History and Vision
Para1This page summarizes the overall vision of Queen’s Men Editions (QME) as a project and provides a historical summary of its development from its
founding in 2006 to the present.
Mission
Para2The two-fold mission of this site is:
to recover the plays associated with the Queen’s Men (QM) as readable, teachable,
and performable theatrical texts for modern scholars, students, and audiences; and
to present those texts in a rich online environment, with multiple points of access
to their theatrical, historical, and scholarly contents and contexts.
QME Resources
Para3In keeping with its Performance-as-Research methodology, QME creates academic resources and performance resources.
Academic
Peer-reviewed old- and modern-spelling editions of QM plays.
Research on original performance conditions and historical contexts of QM plays based
on primary documents.
Bibliography of scholarly criticism on the QM and their plays, including the relationship to Shakespeare
and to other contemporary theatre companies.
Production histories of QM plays.
Copies of scholarly publications arising out of QME research where possible.
Links to other relevant research resources (e.g., REED Patrons & Performances Site).
Performance
Performance annotations to editions.
Photos and scans of the material archive of QME productions staged by the ongoing
Shakespeare and the Queen’s Men (SQM) project (props, stages, costumes, actors, scripts, promptbooks).
Production photographs of all QME productions.
Video footage of the SQM/QME productions: King Leir, Friar Bacon, and Famous Victories, True Tragedy of Richard III, Clyomon and Clamydes, and Three Ladies of London.
Video footage of abridged performances of Three Lords and Three Ladies of London (Purdue) and Troublesome Reign of King John (University of York, UK) and other possible future productions.
Video footage of interviews with participants in the SQM/QME productions.
Performance notes and eyewitness accounts notes made by directors, actors, audiences,
and others.
Biographical information about modern artists involved in SQM/QME productions.
Pedagogical
Activities for undergraduate students.
Workshop outlines for graduate students and faculty.
Course outlines for courses on QM taught by QM researchers.
Aims of Partnership/Shared Identity with Performing the Queen’s Men (PQM)
Para4
PQM and QME share the basic premise that the QM plays are performable theatrical works
relevant to modern audiences. Performing the Queen’s Men (PQM) helps illustrate the performance dramaturgy of the plays on QME, by presenting
primary records of modern productions (to which access is freely given to people affiliated
with post-secondary institutions and upon request).
Partnership/Shared Identity with Linked Early Modern Drama Online
Para5QME is published as an anthology on the LEMDO platform. In addition to the obvious
goal of providing peer-reviewed play texts by Shakespeare’s near-contemporaries, QME
will also provide links to the other anthologies on the LEMDO platform, in particular
the New Internet Shakespeare Editions anthology. Links will be created to allow users
to compare the dramaturgy of the Queen’s Men with Shakespeare’s versions of the same
material.
Design
Para6QME’s images, content, and language support the mission of QME. The design highlights
the relationship between original context and modern scholarship and performance,
and the relationship between QME and its partner projects, PQM and LEMDO.
Para7Period images relating to QM company and repertory:
Images of QM texts and titlepages—all surviving texts are printed, not manuscript;
Images of Elizabeth I, Tarlton, and others, as we find necessary or useful.
Para8Images reflecting the modern relevance and accessibility of the plays:
Images of performances and actors, as part of the material stage archive (props, costumes,
stages, etc). The material archive is a feature still under planning and construction.
The QME Brand
Para9The QME brand consists of the general attributes that distinguish our content and
resources from all others. In our approach to early modern drama, we:
treat historical plays as performance texts rooted in their own time and relevant
to ours;
define repertoire by company rather than by author;
see source and influence not as chronological passage from one work to the next or
one author to the next, but as a mutual sharing and development of knowledge and technique
among a network of artists working concurrently.
Para10Consequently, we provide: a digital collection of plays chosen for their association
with the Queen’s Men, rather than with any individual author or actor, supported not
only by traditional scholarly apparatus but also by:
references to, quotations from, and reproductions of relevant material records (documentary
and physical) of the original theatrical conditions in which the plays were performed;
interpretive editorial commentary on dramaturgy and performance impact;
references to, quotations from, and reproductions of elements of modern productions
which explore, test, or illustrate the historical and modern theatrical impact of
the plays.
Para11Our over-arching goal in QME is to offer a seamless integration of text and performance.
QME Audiences
Primary Audiences
Students and scholars interested in Shakespeare’s sources and influences beyond narrative
and theme.
Students and scholars interested in the plays of the QM.
Secondary Audiences
Scholars resisting Shakespeare-centric view of early theatre, or exploring non-canonical
texts and approaches.
Teachers looking for resources to communicate the relation of playtext to performance/production
in the early modern period.
Anyone interested in original staging practices and the potential for modern staging
of old plays (including theatre professionals).
