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Shakespeare and Renaissance

Royal Shakespeare Theatre. Photo: Tony Hisgett

Click for Shakespeare and Renaissance Studies research outputs|

Introduction

Shakespeare and Renaissance Studies is a diverse research area, and its members represent a wide range of interests. Shakespeare is taught from first year to PhD level, therefore it is possible for a student to begin to specialise his or her studies on this period from the first day at Royal Holloway. Single Honours students will also study Renaissance literature more broadly in their second year. As a result of the dedicated pathway in this field, our MA and PhD students are of a very high standard. In fact, eighteen of them have received AHRC funding.

The distinctive feature of our Shakespeare MA| is its close engagement with the works themselves and with what they say now about our world as well as what they reveal about Shakespeare’s. The critical, historical and theoretical issues raised by his plays and poetry are at the heart of the Department's research in this area but the work of other writers of the period and of the material and intellectual culture of the Renaissance are of great interest to the staff working in this field.

Former students have gone on to work as academics, as teachers and in the professional theatre as well as a range of other fields. Numerous teachers have studied the Shakespeare MA as a means of enhancing their teaching. Members of the Department regularly speak at national and international conferences and are always happy to speak to prospective students.

Staff and Research Interests

Dr Roy Booth works on Renaissance poetry and drama. He has completed a study of the misogynist figure (the marriage-hater) in English Renaissance comedy, provisionally entitled Married and Marred. This covered plays by Shakespeare, Fletcher, Heywood, Chapman, the Duchess of Newcastle and others.
Dr Christie Carson works on Shakespeare in Performance worldwide and across the full four hundred year period that the plays have been staged but specialises in the work of Shakespeare's Globe and the Royal Shakespeare Company. She has developed the online Database Designing Shakespeare: an audio-visual archive, 1960-2000 and the Cambridge King Lear CD-ROM: Text and Performance Archive and therefore is also very interested in the development of online resources for the study of Shakepeare. Her current project involves creating a volume of essays and an online archive which will respond to the Globe to Globe Festival taking place in London as part of the Cultural Olympiad.
Dr Eric Langley is interested in supervising research on: early modern conceptions of interiority and subjectivity; the interaction of science and literature; the body and sexuality; narcissism; Ovid and Renaissance lit; the Renaissance essay tradition; disease, plague, health etc; early modern semiotics and rhetoric; suicide and death; accidents and chance.
Dr Deana Rankin is author of Between Spenser and Swift: English Writing in Seventeenth-century Ireland (Cambridge, 2005) and a number of articles on drama, history-writing, classical republicanism, drama by women and Irish writing in the early modern period. She is currently writing a book about assassination on the early modern English stage and editing two plays from the 1630s/ 40s. She has supervised post-graduate work at MA and PhD level on Shakespeare and film, Shakespeare in performance, Shakespeare and the law, Shakespeare and theory, the soliloquy, women's dramatic writing, Renaissance history plays, performance of the English Republic and Civil War period, Irish drama - early modern and contemporary. She is very interested in hearing from students who would like to pursue research in these or related areas.
Professor Kiernan Ryan
Dr Elaine McGirr is interested in supervising research on: Shakespearean adaptation; cultural competition between print and performance; seventeenth and eighteenth -century theatre; rhetoric, aesthetics and politics; early modern masculinity; the representation of heroism and heroics; poetry, politics and performance of the Civil Wars and Restoration; London.

Current Projects

Designing Shakespeare: an audio-visual database 1960-2000

This AHRB funded research project, which was first launched in 2003, makes freely available audio-visual material which illustrates the performance history of Shakespeare in London and Stratford-upon Avon from 1960-2000; a period of great theatrical and social change. Designing Shakespeare| is widely used in lecture halls and classrooms in Britain, North America and Australia. It aims to demonstrate the vast range of interpretations possibilities for Shakespeare’s work on stage and is used extensively in teaching Shakespeare in performance in the Department by the project’s Principal Investigator Dr Christie Carson.

Early Modern London Theatre

Early Modern London Theatres (EMLoT) is a research database and educational resource that grew out of a collaboration between the Records of Early English Drama| (REED) at the University of Toronto, the Centre for Computing in the Humanities| (CCH) at King's College London, and the Department of English| at the University of Southampton, and developed from an editorial project at REED. EMLoT and its associated Learning Zone have been funded by the UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), the British Academy (BA), and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). Dr Christie Carson of the English Department was involved as the Education Consultant for the Learning Zone| of this project.

Filming and Performing Renaissance History 1500-1660

Filming and Performing Renaissance History 1500-1660| is an Arts and Humanities Research Council funded Research Networks project. It places in juxtaposition individuals and groups already addressing or interested in exploring representations of Renaissance history across and between genres, cultures and disciplines. Concentrating on all types of filmic and performative examples, the network investigates the corpus of representations of the years between 1500 and 1660 (such as the history film, the television period drama, television history, themed museum exhibition, reenactment experience and historically-situated theatre and opera). Dr Christie Carson is a member of the Steering Group and has contributed a chapter to the book that came out of this Network.