LibGuides: FMT 330AD/English 367AD: Adaptation: Finding Reviews


Library Research Guides

Specialized databases

The World Shakespeare Bibliography

The World Shakespeare Bibliography is a great database for identifying productions of Shakespeare's The Tempest and it can help lead you to reviews and promotional materials. Some search tips:

Click on Search & Browse, then on Advanced Search to get to the Advanced Search screen.
Enter the title of the play (e.g., "The Tempest" or "Une tempête" or "A Tempest") in the "Words in title" box, and use the Document Type menu to select "Production." You can also use the "Year (earliest) to Year (latest)" boxes to put in a year range (you'll probably want to for The Tempest - there have been lots of productions of Shakespeare's plays!).
Results are list of productions. Click on a result title for brief info about the production. Important information to copy down: the director, the year, and the venue (theater). You can use this information to search for reviews of the production in other databases and potentially to find some promotional materials on the web. Results for more recent productions may even have a Reviews section listing articles that you can look up in Discover. Really recent ones may even have links to the full text of the reviews if they're freely available online.

World Shakespeare Bibliography Online
World Shakespeare Bibliography Online is a searchable electronic database consisting of Shakespeare-related scholarship and theatrical productions published or produced worldwide between 1960 to the present.

Article databases

Discover and ProQuest News and Newspapers

Theater production reviews appear in both scholarly and popular periodical sources. Discover searches multiple databases that cover both kinds of sources. It doesn't always do a great job of searching the many subscription news databases that the library subscribes to through ProQuest, so you may also want to search ProQuest News & Newspapers separately to find more reviews from newspapers. Some search tips:

If you don't have a particular production in mind, search the name of the playwright and title of the play. Use the database's filters to limit your results to just reviews.
If you do have a particular production in mind, search the title of the play and the name of the director. Use the database's filters to limit your results to just reviews.

Discover
A combined database that simultaneously searches the Five College Libraries Catalog and the majority of our subject-specific databases. Tips: click on Advanced Search to get to an advanced search screen. After you run your search, go to the Refine Results column on the left side of the page, find the Source Types section and select "Reviews" to limit your results to reviews.

Search the library catalog only (enter search terms and then limit) or dozens of databases together. A great place to start your research on almost any topic.
ProQuest News & Newspapers
Gives access to thousands of newspapers and articles. Search tips: click on Advanced Search to get to the Advanced Search screen. After you run your search, in the column on the left side of the page find the Document Type menu and select "Review."

The Times of London

These two databases use the same search interface. Tips for using them to find reviews of plays:

Click on Advanced Search
Enter the title of the play and playwright name in the search boxes provided
Scroll down to the "by document type" menu and select Review
Click on Search

Times London (The Times London)
Full text of the back issues of The Times (London) from 1785 to 2010.
Sunday Times (London)
Full text of the back issues of the Sunday Times (London) from 1822 to 2006.

The web

Google

You can also try searching for reviews on the Web using Google. Some search tips:

If you don't have a specific production in mind, search on the title of the play, playwright's name, and the term review (e.g., william shakespeare the tempest review).
If you do have a specific production in mind, search on the title of the play and the director's name.
When looking through results, try to stick to news and magazine web sites (publications) rather than, for example, someone's personal blog. Using Google's News filter can help.

Google