An international scholarly project that is establishing for the first time the context from which the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries grew. REED has for the last thirty-five years worked to locate, transcribe, and edit historical documents containing evidence of drama, secular music, and other communal entertainment and ceremony from the Middle Ages until 1642, when the Puritans closed the London theatres. Along with twenty-seven collections of records in print, with the most recent, Civic London to 1558, published in April 2015, REED is building a dynamic collection of freely available digital resources for research and education.