This collection of Rose Playhouse records is the first digital edition of London area Renaissance and Jacobean playhouses for the REED Online series. As editor, I have delighted in the support and expertise of several members of the REED editorial team. Tanya Hagen, REED's bibliographer and now managing editor, has been an invaluable companion along the way, first as our research paths converged while she edited the Rose bibliographic data for the Early Modern London Theatres website and lately as bibliographic support for and production manager of the completed collection. Tanya has also contributed the modernizations of the Records text, in response to our external readers' recommendations. I am also grateful to REED's associate editor and paleographer, Patrick Gregory, who checked all transcriptions and contributed the English glossary entries; and to our research associate, Illya Nokhrin, who assisted in content checking the editorial apparatus, indexed the collection and made a significant contribution to mapping all locations named with related events for the new timeline feature. Stephanie Hovland, my co-editor for the forthcoming Bear Gardens/Hope edition, also assisted in on-site work at an earlier stage of research.
My long-time collaborator, Byron Moldofsky, deserves special mention for his cartographic skills and ongoing interest in developing a more ambitious project to map not only the Southwark area in historic detail but also the wider London area for more playhouse editions to come. It was his initiative to develop the timeline feature for the Rose, in collaboration with Dave Luxton, our web designer, Rory McClenagan, web programmer, and Illya Nokhrin. It has been a real pleasure to work with all members of this creative team.
The Rose Playhouse collection, like other REED digital editions, would not appear on our screens without the expertise and advice of our programmer, Jamie Norrish, who has incorporated manuscript images to complement transcriptions for the first time, as well as the enhanced mapping and timeline.
The inclusion of manuscript digital images has been made possible through friendly permissions granted by the following archives: The National Archives, The British Library, and the London Metropolitan Archives (City of London). My thanks to Paul Johnson (TNA), and Laurence Ward and Wendy Hawke (LMA), for responding to my requests for help with permission to publish transcriptions. I am grateful to the Trust for London for the 1650 lease of the Little Rose Estate, and to Justine Horseman Sewell and Southwark Cathedral for permission to include images from the St Saviour's Vestry Minutes now held at LMA. My special thanks go to Calista Lucy, Keeper of the Archives at Dulwich College, and to Grace Ioppolo, Director of the Henslowe-Alleyn Digitisation Project, who granted permission to link my transcriptions to the professional images on the open access Henslowe-Alleyn website.
My visits to Dulwich College for work on the wonderful archive collection there were made memorable by Calista's hospitality, and I look forward to continuing collaboration with Grace, whose support for both the Rose and the Bear Gardens/Hope Playhouse edition has been warmly appreciated.
On a personal note, I have treasured the friendship and shared interests of William Ingram and Alan Nelson, whose generous work on the parish records of St Saviour's Southwark made freely available on the web has assisted my own in many ways. It is a great pleasure that Bill has willingly shared his transcriptions and modernizations of early records of the Little Rose estate for inclusion as Appendix 1 in this collection.
Finally, this publication has been made possible by three grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The first funded the initial research phase for the Rose and four other playhouses south of the river, and a Connection grant enabled most editorial staff work for the initial version, the Rose Playhouse Prototype published in 2020. Most recently, a second SSHRC Insight grant has supported editorial staff work for this full Rose Playhouse edition.