The Records of Early English Drama (REED) is a performance history research project, based at the University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
REED's primary focus is to locate, transcribe, edit, and publish historical documents from England, Wales, and Scotland containing evidence of drama, secular music, and other communal entertainment and mimetic ceremony from the late Middle Ages until 1642, when the Puritans closed the London public theatres.
REED is also engaged in creating a collection of free digital resources for research and education including Patrons and Performances[2][3] (2003) and Early Modern London Theatres[4] (2011).
[6] Johnston also met Margaret Dorrell, an Australian graduate student at the University of Leeds, who was working on a similar project related to the York records; the two women decided to collaborate.
[7] The idea of a scholarly publishing project to find, transcribe, and edit documentary evidence of performance arose from these meetings and was met with interest by the individual researchers and their academic communities.
EMLoT gathers documents related to professional theatres north and south of the Thames up to 1642 and bibliographic information about their subsequent transcriptions, documenting how scholars “got [their] information about the early theatres, from whom and when.”[17] In 2016, to mark the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death, REED collaborated with the BBC and The British Library to produce an ongoing public website titled Shakespeare on Tour.