Search

The Stratford Festival Archives houses the largest single-theatre archive in the world, spanning more than sixty years of performing history, artefacts, production materials, and ephemera. Uniquely, the Stratford Archives also hosts a growing collection of palimpsestic composite scripts, master texts which feature every dramaturgical cut in the Festival's history layered together. Through consideration of high-quality scans of several Festival prompt-books, composite scripts, and archive features, this paper draws conclusions on the benefits and drawbacks of such an approach to stage-managerial material and examines the breadth of the prompt-book and composite script collection at the Stratford Festival Archives, with particular focus on the industry of archivist Nora Polley. Finally, this paper considers the question of copy-text compilation and the pitfalls in neglecting primary source materials with examples of prompt-books constructed from editorially moderated paperback editions rather than Quarto-Folio copy texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examining records in the Stratford Festival Archive of costumes made for Juliets from 1960 to 2008, this paper discusses the significance of Juliet's costumes in themselves, in relation to costume changes that tell her story visually, and in broader social contexts: specifically, Canadian celebrity culture in 1992, inescapable Canadian politics in 1968, and the North American beauty myth in 1960. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]