In February 2011, the Records of Early English Drama project launched a new open access website, titled Early Modern London Theatres, now easily searchable on the web by its acronym ‘emlot’. The Early Modern London Theatres project was produced by an international team of scholars and digital experts, collaborating in happy partnership under the direction of John McGavin, the PI for a major Arts and Humanities Research Council grant for Phase 1: ‘Eight Theatres North of the Thames’. As such, it set a model for REED's further evolution as a web-based research, educational, and publication project, establishing effective means of communication and governance for collaboration and digital innovation among contributors, enabled by the internet age to achieve their common purpose at otherwise farflung locations.

EMLoT aims to locate, assess, and digest all published transcriptions of documents relating to professional performance in purpose-built theatres and inns in the London area before 1642. Rather than offer transcriptions of the documents themselves, EMLoT seeks to identify all published sources, assess the conventions according to which they have been transcribed and edited, and furnish abstracts of each record. EMLoT thus offers an overview of the historical and archival record, while also shedding light on the traditions of London theatre historiography.

EMLoT Phase 1 presented records relating to the eight Middlesex and Westminster theatres north of the Thames, including the Red Lion (1567), the Theatre (1576), the Curtain (1577), the Fortune (1600), the Boar's Head (1602), the Red Bull (1604), the Phoenix or Cockpit (1616), and Salisbury Court (1629), and also featured a Learning Zone, an educational module that draws on database records to introduce undergraduate students to the rudiments of bibliographical and historical research. Our current work on Phase 2 incorporates the theatres south of the Thames in the historic county of Surrey: Newington Butts (1570s), the Rose (1587), the Swan (1595), Globe I and II (1599, 1614), and the Hope (1614), as well as the bearbaiting arena(s) in the same area. Now marking the half-way point of the phase 2 research, we begin work on a new learning module that seeks both to engage student users with a fresh body of records, and to push the technological bounds of the earlier resource.