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> This is an interesting concept for students, but I can see several > difficulties in that there are already many sites on the internet which > post student papers (and sell student papers) on a variety of > subjects. Do we want to add to this? I can understand the fears about plagiarism. My current website (http://shakespearean.org.uk) is based around web versions of historical criticism and other Shakespeare related material - mostly from the 18th and 19th Century - and I have already come across at least one clear instance of plagiarism, in which a student apparently gained University credit for making her own Shakespeare website, which she did simply by stealing the material from my own website and a number of others. This was so lazily done that she had only managed to remove about three-quarters of the identifying marks which proved that she had cut and pasted essays from my site rather than transcribed them from original texts herself. I am sure that others have tried to pass off the content of the essays on my site as their own writing (some of the search terms used to find my site suggest that this was the entire purpose of some visits). Unfortunately such cheating cannot be prevented, and anybody who publishes any writing about Shakespeare or other commonly studied authors on the web (including all online journals dedicated to postgraduate or professional writing) is likely to become an unwilling accomplice to such acts. I personally feel, however, that the benefit of making such materials easily available to those who wish to use them for acceptable purposes outweighs the (possibly significant) minority who use them to cheat. On the positive side, any suspicious tutor could catch attempted plagiarists using such openly published texts simply by typing phrases into Google - something not possible with some of the specialist sites selling essays for the purposes of cheating. Again, I understand that publishing Undergraduate level writing will make plagiarism easier than publishing essays by 19th Century actresses or 21st Century Professors (since it is much more likely that a tutor will believe the student to have been capable of creating the work), but I feel that the benefits that Undergraduates will gain by having their work refereed and published - thereby gaining early experience of academic publishing at their own level, and having their work valued - far outweighs the cost of a few more Internet plagiarists, who would otherwise simply have stolen work from elsewhere on the Internet. The main alternative, I suppose, is a print journal - but this would be expensive to produce and at least initially difficult to distribute, and would probably require a level of funding and human resources that I simply do not have access to. It would also mean that it was much harder for tutors to catch anybody using the journal for purposes of plagiarism, since they would not be able to digitally search the journal for matching phrases. >On the positive side, I'd like to see more papers on > students' responses to performance, whether by reviewing an early >modern production (not simply Shakespeare, which only reinforces > narrow views or myths of The Bard as a god whose works can have > no serious competition) or > by recounting experiences of staging early modern drama themselves. >I've had some excellent papers from my students on their preparation > and participation in the performance of Shakespeare and many other >dramatists of the period. That sounds an excellent idea, and I would certainly want to include student reviews of books and productions, and more detailed or descriptive papers on such subjects would be welcome. Despite being only a mature undergraduate myself I review both theatre and books for the "Shakespeare Bulletin", and have gained a great deal from the experience of writing the reviews, and from having my work published - this is one of the reasons why I am interested in giving other undergraduates less fortunate than myself a formal outlet for their work. I have a special interest in Fringe and non-Shakespearean productions (other Renaissance Drama and modern adaptations), and would expect my proposed journal to allow work on a wide range of other Renaissance Drama and related topics alongside the more strictly Shakespearean. Thanks for your comments. Thomas Larque. "Shakespeare and His Critics" http://shakespearean.org.uk