Para12Our website reflects the interest in historically informed performance that has been
growing from the 1890s to the modern Globe. It reflects a recent shift in understanding
the context of early modern theatre catalyzed by the REED project and reflected in
publications like A New History of Early English Drama edited by John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (1997) and Richard Dutton’s Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Theatre. It also reflects the recent projects undertaken by professional companies like the
American Shakespeare Center and Shakespeare’s Globe, which attempt to recover old practices and experiences and make them accessible
to modern audiences. The liveliest reasons for users to keep returning to the site
are the performance archive, and the editorial annotations discussing the performance
values of individual plays.
Stakeholders
CPSET Centre for Performance Studies in Early Theatre (U of Toronto)
PLS Poculi ludique societas (U of Toronto)
PQM Performing the Queen’s Men (McMaster)
Graduate Centre for the Study of Drama (U of T)
Para13Content is provided by the editorial team, research assistants, and PLS then reviewed
by and funnelled through editors (Cockett, Griffin, Ostovich, and formerly Roberts-Smith).
Individual contributors will be identified by name. Financial supporters have their
logos displayed (University of Toronto, McMaster, Waterloo, SSHRC, University of Victoria,
etc.).
Para14As General Editor, Helen Ostovich ultimately signs off on all content for the site.
Shelf-Life Of QME
Para15Our long term editorial ambitions depend upon our ability to gain funding, and our
ability to argue for the inclusion of other plays as potentially QM plays. We expect
QME editions to remain the editions of record for many decades. Publishing on the
LEMDO platform means that as of 2023 our website will be fully compliant with the
principles for long-term digital archiving set out by The Endings Project.
Communication With Stakeholders and Audiences
Para16We will communicate with users by email, and by website announcements, journal announcements,
special group/conference announcements, and occasional workshops at conferences (e.g.,
SAA).
Prosopography
Helen Ostovich
Helen Ostovich, professor emerita of English at McMaster University, is the founder
and general editor of Queen’s Men Editions. She is a general editor of The Revels Plays (Manchester University Press); Series
Editor of Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama (Ashgate, now Routledge),
and series co-editor of Late Tudor and Stuart Drama (MIP); play-editor of several
works by Ben Jonson, in Four Comedies: Ben Jonson (1997); Every Man Out of his Humour (Revels 2001); and The Magnetic Lady (Cambridge 2012). She has also edited the Norton Shakespeare 3 The Merry Wives of Windsor Q1602 and F1623 (2015); The Late Lancashire Witches and A Jovial Crew for Richard Brome Online, revised for a 4-volume set from OUP 2021; The Ball, for the Oxford Complete Works of James Shirley (2021); The Merry Wives of Windsor for Internet Shakespeare Editions, and The Dutch Courtesan (with Erin Julian) for the Complete Works of John Marston, OUP 2022. She has published
many articles and book chapters on Jonson, Shakespeare, and others, and several book
collections, most recently Magical Transformations of the Early Modern English Stage with Lisa Hopkins (2014), and the equivalent to book website, Performance as Research in Early English Theatre Studies: The Three Ladies of London in Context containing scripts, glossary, almost fifty conference papers edited and updated to
essays; video; link to Queenʼs Mens Ediitons and YouTube: http://threeladiesoflondon.mcmaster.ca/contexts/index.htm, 2015. Recently, she was guest editor of Strangers and Aliens in London ca 1605,
Special Issue on Marston, Early Theatre 23.1 (June 2020). She can be contacted at ostovich@mcmaster.ca.
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 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
UVicʼs 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
Project manager 2022-present. Textual remediator 2021-present. Navarra Houldin (they/them)
completed their BA in History and Spanish at the University of Victoria in 2022. During
their degree, they worked as a teaching assistant with the University of Victoriaʼs
Department of Hispanic and Italian Studies. Their primary research was on gender and
sexuality in early modern Europe and Latin America.
Peter Cockett
Peter Cockett is an associate professor in the Theatre and Film Studies at McMaster
University. He is the general editor (performance), and technical co-ordinating editor
of Queen’s Men Editions. He was the stage director for the Shakespeare and the Queen’s Men project (SQM),
directing King Leir, The Famous Victories of Henry V, and Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (2006) and he is the performance editor for our editions of those plays. The process
behind those productions is documented in depth on his website Performing the Queen’s Men. Also featured on this site are his PAR productions of Clyomon and Clamydes (2009) and Three Ladies of London (2014). 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.
Queenʼs Men Editions (QME1)
The Queen’s Men Editions anthology is led by Helen Ostovich, General Editor; Peter
Cockett, General Editor (Performance); and Andrew Griffin, General Editor (Text).
Metadata
Authority title | History and Vision |
Type of text | About |
Short title | Vision |
Publisher | University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform |
Series | Queenʼs 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 | n/a |
Edition | Released with Queenʼs Men Editions 2.0 |
Sponsor(s) |
Queenʼs Men EditionsThe Queen’s Men Editions anthology is led by Helen Ostovich, General Editor; Peter
Cockett, General Editor (Performance); and Andrew Griffin, General Editor (Text).
|
Encoding description | Encoded in TEI P5 according to the LEMDO Customization and Encoding Guidelines |
Document status | published |
Licence/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. 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. |