Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project

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The Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project, otherwise known as CASP [1], is the online resource for anyone interested in how Shakespeare's plays have been transformed and adapted in Canada. The Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project is an integrated virtual learning, teaching, and research commons devoted to the study of Shakespeare in Canada. The launch of its website marked the first stage of an intensive collaborative research effort whose next phase will involve the establishment of the Centre for Canadian Shakespeare Studies Online at the University of Guelph [2]. Plans include further digitization of CASP's extensive archival holdings (currently CASP has been able to digitize less than 10% of what it holds in its hard copy archives), the full bilingualization of the site (French/English), and the creation of learning modules for all educational levels based on the materials archived to the site. CASP is the first research project of its kind anywhere in the world devoted to the systematic exploration and documentation of the ways in which Shakespeare has been adapted into (and out of) a national, multicultural theatrical practice and is now recognized as the largest and most sophisticated website in the world devoted to Shakespeare. One of the defining features of Canada's cultural (theatrical) heritage is the extent to which it relies on a dialogue with traditional Shakespearean theatre.

Developed by the University of Guelph's [3] Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project (CASP), directed by Dr. Daniel Fischlin (School of English and Theatre Studies), the site houses an as-close-to comprehensive (and ever-growing), digital archive of performances, productions, playwrights, and other materials that date from pre-Canadian Confederation times to the present day. Included in the CASP list of playwrights are such names as Timothy Findley, Ann-Marie MacDonald, Djanet Sears, Daniel David Moses, Rick Miller [4], and Robert Lepage. All told, at launch time (April 2004), the CASP website contained well over seven thousand pages of information on over 450 plays, which will be added to as the project continues. CASP is actually two integrated websites, one an administrative database site, the other the public site that is connected to portions of the Database. CASP is unique in how it has developed an innovative research mechanism that allows for inputting of research results from anywhere in the world through its administrative database site, something CASP conceptualized and designed from the ground up.

Its innovative, ongoing research activities have already attracted national and international media recognition (including feature write-ups in The Globe and Mail (Caldwell, “When Pucks collide”), The Chronicle of Higher Education (Birchard, “U. of Guelph Unveils Largest Website on Shakespeare”), national radio and television interviews, and the visits of many international scholars working on related materials). The project website, to which many of CASP’s findings have been published, has generated a huge volume of site visits since the launch of the site in April, 2004. Currently the site is developing bilingual materials related to French Canada and Shakespeare with an intended launch in Summer of 2006. These materials will effectively double the size of what is already a massive site with enormous resources including scripts, critical writings, images, audio, film, and various multimedia (including a soon to be released Shakespeare literacy game targeted at a youth audience).

Further, the signing of the recent Memorandum of Understanding with the Stratford Festival of Canada ([5]) (April 2005), after more than a year of negotiation and design, articulates a move toward a hybrid site co-developed with Stratford (intended launch date January 2007), that will combine CASP's intepretative, critical, and archival expertise with Stratford's performance focus to create a major new site devoted to Shakespeare and pedagogy. The site will be housed at the University of Guelph. The vision is to create the most sophisticated learning commons in the world devoted to Shakespearean pedagogy with a focus on performance and cultural and linguistic literacy.

The CASP project, which includes both the public web site and hard copy archives of all the plays and play materials it catalogues, has been funded by a Premier’s Research Excellence Award (PREA) provided by the Province of Ontario and by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Standard Research Grant.

For better or worse, Canada's theatrical past is profoundly connected to Shakespeare, with productions, revisions, adaptations, and any number of spin-off representations a key feature of the Canadian cultural landscape. As stated in the Canadian Theatre Encyclopedia entry on Shakespeare:

"The most produced non-Canadian playwright, his works are at the foundation of theatre in this country [Canada] and are performed in all styles at virtually all the major theatres, in French and in English, across the nation. Like Molière , the works of Shakespeare appear as keystones throughout the history of theatre here [in Canada]. His were among the first works performed in the New World, they were the raison d'être of the foundation of the nation's largest theatre (Stratford Festival), and they are still being taught in schools, with interpretations which change from era to era." ("Shakespeare," Canadian Theatre Encyclopedia)

As much as this Shakespearean presence is a function of Canada's colonial heritage with its dependency on immigrant cultures, it is also a function of how a new and emergent culture has sought to define itself in dialogue (and frequently against) the Shakespearean tradition. CASP is an attempt to document the fascinating permutations this dialogue has taken with the understanding that Shakespeare (or the Shakespeare effect) is situated at a key nexus in a wide array of cultural activities and referents.

Moreover, Canadian scholarship has played a crucial role in providing the necessary social, historical, economic, religious and archival contexts for understanding the theatrical work Shakespeare produced. The Records of Early English Drama project housed at the University of Toronto, for instance, "provide proof that a man like Shakespeare––without a university education, untrained in the classical theatre tradition of the time, unacquainted with the manners of aristocracy––actually could have written the plays that are now universally regarded as the greatest in drama and literature" (Monika Stephenson. "Canadian scholarship gives the Bard a boost." The Globe and Mail. May 1, 2004. F9).

