World Premiere of the Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Website!

Daniel Fischlin: CASP Director

April 22, 2004

The Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project is proud to present via streaming video the official opening ceremonies  launching our website in its entirety.

Watch the opening ceremonies via streaming video

The event was a great success. The Dean of the College of Arts, Dr. Jacqueline Murray, welcomed everyone to the event, including our esteemed guests Lloyd Sullivan, the owner of the Sanders Portrait, and Raymond du Plessis, Q.C. Grade 5/6 students from Edward Johnson School were also in attendance, as was playwright Ken Hudson. Dr. Murray's warm remarks were followed by a performance by Ben Taylor and Michelle Smith, two fourth year drama students, from It Was All A Dream: A Hip-Hopera, their own original musical adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Dr. Alastair Summerlee, President and Vice-Chancellor for the University of Guelph, then spoke on how technology is redefining the way research is done and information disseminated, followed by Dr. Arthur Bourns, representing the Premier's Research Excellence Awards, who talked about the quality of research going on in Ontario right now.

This was followed by a rousing reading by author Leon Rooke from his novel Shakespeare's Dog. The novel, aptly described by Rooke as "a bit raunchy," is set at the moment of Shakespeare's departure from Stratford to London as narrated by Shakepseare's dog.

Finally, Dr. Daniel Fischlin delivered some comments on the website (published below) and made the launch of the CASP website--the largest Shakespeare site on the web--official on the eve of Shakepseare's 440th birthday.

Thank you to everyone who attended and helped make the event a success.

Campus News: U of G launches revolutionary Shakespeare website

CBC Arts News: Guelph University launches Canadian Shakespeare site

Globe and Mail: "When Pucks Collide"
Please see Rebecca Caldwell's review of our website.

Images from the Bardfest at the Bullring, April 22, 2004
(in celebration of the CASP launch).

Prof featured in Globe and Mail

Campus News: Daniel Fischlin's appearance on Canada AM

Watch the opening ceremonies via streaming video

Daniel Fischlin's Launch Comments

Distinguished guests and colleagues:

Launch of this site––the largest Shakespeare site on the WWW––on the eve of Shakespeare’s 440th birthday, signals one of the ways in which universities can disseminate the unique kinds of information they create into a wide public context. The combination of substantive information and the critical organization and presentation of that information are crucial and innovative features of the Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare site. We've dared to use the web in what is I think a visionary way and have not shied away from pushing the technology (sometimes to its limits) in order to enhance the appeal of the site to a wide variety of audiences while not compromising the quality of the information we present.

CASP's website is an integrated virtual learning, teaching, and research commons devoted to the study of Shakespeare in Canada--the first of its kind anywhere in the world and a site that makes full use of the creative digital technologies implicit to web technology. It is pitched at a wide audience that includes almost all levels of schooling, professional researchers, theatre practitioners and aficionados (and a range of other audiences) and it has over 6000 pages of information on it, countless embedded links that provide additional context, multimedia, an absolutely unique database of hard information, and multiple other features. One I'm most pleased with is the Spotlight attention paid to aboriginal theatre and Shakespeare in Canada––one of many such possible spotlights based on the patterns we're seeing emerge in the data we've gathered.

One of the defining features of Canada's cultural (theatrical) heritage is the extent to which it relies on an extensive dialogue with traditional Shakespearean theatre. That CASP has found close to 500 plays dating from pre-Confederation to the present (over three centuries) gives some idea of the cultural attention paid to Shakespeare in Canada. 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. I note that this activity is over and above the theatrical work in which more conventional stagings and productions of Shakespeare occur (themselves always potentially adaptations). Remember that many of the plays we have found are being published for the first time to the site and represent a significant amount of archival material hitherto ignored or undiscovered. The site itself, then, only represents less than 10% of the total hard copy materials that the project has gathered in its archives.

CASP’s linkage with the Theatre Archives at the University of Guelph (the largest in the country and the place where all our materials will eventually end up) is hugely important--and it is of the utmost importance that those archives be nurtured and supported as they grow. We're one piece of a much larger puzzle that relates to arts activities across the country--I'm proudest of the fact that our main organizing/collecting principle has been inclusivity undergirded by the fact that we understood how important local and regional activities are when placed in a national perspective that tends to focus on only the "big" picture usually associated with Stratford or the Toronto or Montreal theatre scenes.

I'd like to invite everyone in this room, from the Grade 5 and Six students from Edward Johnson School to our distinguished guest Mr. Lloyd Sullivan, owner of the Sanders portrait whose intriguing face you see on our site, to think of the site as a giant story box that you can reach into in order to discover stories that are part of Canada's cultural heritage.

