The purpose of this two-hour online meeting was to see the last tasks ahead in the home stretch of the project, that is, before our collection appears in print and before we organize – probably online - the dissemination of our results.
The deadline for the participants to respond to the peer reviewers’ commentary was 15th December. As the schedule for the reviewers was exceptionally tight, at the time of this Progress Check Meeting participants were still tackling with the remarks the peer reviewers made to improve their articles.
By the beginning of December new lockdowns were introduced in various countries in Europe and a new mutant of the lethal COVID 19 virus in Britain was detected. This annulled our chances to disseminate our results as we had originally planned, a gathering with physical presence was suddenly out of the question. As a consequence, we agreed that the budget which contained substantial sums for guest accommodation, travel and catering should be re-allocated and re-licensed by PPCU and then VF authorities. Also, as so much had to be left out from the papers because of the 6,000-word limit, we agreed that the collaboration was so fruitful that we both need to continue and invite like-minded colleagues as well. Eventually, a decision was made to move the final event online, invite fellow scholars as respondents to review the volume or parts of it, and also, to build and maintain a long-term project webpage independent of any university to cater for researchers in our field, providing sources, forums and a bibliography. We also agreed that the symposium which would take place mid-March at the latest should be organized as a series of roundtables, not lectures, to serve more as an interactive event than a webinar, in sum, it should reach out to and involve as many colleagues on the Central European Shakespeare scene as possible. We also agreed that each participant of the project should make a video about their respective research papers, and that we would make them available for the public on the website prior to the symposium so that colleagues or the interested could become acquainted with them. This way the dissemination of the results of the project would prove more beneficial, as we would be able to reach a wider audience in the long run.