CASP was conceived as an attempt to produce an archive of lost or forgotten theatrical materials and practices important both to Canada’s theatrical and literary histories, but also to Canada’s emergent sense of itself as a nation as mediated by these same materials and practices. To that end, we have collected information on over 450 plays in which some form of Shakespearean adaptation is at work. These plays span hundreds of years (over three centuries) in chronology and document a vast range of local, regional, national, transnational and multicultural theatrical realities that form a significant part of Canada's cultural heritage.

The sheer quantity of theatrical activity occurring in the genre of Shakespearean adaptation over an extended historical period marks a significant economic, artistic, cultural, and social investment in doing "something" to/with Shakespeare. CASP notes that this activity is over and above the theatrical work in which more conventional stagings and productions of Shakespeare occur (themselves always potentially adaptations).

Moreover, these adaptations, if anything, reinforce the crucial linkage between works of the imagination and the political and social contexts out of which they emerge. As Jane Henderson suggests in a recent online article linking Shakespeare to Canadian politics, especially in relation to issues of marriage and domesticity, "both art and politics are putting out ideas about the same thing; namely, they are imagining how people could identify and organize their experiences of attraction and devotion. Shakespeare's text is an inherited institution, as is the Canadian federal definition of terms of marriage" (Paul Martin, Meet Shakespeare). Such an association is but one of a multiple set of intersections between theatrical activity that uses Shakespeare as a key framing device and the wider cultural patternings and activities to which Shakespearean adaptation is pertinent.

Shakespeare's use of a wide variety of adaptive techniques and source texts in his theatrical writing and the recent explosion of Shakespearean adaptation studies also provide an important context for understanding the impetus behind CASP.

The diversity of Shakespearean adaptation in Canada is staggering: from aboriginal and African-Canadian theatre through to colonial, postcolonial, fringe, multicultural, minority, popular culture, gay, lesbian, queer, and youth theatre. The CASP digital archive includes adaptations with a range of thematic predilections: from cowboy Shakespeare to vampire Shakespeare to club (rave and DJ) Shakespeare to hockey Shakespeare to TheatreSports Shakespeare to Shakespeare and the October Crisis of 1970.

In response to this diversity, the CASP website was designed to have multiple uses for a range of audiences––from students and teachers looking for access to classroom materials through to playgoers and theatre practitioners looking for production details and other sorts of information. The CASP site collects materials with inclusiveness as a key operating principle. Materials made available on the CASP website represent only a small portion of the materials collected in a hard copy archive housed in the CASP offices at the University of Guelph. It is CASP's intention to digitize as many of these materials as possible in the future.

A number of features make the CASP site unique:

1. The CASP Online Anthology ([6]), consisting of over 35 texts (most of them playscripts), is the first of its kind, and completely free to anyone with access to a web browser, making accessible a variety of Canadian playscripts and historical texts that have been either lost or unavailable until now. For instance, CASP published for the first time John Wilson Bengough’s Puffe and Co., or Hamlet, Prince of Dry Goods, a comic play by Canada’s internationally famous cartoonist that had been lost for over a century. A substantial portion of the materials gathered in the CASP archives are distinctive, critically unrecognized, virtually unknown, or unpublished.
2. Using the technical expertise of programmers working for the University of Guelph, CASP built an online database designed specifically for recording literary and theatrical information. It is fully searchable and contains significant amounts of data (on playwrights, productions of plays, awards, historical context, digital links and information, and so forth) that is constantly being updated. The content of this database is unique––no other database of its sort exists anywhere.
3. CASP also developed a Spotlight page that allowed it to digitize and organize materials from within its archives as a special focus section thus providing access to a focussed grouping of materials that will be useful in a range of pedagogical contexts. The first spotlight page launched by CASP was Aboriginal Adaptations of Shakespeare ([7]).
4. The information in the CASP Online Anthology and database is complemented by links to a range of secondary sources and multimedia materials ([8]). CASP has digitally recorded and transcribed exclusive interviews done with a variety of playwrights and have made them available online. It has also included clips from movies, photos, political cartoons in which Shakespearean referents figure, rare historical documents (like the first program for the Stratford Festival in Stratford, Ontario), and, where possible, other relevant audiovisual materials.

CASP trains and funds, in a collaborative research context, undergraduate and graduate students and postdocs at the University of Guelph's School of English and Theatre Studies (SETS). Many of its trainees go on to do further graduate work in the field (there are currently 4 CASP graduates completing PhDs in overlapped areas of study). CASP has trained and employed some 35 graduate and undergraduate students and has employed close to 50 people in a variety of functions since its inception. CASP is currently one of the largest digital humanities research projects in Canada with a strong record of training numerous students and of achieving its deliverables in a timely manner.