Launching something that is virtual is admittedly a little strange—I’m sorry to say that there won't be a champagne bottle smashing into the screen behind me. Nonetheless I'd like to remind people that the virtual world we've created coexists with the material world of print culture in all sorts of interesting ways––our site is extremely dependent on the many forms of print and other media that you'll find virtually archived on it––and we fully anticipate that the site will produce new iterations of print culture as people make use of it in traditional and unexpected ways.

CASP’s vision has never been to supplant print culture--merely to make it more widely accessible via the enormous power of the web to disseminate materials quickly, inexpensively, and in a way that allows for relational archives like ours to be associated with the appropriate critical contexts for negotiating the enormous range of information we have gathered. Without wanting to sound too self-congratulatory, I would suggest that what we've done on this site is create a vision for knowledge creation and dissemination that will have serious and far-reaching implications for how universities in the future represent the research work they do to the world--how universities manage information and disseminate it and make it accessible to a much broader spectrum of society than is currently the case.

Imagine a scenario where the university not only continues to create knowledge across the disciplines but then also creates more effective digital portals to that information for those seeking to use it--and I don't just mean putting scads of information up on sites without context, but actually producing sites in which the relationship between data of various sorts and the critical contexts necessary for evaluating those data are transparent and part of an integrated approach to knowledge dissemination. Rather than sending doctoral dissertations, for example, to the University of Michigan to be archived in microfilm, doctoral dissertations in the various disciplines would become available online with sophisticated apparatuses for evaluating their research impact and relation to other research. And all this shaped by the university community as part of both its commitment to making the knowledge it creates public (and understandable) but also as part of actually generating the kind of community that is capable of and necessary to the creation of meaningful knowledge. Knowledge in such a context becomes much more dynamic, processual, and transparent--less static, inaccessible and obscure.

Our project, then, has achieved what I think are two goals it has always had that align with the social value and utility of university research generally, and of arts research specifically: 1) it has created an absolutely distinctive and unique body of information conjoined with the critical tools for evaluating that information and 2) it has made it completely and freely accessible to a worldwide audience in both an aesthetically pleasing and intellectually rigorous way.

About a year and a half ago the Research Associates in the CASP offices presented me with the Ratbert Office Award, a joke diploma they all signed that is given for "having the greatest optimism despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary." (Ratbert for those of you who don’t know is a rat from the Dilbert cartoon distinguished by his simpleminded optimism—someone who as a matter of course says things like “Let's form multi-disciplinary task forces to reengineer our core processes until we're a world class organization”). I've kept that Diploma taped to the wall directly in front of my work station ever since as a reminder of the value of the collision between optimism and pessimism that happened at one of the most difficult moment's in the project's history, a time when people were doing brutally repetitive input entries to a database that had grown beyond the scope of any of our collective imaginations. And I would hasten to add that despite the very Canadian cautionary message that the gift implied--the lot of us involved in the project were being driven by the very real excitement at the knowledge that we were creating something truly unique, even as the scope of the project and capacity to manage all the information were under protracted strain.

So, to all those people--research associates, staff, and faculty-- who have worked with resistant creativity, extreme diligence, and genuine productive enthusiasm in the face of all sorts of obstacles as we bring the project to this point in its history--a most sincere and heartfelt thank you. My Ratbert Diploma will stay where it is and I won't forget the important lessons you've collectively taught me.

To the playwrights and directors and theatre people in the audience—all of whom have helped enormously in providing CASP with the materials it has been seeking a sincere thank you. To Lloyd Sullivan owner of the remarkable Sanders portrait that we’ve used throughout the site, we owe you an especial debt of gratitude for your generosity and encouragement. Thank you.

I invite you all to explore the virtual world we’ve created––enter into dialogue with it, critique it, enjoy it, learn from it, change it, adapt it, reflect on it. The site offers all those possibilities and more. Like any form of meaningful knowledge the site asks that you engage with it and in so doing contribute to making the ongoing narratives that are part of our cultural legacy.

I want to end by letting on, tongue firmly in cheek, that Shakespeare anticipated the world-wide-web and of course this project. In words from All’s Well that Ends Well written in 1602-03, approximately the same time as the Sanders portrait was created, Shakespeare suggested that “The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together” (Act 4, Scene 3). With those words and their invocation of the mingled narratives that make up the web of our cultural heritage as Canadians, I’d like to declare the Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project at the University of Guelph officially launched.

Daniel Fischlin