Ted McGee

PhD, Toronto
MA, Toronto
BA, Toronto

Email: ted.mcgee@uwaterloo.ca

Biography

I grew up in Whitby, Ontario, where I played shinny on Pringles Creek pond with Mike Keenan, read all the Hardy Boy books I could find, and had a high school English teacher who made Shakespeare’s plays and Eliot’s poetry seem immediately, profoundly important. Thanks to that teacher, Peter Dales, I had the good fortune to go on to study at St. Michael’s College at the University of Toronto at a time when it was dedicated above all to excellent teaching while enjoying a period of dynamic, provocative intellectual activity.

I did a Master’s thesis on Graham Greene’s fiction because the topic, as it were, tapped me on the shoulder and asked me to look at it. For my doctoral work, I shifted my focus to early modern drama because of the opportunity to edit a late-15th-century manuscript with some of the earliest instances of English civic drama. The research on this project proved to be the foundation for what I have gone on to teach and study during my years at Waterloo:  political forms of drama, theatre history, Shakespeare, and the editing of literary texts. Having served on the Board of the Stratford Festival from 1992-1997 (and still a member of its Education and Archives Committee), I’ve extended my interest in Shakespeare to Shakespeare in Performance and my work on theatre history into contemporary theatrical archives. For me, teaching remains the most enjoyable and important part of my work—even more fun than those games with the Waterloo Worriers.

Selected publications

"Rush-bearings of Yorkshire West Riding," in Early Performers and Performance in the Northeast of England, ed. Diana Wyatt and John McKinnell (Leeds: ARC Humanities Press, 2021): 131-46.

"'The isle is full of noises …': Music for the Yorkshire West Riding from Ripon to London," Co-authored by Sylvia Thomas. European Medieval Drama 23 (2019): 71-100.

"'Theatre is not a nursing home': Merchants of Venice of The Stratford Festival," in Shakespeare and Canada: "Remembrance of Ourselves", ed. Irena R. Makaryk and Kathryn Prince (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2017): 11-26.

"Narrative Threads: Juliet's Costumes and their Contexts." Canadian Theatre Review 156 (Fall 2013): 12-17.

“The Entertainment of the French Ambassadors in England in 1564,” Early Theatre 14.1 (2011): 79-100.

“Sir Thomas Benger: Ups and Downs of a Master of the Revels,” Notes and Queries 58 (2011): 207-8.

“Smitten: Staging Love at First Sight at the Stratford Festival,” in Shakespeare’s Comedies of Love (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008): 213-27.

"The World Tossed at Tennis," in Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works and in and in Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture: A Companion to The Collected Works, ed. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007): 1405-30 and 667-71.

"Pocky Queans and Hornèd Knaves: Libelous Poetry and the Circulation of Gender Stereotypes,” in Oral Traditions and Gender in Early Modern Texts, ed. Karen Bamford and Mary Ellen Lamb (London: Ashgate, 2008): 139-51.

"Mysteries, Musters, and Masque: The Import(s) of Elizabethan Civic Entertainments,” in The Progresses, Pageants, and Entertainments of Queen Elizabeth I, ed. Jayne Elisabeth Archer, Elizabeth Goldring, and Sarah Knight (Oxford University Press, 2007): 104-21.

"The Older I Get, The Better I Was,” The New Quarterly 94 (2005): 102-7.

Fellowships and awards

• Marc Fitch Fund, London,  Special Project Grant, 2019: 'The Thynne Family Papers' for the Records of Early English Drama: Wiltshire.Malone Society, Oxford, 2017 Colin Baldwin Research Fellowship
• Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Occasional Conference Grant for “A Celebration of Canadian Plays and Playwrights,” 2003
• SSHRC Standard Research Grant for the “New Variorum Shakespeare Othello,” 2002
• Visiting Scholar, The Stratford Festival, 2001
• SSHRC Occasional Conference Grant [with A.L. Magnusson] for the Waterloo Conference on Elizabethan Theatre on “Theatre and Nation,” 1997
• SSHRC Standard Research Grant for the “Records of Early English Drama: Dorset,” 1990