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Our archival set of DVD recordings of the 2006 Shakespeare and the Queen’s Men productions, The Chronicle History of King Leir, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, and The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth, are still available for purchase.

To get a taste of what is on the archival DVD set, please log on to our interactive research web site, Performing the Queen’s Men:

www.thequeensmen.ca

alternative URL: www.performingthequeensmen.com

LOGIN: sqm

PASSWORD: shakespeare

Performing the Queen’s Men contains some scenes from the archive along with contextual notes on the 2006 plays, interviews with director and actors, and discussions of such pertinent aspects of original performance as doubling, playing with cues and parts, and explorations of particular props. The archival set of DVDs contains full versions of all the plays excerpted on the web site.

Work on the Shakespeare and the Queen’s Men project is ongoing. As many of you know, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada funded us with a Research/Creation grant for the project, Shakespeare and the Queen’s Men, 2005-2008. To date, we have spent about $250,000 on research (acquiring the services of several graduate students in English and in Drama at the University of Toronto, McMaster University, and the University of Waterloo), portable set construction, costumes, props, Equity actors, other actors, filming (including rental of lights, cameras, sound equipment, paid cameramen, film), film–processing, and creating Performing the Queen’s Men.

The research site is still a work in progress: we have yet to add performances from 2007 (The True Tragedy of Richard III) and 2009 (Clyomon and Clamydes) and some of the mountains of research we have acquired on stage fighting, stage beards, and other information related to playing spaces and touring. Some of this material is now available in our just published book, Locating the Queen’s Men, 1583-1603: Material Practices and Conditions of Playing (Ashgate 2009), edited by Helen Ostovich, Holger Schott Syme, and Andrew Griffin. The sister project is the repertory of old-spelling and modern-spelling critical editions online: Queen’s Men Editions is part of the Internet Shakespeare Editions web-space, and will be connected to the Performing the Queen’s Men website at McMaster. The cost of uploading this work is not yet fully covered, but we hope gradually to acquire sufficient funding over the next few years.

We are able to offer our archival DVDs for free, but we do have to ask for payment to cover mailing, handling, and materials (packaging, cases, blank DVDs, etc). We hope you will purchase of one set, to be donated to your university library or media centre. We are asking for $30 – in practical terms, that’s only $10 for each DVD.

To order the DVDs, here is what we ask you to do:

1. Collect the $30 (CAD for Canadians, US dollars for everyone else), and send payment using one of the following methods:
   • send a cheque to:
     Poculi Ludique Societas
     125 Queen’s Park, Room B06C, Toronto, ON M5S 2C7
   • use a credit card via PayPal
     
     

2. Make contact with your librarian or media librarian to ensure that your university library will accept the donation, should you decide to donate your copy, and respond by writing a letter of receipt to PLS. This is very important for our ability to raise future funding: we have to show a broad dissemination of results.
   
3. I hope you will all also respond to us after you have used Performing the Queen’s Men with your Shakespeare or early drama classes. We want to know what you think the gaps are, what sort of information you would like to see added to the site. If you add The Chronicle History of King Leir, The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth, or Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay to your course, you can use the editions online at Queen’s Men Editions.
   

If you have questions about this purchase, please email PLS.

Thanks,

Linda Phillips
Artistic Director, PLS