Courses
Spring 2006:
Not Teaching
Fall 2005:
ENGLISH 564: SEMINAR IN LITERARY MODES AND GENRES
Spring 2005:
ENGLISH 419: LATE SHAKESPEARE
Fall 2004:
ENGLISH 102: INTRODUCTION TO DRAMA
Spring 2004:
On leave
Fall 2003:
ENGLISH 316: DRAMA BYSHAKESPEARE’s Contemporaries
ENGLISH 318: EARLY SHAKESPEARE
Spring 2003:
ENGLISH 319: LATE SHAKESPEARE
ENGLISH 420: READING THE EARLY MODERN PLAYBOOK
Areas of Interest
- Tudor and Stuart Drama; Print Culture and the History of the Book; History and Theory of Reading; Genre, Form, and Politics; Religious Studies; Popular Culture; Legal Studies; Early Modern Political Culture; Humanities Computing.
Work in Progress
BOOKS
The Birth of Tragicomedy: Mixed Form, Mixed Politics in Renaissance Drama. Historical-formalist study of the politics of the most popular genre of the early seventeenth century, with chapters on plot, character, and setting. I argue that the emphasis on mixture—and its tropic analogue, paradox—in the formal structure of tragicomedy encodes and elaborates the pressing political questions of early Stuart society, a society that, in a period of historic transition, relied on the same kind of paradoxical mixture to prevent political, religious, and economic debates from becoming unbridgeable divides.
The Popularity of Playbooks in Shakespeare’s England. With Alan B. Farmer. Revisionist study of the publishing, marketing, and reception of playbooks, with chapters on the popularity of playbooks, title-page marketing, theatricality and print, canon formation, the author function, and the social geography of play publication.
WEB RESOURCE
DEEP: The Database on Early English Playbooks. With Alan B. Farmer. DEEP will be a valuable new online humanities research tool, allowing scholars of early modern drama and the history of the book to investigate the ways that English Renaissance drama was advertised, sold, and consumed in the marketplace of printed books. A searchable database of every edition (over 1700 total) from the early sixteenth century to the Restoration, DEEP includes about forty fields related to each original playbook, including: years of composition and publication; title-page attributions of author, playing company, and theater; addresses to the reader and dedications; publishers, printers, and booksellers; frequency of reprints; number of sheets used per edition; number of years between performance and first publication; and many others.
Recent Publications
BOOKS
Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication: Readings in the English Book Trade. Cambridge UP, 2004.
Edition of The Noble Spanish Soldier (1634), by Thomas Dekker. London: Globe Quartos, forthcoming.
ARTICLES AND BOOK CHAPTERS
“The Popularity of Playbooks Revisited.” With Alan B. Farmer. Shakespeare Quarterly, forthcoming.
“Typographic Nostalgia: Playreading, Popularity and the Meanings of Black Letter.” Book chapter in The Book of the Play: Playwrights, Stationers, and Readers in Early Modern England. Ed. Marta Straznicky. U of Massachusetts P, forthcoming.
“The Caroline ‘Classic’ and the Modern Canon.” With Alan B. Farmer. Book chapter in Localizing Caroline Drama,1625-1642. Eds. Alan B. Farmer and Adam Zucker. Palgrave, forthcoming.
“Mixed Government and Mixed Marriage in A King and No King: Sir Henry Neville Reads Beaumont and Fletcher.” ELH 69 (2002): 947-977.
“Vile Arts: The Marketing of English Printed Drama, 1512-1660.” With Alan B. Farmer. Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 39 (2000): 77-165.
“Walter Burre’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle.” English Literary Renaissance 29 (1999): 21-43.
BOOK REVIEWS AND SHORT PIECES
“Copyright.” In The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature. Eds. David Scott Kastan, Nancy Armstrong, Gail McMurray Gibson, Andrew Hadfield, and Jennifer Wicke. Oxford: Oxford UP, forthcoming.
“William Shakespeare: The Life of Shakespeare.” In The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature. Eds. David Scott Kastan, Nancy Armstrong, Gail McMurray Gibson, Andrew Hadfield, and Jennifer Wicke. Oxford: Oxford UP, forthcoming.
Rev. of Andrew Murphy, Shakespeare in Print: A History and Chronology of Shakespeare Publishing. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. Shakespeare Yearbook, forthcoming.
Rev. of The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Volume IV, 1557-1695. Eds. John Barnard and D.F. McKenzie, assisted by Maureen Bell. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. Renaissance Quarterly 57 (2004): 717-719.
Rev. of “A Certain Text”: Close Readings and Textual Studies on Shakespeare and Others in Honor of Thomas Clayton. Ed. Linda Anderson and Janis Lull. Newark: U of Delaware P, 2002. Renaissance Quarterly 57 (2004): 367-368.
“Henry Machyn.” In Tudor England: An Encyclopedia. Eds. Arthur F. Kinney, David W. Swain, Eugene D. Hill, and William B. Long. New York: Garland, 2001.
Rev. of John Jones, Shakespeare at Work. Archiv 236 (1999): 175-177.
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