The largest collection of theatrical material in the John Hay Library is in the Harris Collection of American Poetry and Plays. The goal of this Collection is to acquire all American and Canadian poetry, drama, and vocal music, published at any time, in any place. Consequently, it is perhaps the largest collection of its kind in existence, with over 250,000 volumes.

Approximately 35,000 of these volumes are American and Canadian plays, dating from the 18th century to the present day. The oldest title in the entire Harris Collection, Les Muses de la Nouvelle France, by Marc Lescarbot, published in Paris in 1609, contains a pageant that was performed in Nova Scotia in 1606. Included in the Collection are 79% of the play titles published in America prior to 1830, as represented in Frank Pierce Hill's bibliography. Holdings of the acting text services are extensive, with long runs of the plays issued by such companies as A.D. Ames, Samuel French, Dramatists Play Service, Playwrights Canada, as well as plays published by the trade presses. Harris holds a nearly complete run of the plays of the Walter Baker Company; Mrs. Theodore Johnson, the widow of the president of the company, many years ago presented the collection with a complete run of publications. At present, standing order and approval arrangements bring in most of the material that is currently published, although finding titles published by small and private presses is always a challenge.

In addition to the play texts, the Collection includes a large group of vocal scores and selections from musical plays and comedies, dating back to the 19th century. There are in place arrangements with music dealers to acquire those currently published, and thus the collection is quite extensive. There are also large numbers of songsters (books of lyrics to popular songs), most published in the 19th century. Often these songsters were associated with particular performers, such as Harrigan and Hart or the Hutchinsons, so they provide one means of access to the repertoire of performers of the period. The music collection also contains numerous anthologies of composers' works, including many associated with the musical theatre, such as Gershwin, Berlin, and Porter. It is usually possible to find most of the songs of these composers somewhere in the Collection.

The Harris Collection does not particularly specialize in theatrical memorabilia, but, as with any collection of this size and age, there are all sorts of materials to be found in it. There are playbills and souvenir programs, mostly from the late 19th and the 20th centuries, scrapbooks, primarily made up by local theatre buffs of the same period, as well as theatre histories and reference books. Published radio plays, television scripts, and motion picture scripts have also been collected, and there is a small amount of memorabilia associated with these forms in the Collection as well.

One particular aspect of the Collection should be mentioned. The Harris Collection has a fine collection of texts from the Yiddish-language theatre in New York at the turn of the century. These texts, mostly in Yiddish, represent works by most of the best known writers for that theatre, and include musical works as well as straight drama. The Collection, based on that amassed by a New York dealer and collector, Menache Vaxer, includes much manuscript material that can provide many very rewarding research topics.

See Also:

Music
Songsters
Yiddish-American Literature
Sources for the Study of 19th and 20th Century Blackface Minstrelsy

In addition to the Harris Collection, theatre materials are to be found in the Asa Cushman Collection, Sheet Music Collections, the Broadsides Collection, and the Manuscripts Collections, the Sidney Albert George Bernard Shaw Collection, the H. Adrian Smith Collection of Conjuring Books and Magicana, and scattered throughout the remainder of the rare book collection in the John Hay Library. The Asa Cushman Collection consists of prompt books and plays in parts, from the collection of Asa Cushman, a mid-19th century actor-manager.

The Sheet Music Collection is one of the largest in the country, containing some 500,000 pieces of music. Most are of American imprint, and date from the late 18th century to the present, with the bulk of the collection dating from approximately 1840 to 1950. Approximately 35,000 pieces, filed by title, are of Broadway show music, or music from motion pictures, radio, and television. Another important segment of the collection, some 10,000 pieces, is the Afro-Americana. This segment includes much music from the 19th century minstrel stage and the turn of the century Black musical theatre. A small portion of this segment is fully cataloged, and available through Josiah, the Library's online catalog; the remainder is filed by title. 1,500 pieces of the cataloged Afro-Americana have been digitized as part of the Library of Congress' National Digital Library Program, American Memory, and are available in full-text as part of the Library's Center for Digital Initiatives. There is also a collection of 2,000 titles of Yiddish-American music, mostly published between 1880 and 1940, and much of it associated with the Yiddish musical theatre in New York at that period; it complements the collection of play texts and musical scores in the Harris Collection. The Yiddish sheet music is currently being digitized.

The Broadsides Collection includes copious numbers of slip ballads (lyrics to popular songs, mostly from the mid-19th century) and playbills and programs of all sorts. The Manuscript Collections include a number of individual collections with theatrical interest. Foremost is the Langdon Collection of Pageants. William Chauncey Langdon was founder and president of the American Pageant Association, which presented many community and organizational spectacles in the years prior to World War I. Holdings include Langdon's scripts, photographs, notes, music, and ephemera for the pageants with which he was associated, along with notes, clippings, and texts for many other pageants in this country.

In addition, the Manuscript Collections include over 1,000 unpublished television scripts and over a hundred film scripts. Many of the film scripts are adaptations of stage plays, so that it is possible to examine the alterations that are made to a text in adapting it to film. Also included in the Manuscript Collection are the papers of Frances Herriott Sargent, including those concerned with the production of Porgy and Bess. The Tierney Collection adds extensive holdings of theatrical memorabilia, in the form of posters, playbills, autographed photographs, scripts, tickets, and publicity materials for local and regional theatrical and variety performances of the past fifty years.

The George Bernard Shaw Collection includes correspondence, programs, editions of Shaw's works, a large number of biographical and critical works relating to Shaw, along with a considerable number of works dealing with his contemporaries and associates, both in the theatre and in relation to other interests. There are photographs, costume designs, recordings, stills and lobby cards from films of Shaw's plays, publications of Shavian societies, translations and many other items, allowing for very extensive research on Shaw's life and times.

The H. Adrian Smith Collection of Conjuring and Magicana is composed of over 10,000 items on the art, theory, and history of magic as a performing art, including books, serials, pamphlets, posters, broadsides, playbills, catalogues, prints and engravings, photographs and ephemera, along with some magical apparatus and other museum pieces. Included are approximately 500 extremely rare or scarce magic books, dating from the sixteenth century.

There are, in addition, theatrical materials scattered throughout all the other collections in the John Hay Library. The Archives contains records of performances at Brown University throughout the years; the Lincoln Collection includes plays about Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War; the H.P. Lovecraft Collection includes scripts and plays based on Lovecraft's works. The John Hay Library is thus the repository of an enormous quantity of theatrical materials, largely focusing on American theatre and drama from the seventeenth century to the present day.

The Orwig Music Library contains many supportive and general materials related to American musical theatre. Circulating copies of play texts, and general biographical and historical supportive material related to American theatre and drama may also be found in the Rockefeller Library.