About

Welcome to the Patrons and Performances website!

Professional performers of all kinds in England and Wales toured to provincial towns, monasteries and private residences before 1642. The Records of Early English Drama (REED) project is discovering fresh evidence about medieval and renaissance entertainment for publication in volumes for all English, Scottish and Welsh counties.

The REED Patrons and Performances website is designed to include a wide range of data about professional performers on tour in the provinces – their patrons, the performance venues they used and the routes they took across the kingdom.

Most of the data relating to the published REED collections, including the latest, Civic London to 1558, is now uploaded. Please see ‘Present Data Coverage’ for more details.

Users can tag records of interest and print or email them. After tagging individual records, click the ‘Tagged Record’ link at the top of the Web Site’s homepage to see a list of all the records you have tagged.

Please note that recommended citation of data from the website is REED: Patrons and Performances (REED: P & P).

Keep watching! We are currently working on the Staffordshire county collection's patrons, events and troupes, to be linked directly with this site from REED Online (https://ereed.library.utoronto.ca).