Released with Queen’s Men Editions 2.0
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.
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QME is driven by the desire to integrate Performance as Research (PaR) productions with traditional literary, historical, and textual scholarship. A textual edition of a script and a public performance of a script are two forms by which a play can be published. The performance editions are designed to make two forms of publication speak to each other. Working from texts published hundreds of years ago, editors modernize spelling; regularize punctuation; and add, move, and revise stage directions to produce an edition of the original playtext they feel best communicates the social, political, and theatrical meanings or potentialities of the original text to a modern audience. The interpretive role of directors is similar, but communicates direct bodily experience in the perception of meanings. Directors are not bound to follow the text (although they commonly do) and must deal with specific physical aspects of a theatrical production that are either mentioned in passing or not mentioned at all, such as costumes, props, blocking, vocal interpretation, music, and sets. The final performance editions establish the principle that the choices made in directing a play bring insight to the text of a play, and the information provided by an editor can give insight into a performance.
A completed QME performance edition includes clarifying choices in punctuation, spelling, and verse lines; full textual annotation, including textual history or solutions provided by earlier editors; video of the performance that appears beside the text; photographs from the production; production notes outlining the creative choices behind the productions; introductory matter on the texts, contexts,and performances; and links to further production resources. The nature of those resources depends on the research process behind the production and the research team’s documentation of their sources.
Performance editions take a long time to create and the playtexts are published in stages: old-spelling texts, texts with modernized spelling, modern texts with annotations, and then performance editions. The current status of the editions can be found on the editions page.
The old-spelling texts form part of the full editions on the site. Users can view, search, print, or cut-and-paste these transcriptions of the texts as they were originally published. It may come as a surprise to many to see that some texts appeared in different versions, although not with as many versions as in Shakespeare’s works. For example,