The Queen’s Men Editions: Introduction to the Site

Introduction to the Site

Queen’s Men Editions

Para1 Queen’s Men Editions is a collaborative site, created by an international body of scholars, theatre practitioners, and digital developers, all working to achieve the same goals: to inspire a love of early theatre beyond Shakespeare; to recover the plays associated with the Queen’s Men in particular as enjoyable, teachable, and performable theatrical texts; and to present those texts in a richly linked, open-access, online environment.

The Queen’s Men

Para2The Queen’s Men were the foremost theatrical company of the 1580s, an all-star troupe formed in the Queen’s name by her chief advisor Sir Francis Walsingham, and her close ally the Earl of Leicester. From 1583 through to Elizabeth’s death in 1603, they toured the provinces of England performing plays that celebrated national and Protestant virtues. The Queen’s Men Editions (QME) publishes the plays associated with the company in performance editions that incorporate textual scholarship with production records of modern performances of the plays.

Performance Editions

Para3QME gives the user two primary ways to access the work of the Queen’s Men:

through visual records of modern performances of their plays, and

through performance editions of their play texts in both original and modern spelling.

The two avenues of access are interrelated through linked annotations embedded in the play texts that discuss the texts themselves, their historical contexts, and the creative choices behind the modern productions. Our User Guide, demonstrates the navigational possibilities of the site for the purposes of study and research. See also our History and Vision page.

Performance as Research

Para4QME is a product of a larger research enterprise that began with the Shakespeare and the Queen’s Men project (SQM) in 2006, led by Alexandra Johnston and Helen Ostovich and inspired by Scott McMillan and Sally-Beth MacLean’s book, The Queen’s Men and their Plays. The project emerged from University of Toronto’s Poculi Ludique Societas and Centre for Performance Studies in Early Theatre. The ongoing research project places the production and performance of plays at the centre of the research endeavour as an important and dynamic complement to library research on surviving texts and theatre documents from the period. The methodology behind these editions was developed further at our 2015 conference Performance as Research in Early English Theatre Studies: The Three Ladies of London in Context. The QME performance editions integrate the Performance as Research (PaR) productions with traditional textual scholarship.

Contexts

Para5In addition to the contextual information embedded in the performance editions, QME provides an overview of the history of the company with a timeline of the documentary evidence and biographies of the actors. It also has expanding sections on pedagogy, associated with the PaR productions of the plays.

Contributors to the Site

Para6QME is a collaborative site, created by an international body of scholars, theatre practitioners, and digital developers. For information on our contributors and collaborators, see:

Editorial Board

Advisory Board

Directors of the Productions

Editors of the Plays

Acknowledgements

Editorial Guidelines

Para7The editions of Famous Victories, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, King Leir, and Selimus follow the ISE Editorial Guidelines. All other editions follow the DRE/NISE Editorial Guidelines.

ISE Editorial Guidelines

Legal

Prosopography

Janelle Jenstad

Janelle Jenstad is a Professor of English at the University of Victoria, Director of The Map of Early Modern London, and Director of Linked Early Modern Drama Online. With Jennifer Roberts-Smith and Mark Beatrice Kaethler, she co-edited Shakespeare’s Language in Digital Media: Old Words, New Tools (Routledge). She has edited John Stow’s A Survey of London (1598 text) for MoEML and is currently editing The Merchant of Venice (with Stephen Wittek) and Heywood’s 2 If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody for DRE. Her articles have appeared in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Elizabethan Theatre, Early Modern Literary Studies, Shakespeare Bulletin, Renaissance and Reformation, and The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. She contributed chapters to Approaches to Teaching Othello (MLA); Teaching Early Modern Literature from the Archives (MLA); Institutional Culture in Early Modern England (Brill); Shakespeare, Language, and the Stage (Arden); Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate); New Directions in the Geohumanities (Routledge); Early Modern Studies and the Digital Turn (Iter); Placing Names: Enriching and Integrating Gazetteers (Indiana); Making Things and Drawing Boundaries (Minnesota); Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study: Audiences, Authors, and Digital Technologies (Routledge); and Civic Performance: Pageantry and Entertainments in Early Modern London (Routledge). For more details, see janellejenstad.com.

Joey Takeda

Joey Takeda is LEMDO’s Consulting Programmer and Designer, a role he assumed in 2020 after three years as the Lead Developer on LEMDO.

Martin Holmes

Martin Holmes has worked as a developer in the UVic’s Humanities Computing and Media Centre for over two decades, and has been involved with dozens of Digital Humanities projects. He has served on the TEI Technical Council and as Managing Editor of the Journal of the TEI. He took over from Joey Takeda as lead developer on LEMDO in 2020. He is a collaborator on the SSHRC Partnership Grant led by Janelle Jenstad.

