This guide serves as a basic starting point to find key resources for studying and researching theater and drama at Princeton. It is maintained by Darwin F. Scott, Mendel Music Librarian and the Princeton University Library's subject liaison to the Music Department and the programs in Theater, Dance, and Music Theater in the Lewis Center for the Arts.
For almost all online searches, the spelling theater or theatre really matters and can drastically affect search results. Note these general guidelines of when to use one or the other.
• American practice (can be inconsistent):
Theater: standard spelling used in most U.S. academic writing and popular journalism about the discipline and productions, as well as the general term for the performance venue. Also the prescribed usage for subject descriptors in U.S.-based library catalogs and journal databases.
Theatre: spelling often found in titles of companies, institutes, performance houses, journals, and websites (e.g., Signature Theatre, Schubert Theatre, New York City Theatre—note, however, Anspacher Theater, American Repertory Theater, and many other exceptions; in publisher and distributor names (Applause Theatre, Theatre Communications Group); and in academic and arts-focused writing to express the collective art form (e.g., "the American theatre," "theatre arts," "theatre and performance studies").
• British & Canadian practice: theatre for all contexts (including titles of books issued jointly in the U.S. and the U.K., such as the Oxford and Cambridge university presses, and several others).
• Subject search in library catalog or database: use theater for all contexts (unless working in a Canadian or British resource or catalog), even if the title of the publication has "theatre." Tip: a truncation search on theat* will retrieve results on both spellings, plus the plural forms and the adjective "theatrical."
All books cited in this guide are available in either electronic or printed form, with some in both options. To connect to an e-book, click the citation link, and then click on the link under Online in the catalog record, which leads to the book on a publisher or vendor website. In most cases, access is available only to authorized Princeton users. To locate printed books in the Mendel collection, click on "Where to find it" beneath "Location" in the catalog record. E-books sometimes bear dates later than the print but do not necessarily offer corrected or revised texts of the print version.
