eLabs Events
From Macbeth to Mucedorus: Changing How We Edit and Publish Early Modern Plays
April 23, 2025 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm British Summer Time
Shakespeare’s corpus represents just 1% of the known Early Modern plays but his works dominate publishers’ catalogues, scholarly criticism, public performance, and our classrooms. The economics of publishing have perpetuated a situation where it’s difficult to teach, perform, or analyze anything outside a small canon of plays that will generate a profit for the publisher. ‘Linked Early Modern Drama Online’ (LEMDO) aims to change this situation via a new publishing model that makes open editions available in digital, PDF, and print formats. When we make it as easy to read and teach Mucedorus as Macbeth, we see immediate uptake in classrooms and rehearsal halls.
On April 23 at 6:00 PM (British Summer Time), Janelle Jenstad (University of Victoria) will discuss LEMDO during a presentation hosted by Animating Text Newcastle University. This talk aims to justify LEMDO’s objective to provide open-access editions of every surviving early modern text (1512-166), argue for a collaborative editorial practice, and describe its mechanism for publishing editions in sustainable digital anthologies, downloadable PDFs, and print-on-demand books. In addition to changing performance, critical, and pedagogical possibilities for early modern plays, LEMDO aims to model a new, non-commercial, stable publishing model that liberates us from the conventional modes of disseminating editions.
Event Format
VirtualEvent Price
About the Presenter
Janelle Jenstad is Professor of English and Academic Director of the Humanities Computing and Media Centre, University of Victoria in Canada. She is the founder and director of both ‘The Map of Early Modern London’ and ‘Linked Early Modern Drama Online’, For the latter, she is Co-Coordinating Editor of the ‘Digital Renaissance Editions’, ‘New Internet Shakespeare Editions’, and ‘MoEML Mayoral Shows Project’. She co-edited ‘Shakespeare’s Language in Digital Media’ (Routledge) and has published widely on book history, digital humanities, editorial praxis, and early modern drama. See https://janellejenstad.com for more information.
