Selection of Plays: The Scope of <title level="m">Queen’s Men Editions Scope Author QME Anthology Leads Conversion and Remediation LEMDO Team Queen’s Men Editions QME

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–)

 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

Released with Queen’s Men Editions 2.0

 University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform

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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.

Queen’s Men Editions

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.

Encoded in TEI P5 according to the LEMDO Customization and Encoding Guidelines

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 Document Types All documents in LEMDO are either born-digital documents or primary documents. Within those two general categories, LEMDO offers additional ways to categorize a file. Born-digital Born-digital documents are anything other than primary texts About Documents about LEMDO or another anthology. Document History Various sources from which born-digital texts have made their way into the LEMDO collection. Original Source: XWiki This TEI file was created based on one or more supplementary files from the Internet Shakespeare Editions anthology, originally encoded in HTML and stored in the ISE’s XWiki system. Responsibilities Responsibilities Author MARC Code List for Relators definition: A person, family, or organization responsible for creating a work that is primarily textual in content, regardless of media type (e.g., printed text, spoken word, electronic text, tactile text) or genre (e.g., poems, novels, screenplays, blogs). Use also for persons, etc., creating a new work by paraphrasing, rewriting, or adapting works by another creator such that the modification has substantially changed the nature and content of the original or changed the medium of expression. LEMDO uses the term author in two contexts: (1) to indicate the author of a primary work or document (such as Hamlet), and (2) to indicate the author of a secondary text (such as the Critical Introduction to <title level="m">Hamlet, by David Bevington). Markup Editor MARC Code List for Relators definition: A person or organization performing the coding of SGML, HTML, or XML markup of metadata, text, etc. LEMDO uses this term for someone who encodes a file, remediates a converted text, or reviews the XML markup of a file. Published file. Checked metadata. Numbered paragraphs. Proofed text. Updated metadata Added citation link, deleted comments Removed front element from born-digital documents that should not have one. Rationalized metadata. Fully remediated content and encoding. Renamed document. Added xml:ids to divs. Converted document. Original peer-reviewed content added to XWiki by a member of the QME team or a member of the ISE team acting on behalf of QME. The earlier history of this content was not captured in metadata. Peter Cockett 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.

 Martin Holmes 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 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.

 Janelle Jenstad 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

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

 Knutson, Roslyn L. The Start of Something Big. Locating the Queen’s Men, 1583–1603. Ed. Helen Ostovich, Holger Schott Syme, and Andrew Griffin. London: Routledge, 2009. McMillin, Scott, and Sally-Beth MacLean. The Queen’s Men and Their Plays. Cambridge University Press, 1998. WSB aw359. LEMDO Team 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. Queen’s Men Editions QME

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–)
Selection of Plays

For Queen’s Men Editions we decided to make a fairly conservative choice, selecting the nine plays listed in McMillin and MacLean (McMillin and MacLean 88–89) on the basis that these published works identified themselves on the title page as Queen’s Men productions. We added Thomas Wilson’s The Three Ladies of London, even though it was written in 1581, before Wilson joined the Queen’s Men. The play was published in 1584; it was expanded and republished in 1592, suggesting that the play had been performed successfully by the Queen’s Men. Wilson also wrote the sequel, The Three Lords and Three Ladies of London, written after the defeat of the Spanish Armada, 1588, and published in 1590. The two plays use many of the same characters and the second continues the story of the three ladies, left in a kind of limbo at the end of the first play.

The fact of the sequel is not the only reason for including Wilson’s 1581 play. That play illustrates most of the traits we have come to associate with Queen’s Men house style. The verse form is irregular, anything from short lines to fourteeners to prose. The topics ranged from early English history, mythology, magical transformation, religious conversion, romance, swordplay and wordplay, lively storytelling including folk tales, and comic business of all kinds. All the plays might be loosely considered comedies, as they all have happy endings and restorations, but they also include deaths along with the marriages and feasting usually associated with comic finales. Most were printed by Thomas Creede. McMillin and MacLean list a further thirteen plays (91–93), of which four are lost; Roslyn Knutson gets up to seventeen, although she concedes that what she is recognizing is Wilson’s influence on playwrights of the 1580s, with The Three Ladies of London as seminal in the development of the Queen’s Men repertory (Knutson 101). That is, her list, like McMillin’s and MacLean’s conjectures, might be Queen’s Men or might be imitations by other companies, including such plays as James IV, The Cobbler’s Prophecy, The Pedlar’s Prophecy, and Locrine as well as the Shakespeare-assigned Edmund Ironside, and the still anonymous Edward I. We decided, however, to stick with the strongest candidates and aim for ten complete performance editions with as little muddying of the water as possible.