses. Although
transcriptions of the over 2200 pages of manuscripts are not yet available in
this electronic archive and website, the members of the Henslowe-Alleyn
Digitisation Project hope that making the manuscripts themselves available as
photographic images will encourage further study and use of this very rich
resource not just by literary, theatrical and manuscripts scholars, economic, social and regional historians
and archaeologists but students, actors, directors and other theatre
personnel, as well as all members of the general population of readers who are interested
in the greatest age of English professional drama and theatrical production.

This Project is designed for research purposes only. For reasons of copyright,
images and content are not downloadable from the website or the electronic
archive, nor can any material be used, copied, circulated or reproduced in any
format without permission and acknowledgement. The copyright of all the
manuscripts in the Alleyn Papers belongs to the Governors of Dulwich College.
For digital photographs or reproductions of any of the manuscripts, for
permissions to reproduce them in any format, or for more information about the
manuscript photography, the website and electronic archive, please use see
Copyrights, Reproductions and Permissions.

The Project has been graciously supported by grants from The Leverhulme Trust,
The British Academy, The Thriplow Charitable Trust, The Pilgrim Trust, the Henry
E. Huntington Library, the Folger Shakepeare Library, the British and American
Bibliographical Societies, and The University of Reading, for which the members
of the Project remain very grateful.