About the Production Records
Performances
Para1Through this menu you can access the video records of the modern productions directly,
which presents an opportunity to experience the performances without prior knowledge
of the printed text. The performances featured on the site are all research productions
with their
own objectives and agenda. They form part of a movement we now refer to as Performance as Research (PaR). Many of the directors are interested in how the plays
might have been originally staged, but the productions should not be viewed as
reconstructions of original performances. The performances are inescapably modern
but
provide a lively medium through which to re-imagine the plays of the Queen’s Men:
what they might have meant in their time and how they make meanings in our time.
Para2The video records of the PaR productions are integrated into the performance editions
of the plays but can also be accessed directly through this menu. Information on the
research objectives of each production are provided in introductory essays.
Overview of the PaR Productions
Para3The list follows the chronological order of the modern productions, not the order
of publication on this site. (Only the first three titles below have been
published to date; they are linked to the production records for that
play.)
Plays Performed for SQM Project
Para4The first three plays were performed in repertoire as the climax of the Shakespeare and the Queen’s Men
(SQM) project. The plays were directed by Peter
Cockett (McMaster University) who is also the performance editor for the
editions. The productions were created through an experimental process designed to research the work and practices of the original Queen’s
Men company. The modern company of actors assembled for the SQM project adopted the theatrical
techniques and technologies of the early modern theatre, and the production notes
in the editions examine what was learnt about the differences between a modern professional
understanding of drama and the dramaturgy implied by the Queen’s Men plays. These
performance editions build on the
work presented in the teaching and interactive research site:
Performing the Queen’s Men
.
Further Productions
Para5As QME grows towards completion, records of the following PaR productions will be
added to the site along with our editions of the plays.
True Tragedy of Richard III (2008), directed
by Jennifer Roberts-Smith (University of Waterloo).
Troublesome Reign of King John (2009),
directed by Oliver Jones (York University).
Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes (2010), directed by Peter Cockett. The production furthered the SQM exploration of the
impact on theatrical rehearsal and performance practices on the style of
performance of the plays.
Three Lords and Three Ladies of London (2015), directed by Richard Sullivan Lee in a research project designed by Paul W.
White (Purdue).
Three Ladies of London (2015), directed by
Peter Cockett and presented at the as part of the conference
Performance as Research in Early English Theatre Studies: Three Ladies of London in Context
The QME team members hope the final
two plays, Selimus and Old Wives’ Tale, will be staged in a future PaR conference.
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.
Jennifer Roberts-Smith
Jennifer Roberts-Smith is an associate professor of theatre and performance at the
University of Waterloo. Her interdisciplinary work in early modern performance editing
combines textual scholarship, performance as research, archival theatre history, and
design in the development of live and virtual renderings of early modern performance
texts, venues, and practices. With Janelle Jenstad and Mark Beatrice Kaethler, she
is co-editor of Shakespeare’s Language in Digital Media: Old Words New Tools (2018). Her most recent work has focused on methods for design research that deepen
interdisciplinary understanding and take a relational approach. She is currently managing
director of the qCollaborative (the critical feminist design research lab housed in the University of Waterloo’s Games Institute, and leads the SSHRC-funded Theatre for Relationality and Design for Peace projects.
She is also creative director and virtual reality development cluster lead for the
Digital Oral Histories for Reconciliation (DOHR) project. She can be contacted at
jennifer.roberts-smith@uwaterloo.ca.
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.
Oliver Jones
Oliver Jones (Troublesome Reign of King John. performance) is Lecturer in Theatre at the Department of Theatre, Film and Television,
University of York. His doctoral thesis combined theatre history, archaeological survey,
and performance-as-research methodologies to investigate the Queen’s Men and the guildhall
of Stratford-upon-Avon, and created a site-specific performance and video of The Troublesome Reign of King John.As Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Shakespeare’s Globe, now a member of the Globe’s
Architectural Research Group, he undertook preparations for the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse.With Michael Cordner he has produced stagings of John Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan(www.dutchcourtesan.co.uk) and associate-directed James Shirley’s Hyde Park.Recent publications appear in Shakespeare Bulletinand Andrew Gurr and Farah Karim-Cooper(eds), Moving Shakespeare Indoors (CUP, 2014). He can be contacted at oliver.jones@york.ac.uk.
Paul Whitfield White
Paul Whitfield White specializes in Shakespeare, medieval drama, and early modern
drama and literature. His publications include recent articles on the Chester Cycle,
Elizabethan Arthurian drama, and Robert Wilson’s plays, as well as the books Drama and Religion in English Provincial Society, 1485–1660; Theatre and Reformation: Protestantism, Patronage, and Playing in Tudor England; Marlowe, History, and Sexuality: New Critical Essays on Christopher Marlowe(edited collection); and Shakespeare and Theatrical Patronage in Early Modern England, collected and co-edited with Suzanne R. Westfall. He can be contacted
at pwhite@purdue.edu.
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.
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).
Metadata
| Authority title | About the Production Records |
| Type of text | About |
| Publisher | University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform |
| Series | Queen’s Men Editions |
| Source |
Page compiled by Peter Cockett. 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 | n/a |
| Edition | Released with Queen’s Men Editions 2.0 |
| Sponsor(s) |
Queen’s Men EditionsThe 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.
|