FMT 330AD/English 367AD: Adaptation

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 a 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.

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.

The Times of London

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.