Funding

The Shakespeare and the Queen’s Men project was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council’s Research-Creation Grant. This new grant recognizes the important work done by artists within the university community and the value of pursuing research through artistic production.

Creative Research

The centerpiece of our research was the professional repertory production of three Queen’s Men plays that had not been performed together since 1604. The plays were produced in conditions that approximated those of the original company and the rehearsal process was based on our current understanding of Elizabethan production practice. They were performed on a short tour of Hamilton and Toronto culminating in an international conference on the company and their plays. The project depended on a dynamic interaction between scholars and theatre professionals and gave insight into the original company’s work, their plays and the differences between Elizabethan approaches to theatrical production and our own.

Our approach to producing the plays has been categorized as “original practice” production and compared to similar work conducted at Shakespeare’s Globe in London. The notion of “original practice” productions however is a contentious one since evidence is so scanty on the period that it is hard to establish exactly how Elizabethans originally rehearsed and performed their plays, in addition to the obvious but sometimes overlooked fact that it is not possible to turn back time and recreate the past. Our productions were not recreations or reconstructions; they were research experiments designed to explore the available evidence on the Queen’s Men and their practices through theatrical production. While many members of our audience chose to view the shows as recreations, the words “recreation,” “reproduction” and “reconstruction” were banned from all material associated with the project, much to the chagrin of our publicity team who understood the appeal of this idea. It is important to us that you too understand that we are not presenting our production records and resources as reconstructions or replicas of the work of the Queen’s Men.

Why Produce Plays?

If it is impossible to recreate past performances, why bother producing the plays in the first place? The answer to this is twofold:

1. The impossibility of recreating the past does not stop historians making arguments in order to communicate their understanding of the available evidence.
2. We believe producing plays gives a particular insight into theatrical process and dramatic text; one that cannot be achieved through the studying of documents and writing of papers alone much as we support, encourage and engage in these activities.

Theatrical production is an additional and invaluable way of researching theatre history. Our work is distinct from the work of mainstream professional producers of Shakespeare and his more famous contemporaries because our production process was driven by a desire to understand the Queen’s Men plays in their original historical and theatrical context. The rehearsal and production process was designed to reflect that context and while the relationship between our company and the original Queen’s Men is a complex one, that very complexity is worthy of study. Created in the spirit of scholarly enquiry, our productions are arguments of a kind–ones we hope will generate further debate.

Our Inspiration

The SQM project was inspired by the book The Queen’s Men and their Plays by Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean. In the introduction the authors outline the central purpose of their work as follows:

Sally-Beth and Scott both served as advisors on our research committee. The experimental approach of their book and the importance placed on maintaining historical distance became informing principles of the project. Unfortunately Scott passed away before seeing the festival of plays he dared to imagine and we would like to dedicate this website to his memory.

About this Website

The SQM productions themselves were the principal publications of the research-creation project but these were witnessed by a relatively small number of scholars and graduate students. All theatre historians have had cause to bemoan the ephemeral nature of theatre but thanks to video recording and the internet we are now able to preserve our work and make it accessible to a much wider audience. Admittedly video recording can be a poor substitute for the live experience of plays but we hope the rough, documentary videos we have created will give the user a sense of the plays as they worked on the stage. The videos and other records of the performances can be found in the Production Resources section.

In addition to the publication of our production records, the Performing the Queen’s Men website is designed to give insight into our research-creation process. The five modules in the Performance Research section allow the user to explore the production decisions of the SQM company and their relationship to early modern theatre history and modern performance practice.  These modules are all interactive: taking the user through the company’s decision-making processes, teaching the user specific production techniques, or allowing the user to explore issues raised by the project according to their own interests and needs. For the most part, we have stopped short of drawing firm conclusions from our experience preferring to allow the records of our work to be the object of others’ analysis.

The website focuses principally on the Queen’s Men, early modern theatre practice and the SQM productions but invites comparison between the plays and Shakespeare’s adaptations in the Production Resources video section.

Credits