If you use this custom link, you should go directly to a selection of hundreds of scripts in our collection that were published since 1980. You can easily remove that date filter to include more plays.
A peculiar and helpful thing about the WT library specifically is that acting edition scripts in this library in particular are shelved in the PZ3.5 range, so if you choose to search in the Call Number field of our Advanced Search, you can enter PZ3.5* [the * is important] to see a list of most of the scripts that we have.
You can then also apply date limiters on the right to get only results since a given year.
The link above has already applied each of those criteria for you.
To limit the results you see to only those items that are available on the shelves and exclude those that have already been checked out, you should click on the limiter on the right that says, "Available in the Library."
We have hundreds of ebook versions of scripts and script collections through our subscription to the EBSCO eBook Collection.
None of these are published, unfortunately, by Samuel French or Dramatists, but many are published by Theatre Communications Group, among others.
While no simple search can bring up all scripts and only scripts, the first, rather complex, search linked above gathers a pretty good set of the scripts we have on that platform, while the second link above has just those published by TCG.
If you view the ebook in EBSCO's embedded viewer, you can use options at the very top of the screen to download PDFs of selected pages. (The option exists to download the whole ebook but requires creation of an EBSCO account and, often, installation of additional software and could make the book less available to others for two weeks.)
Full text of 1,691 scripts of classic and contemporary plays. All the plays are browsable by playwright, genre, and period, as well as by title.
Use the Advanced Play Search to find plays by number of scenes, word count, total roles, and number of male, female, and unassigned roles and to find monologues of a given gender and word count.
Our current subscription is for the Core Collection.
Samuel French and Dramatists Play Service each have search functions that allow filtering on genre and searching for comedies specifically. Unfortunately, neither allows filtering on or sorting by date, and Dramatists lists only 11 per page with no option to change that number or to change the sort order. Nonetheless, these may be useful in focusing on comedies specifically.
These aren't linked here for you to then buy the scripts from them; we have many of these in our library holdings, may acquire others, and can get many others for you through interlibrary loan. This is simply a way to filter by genre.
Search titles from Samuel French.
Search titles from Dramatists.
When you knows what specific play you want, you can see whether we have it available and where with the catalog search below (also searchable from the WT library home page through the Books+ tab).
EBSCO's Play Index doesn't include every play it necessarily should, but for many plays, it indicates and allows searching by genre, as well as cast numbers. Though its coverage isn't complete, it is worth searching in to discover plays in a given genre. Records in it link through to the catalog records for those plays we have in our collection.