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UVic English professor Dr. Gary Kuchar has recieved an honourable mention in the Canadian Association for Theatre Research's 2025 Saddlemyer Award competition for his book Shakespeare and the World of “Slings & Arrows”: Poetic Faith in a Postmodern Age (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2024). The award recognizes the best book published in English or French in a given year which constitutes a substantial contribution to the field of drama, theatre, and performance studies.

Read the jury's citation below:

In Shakespeare and the World of “Slings & Arrows”: Poetic Faith in a Postmodern Age, Gary Kuchar brings his expertise as an early modern theatre scholar to an in-depth exploration of the 2003-2005 Canadian television series created by Susan Coyne, Bob Martin, and Mark McKinney. Kuchar reads the narrative structure of the show’s three-season arc, set at the New Burbage Theatre Festival (a fictionalization of the real-life Stratford Festival), as an “ironized morality play” (14) about the “pursuit of artistic vocation in an age of advanced capitalism” (6). His larger agenda is to probe the disparity in response to the series – while embraced by theatre lovers and television critics, it was dismissed by some early modernists – with reference to a larger rift in Shakespeare studies in the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries. Slings & Arrows, he argues, presents the contemporary dedication to producing and performing Shakespeare as an alternatively absurd and transformational enterprise, and engaging with the show as it navigates this dialectic informs and perhaps supplants the “dehumanizing contexts in which we now read, study, and perform Shakespeare” (6). Not early modernists ourselves, the Saddlemyer committee found Kuchar’s navigation of this material edifying and elegantly written, as he brings readers through unexpectedly refreshing re-readings of Peter Brook’s The Empty Space and key writings of Northrop Frye. In the latter parts of the book Kuchar contends with readings of Slings & Arrows as elitist and heteronormative, arguing that both the series and Richard Monette’s tenure as Stratford Festival artistic director (1994-2007), on which it comments, deserve deeper retrospective consideration of their treatment of Shakespeare and diversity in Canada. This book of television and early modern theatre studies, in our view, offers a welcome return to debates about the role of Shakespeare and of a Shakespearean theatre festival in Canada at a moment when leadership change is imminent at the Stratford Festival, and such debates are likely to resurface. Also deeply welcome is Kuchar’s serious consideration of the show’s co-creators, especially Coyne, as significant artists with informed and compelling positions on the meaning and value of Shakespeare and of a life in the theatre.