A dataset derived from the Digitised 19th Century Books dataset which contains books pertaining to theatre written in English. The dataset of 841 items was created by filtering by keywords which are related to different genre of play including Drama, Act, Scene, Play, Comedy, Farce, Pantomime, Tragedy and Shakespeare and manual curation to identify works which were written to be performed. This dataset was curated by students at University College London for the module BASC003, Information through the ages in Autumn 2019.