As the world commemorates the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death this year, The New York Library for the Performing Arts is doing its part by sharing with the world some of our unique Shakespearean treasures. Currently, visitors can see artifacts ranging from photographs and programs to costumes and set designs in the exhibit Shakespeare’s Star Turn in America, open through May 27.

The artifacts I’m most excited about, however, are the promptbooks—scripts used and annotated by actors preparing for their roles. LPA is lucky enough to hold several hundred promptbooks from productions of Shakespeare’s plays in the U.S. and abroad, from the seventeenth century to the present day, but primarily from the 1800s. Researchers can visit our Special Collections Reading Room and pore over handwritten notes by some of the stage’s leading actors—such as Edwin Booth—along with their doodles of stage blocking, cues, musical notation, and cast photos.

For the past several weeks, I have been immersed in a project to update NYPL’s catalog records for these promptbooks to make them more valuable and accessible to researchers. Much of what we know about them comes from the work of Charles H. Shattuck, a renowned Shakespeare scholar and director. In 1965, he published The Shakespeare Promptbooks: A Descriptive Catalog, at the time a near-complete compendium of information about promptbooks belonging to libraries all over the world, from the Folger Shakespeare Library to LPA. Each promptbook was assigned a “Shattuck number” within each play title. For instance, LPA holds Shattuck numbers 7, 8, 13, and 14 for The Comedy of Errors.

Of course, some promptbooks were not accounted for in Shattuck’s catalog, and many more have come into various library collections since it was published. As for LPA, the bulk of our promptbooks came from bequests and archival collections of the actors who used them. In 1905, the library received a major collection of materials from actor George Becks, including dozens of his own promptbooks. In addition, many were part of larger archival collections donated by such theatre personalities as actors E. H. Sothern & Julia Marlowe and producer/manager Winthrop Ames.

Simultaneous with this project and the exhibit, LPA has begun digitizing these promptbooks, starting with our Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet holdings. You can flip through their fragile pages virtually by visiting NYPL Digital Collections. Expect more to come in the near future!