Navarra Houldin

Training and Documentation Lead 2025–present. LEMDO project manager 2022–2025. Textual remediator 2021–present. Navarra Houldin (they/them) completed their BA with a major in history and minor in Spanish at the University of Victoria in 2022. Their primary research was on gender and sexuality in early modern Europe and Latin America. They are continuing their education through an MA program in Gender and Social Justice Studies at the University of Alberta where they will specialize in Digital Humanities.

Peter Cockett

Peter Cockett is an associate professor in the iArts (Integrated Arts) program at McMaster University. He is the co-editor, with Melinda Gough, of Engendering the Stage in the Age of Shakespeare and Beyond (University of Toronto Press, 2025) which publishes the findings of their 2018 Performance as Research (PaR) workshop at the Stratford Festival Lab. He is the general editor (performance), and technical co-ordinating editor of Queen’s Men Editions. His PaR directing credits include King Leir, The Famous Victories of Henry V, and Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (2006), Clyomon and Clamydes (2010), and Three Ladies of London (2015) for the Shakespeare and the Queen’s Men project (SQM). The process behind the 2006 productions is documented in depth on the project website Performing the Queen’s Men. For the PLS, the University of Toronto’s Medieval and Renaissance Players, he has directed the Digby Mary Magdalene (2003) and the double bill of George Peele’s The Old Wives Tale and the Chester Antichrist (2004). He also directed An Experiment in Elizabethan Comedy (2005) for the SQM project and Inside Out: The Persistence of Allegory (2008) in collaboration with Alan Dessen. Peter is a professional actor and director with numerous stage and screen credits. He can be contacted at cockett@mcmaster.ca.

Bibliography

McMillin, Scott, and Sally-Beth MacLean. The Queen’s Men and Their Plays. Cambridge University Press, 1998. WSB aw359.

Orgography

LEMDO Team (LEMD1)

The LEMDO Team is based at the University of Victoria and normally comprises the project director, the lead developer, project manager, junior developers(s), remediators, encoders, and remediating editors.

QME Editorial Board (QMEB1)

The QME Editorial Board consists of Helen Ostovich, General Editor; Peter Cockett, General Editor (Performance); Andrew Griffin, General Editor (Text); and Janelle Jenstad General Editor (Text).

Queen’s Men Editions (QME1)

The Queen’s Men Editions anthology is led by Helen Ostovich, General Editor; Peter Cockett, General Editor (Performance); Andrew Griffin, General Editor (Text; until 2026); and Janelle Jenstad, General Editor (Text; 2026–)

Metadata

Authority title	Introduction to the Site
Type of text	About
Publisher	University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform
Series	Queen’s Men Editions
Source	Page written by the QME Anthology Leads. First published in the QME 1.0 anthology on the ISE platform. Converted to TEI-XML and remediated by the LEMDO Team for republication in the QME 2.0 anthology on the LEMDO platform.
Editorial declaration	This document follows Canadian spelling conventions.
Edition	Released with Queen’s Men Editions 2.0
Sponsor(s)	Queen’s Men Editions The Queen’s Men Editions anthology is led by Helen Ostovich, General Editor; Peter Cockett, General Editor (Performance); Andrew Griffin, General Editor (Text; until 2026); and Janelle Jenstad, General Editor (Text; 2026–)
Encoding description	Encoded in TEI P5 according to the LEMDO Customization and Encoding Guidelines
Document status	published, peer-reviewed
Funder(s)	Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada McMaster University Poculi Ludique Societas University of Waterloo University of Toronto Centre for Drama, Theatre & Performance Studies University of Victoria Friends of the ISE
License/availability	This file is licensed under a CC BY-NC_ND 4.0 license, which means that it is freely downloadable without permission under the following conditions: (1) credit must be given to the author, Queen’s Men Editions, and LEMDO in any subsequent use of the files and/or data; (2) the content cannot be adapted or repurposed (except in quotations for the purposes of academic review and citation); and (3) commercial uses are not permitted without the knowledge and consent of Queen’s Men Editions, the editor, and LEMDO. This license allows for pedagogical use of the critical paratexts in the classroom. Neither the content nor the code in this file is licensed for training large language models (LLMs), ingestion into an LLM, or any use in any artificial intelligence applications; such uses are considered to be commercial uses and are strictly prohibited. Production photographs and videos on this site may not be downloaded. They appear freely on this site with the permission of the actors and the ACTRA union. They may be used within the context of university courses, within the classroom, and for reference within research contexts, including conferences, when credit is given to the producing company and to the actors. Commercial use of videos and photographs is forbidden.