Primary Sources: Medieval and Renaissance Periods: Literature

Adding a further 20,000 poems to the original collection, English Poetry, Second Edition contains over 183,000 poems. Essentially comprising the complete canon of English poetry of the British Isles and the British Empire from the 8th century to the early 20th, its works are drawn from nearly 4,900 printed sources and represent more than 2,700 poets. The newly-added works represent both the literary heritages of Commonwealth and ex-colonial countries and the poetic legacies of English writers only recently brought back to scholarly attention.

English Drama contains more than 3,900 plays in verse and prose from the late thirteenth century - the likely date of the Shrewsbury Fragments - to the early twentieth. It offers exhaustive coverage of the prodigious dramatic literature of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, as well as Restoration plays, medieval morality plays and mystery cycles, and nineteenth-century closet dramas, including works by major dramatists such as Ben Jonson, Aphra Behn, William Wycherley, Oliver Goldsmith, Richard Sheridan, Oscar Wilde and J. M. Synge