Presenters
The following presenters spoke at the 'Strangers and Aliens in London and Toronto: Sex, Religion, and Xenophobia in Marston's The Dutch Courtesan' conference on 22-23 March 2019. Read an overview of our project events, including the conference, here.
Keynote
Speaker: Martin Butler (University of Leeds)
Martin Butler is an internationally respected speaker, author, and editor whose work covers the whole period of 1560-1642. His first book Theatre and Crisis 1632-1642 (1984) explores the politics of the English stage in the pre-Civil War years. In subsequent essays he has written about Chapman, Webster, Middleton, Massinger, Brome, Shirley, Ford and others, and his 2008 monograph The Stuart Court Masque and Political Culture gives an overview of drama and political festivals at Whitehall under James I and Charles I. As general editor, he produced the Cambridge Ben Jonson (2012), and is now preparing the Oxford Complete Works of John Marston. He is currently editing Massinger's A New Way to Pay Old Debts for Revels Plays; and The Cardinal for the Oxford Complete Works of James Shirley. He's a member of the editorial board for The Oxford Works of Thomas Nashe. Recently, he has spoken in China (2016), California (2016), and Germany (2017). Read more about the keynote in our Conference Discoveries.
Respondent: Jeremy Lopez (University of Toronto)
Jeremy Lopez teaches and writes about the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. His most recent book is Constructing the Canon of Early Modern Drama (Cambridge 2014), a history of the early modern dramatic canon from the eighteenth century to the present. He is the general editor of the Routledge Anthology of Early Modern Drama (2020), which will be the first entirely revisionary anthology of its kind in over a century. Other current work in progress includes a monograph on the life and work of John Fletcher. In January 2018 he succeeded Gail Kern Paster as the editor of Shakespeare Quarterly. He is an innovative editor and a theatre scholar with a particular interest in finding new ways to read the lesser-known plays of Shakespeare’s contemporaries.
Panellists:
Meghan C Andrews (Lycoming College)
Meghan C. Andrews is Assistant Professor of English at Lycoming College. Her current book project, Shakespeare’s Networks, argues that Shakespeare’s social networks and institutional affiliations provide important but neglected local contexts key to understanding his works; her next project will focus on how the theatrical marketplace, print marketplace, and other early modern institutions triangulated to shape early modern drama. Her work can be found in Shakespeare Quarterly; Renaissance Drama; Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900; and Marlowe Studies. Read more about Andrews's work in our Conference Discoveries.
Tom Bishop (University of Auckland)
Tom Bishop is Professor and former Head of English at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, where he teaches Shakespeare, Renaissance literature, and Drama. He is the author of Shakespeare and the Theatre of Wonder (Cambridge, 1996), the translator of Ovid’s Amores (Carcanet, 2003), the editor of Pericles, Prince of Tyre (Internet Shakespeare Editions), and a continuing general editor of The Shakespearean International Yearbook (Routledge). He has published articles on Elizabethan music, Shakespeare, Jonson, court masques, Australian literature, the Renaissance Bible, Shakespeare and religion, and other topics. He is currently working on a book entitled Shakespeare’s Theatre Games. Read more about Bishop's work in our Conference Discoveries.
Andrew Fleck (University of Texas at El Paso)
Andrew Fleck is associate professor of English at the University of Texas in El Paso. He is the editor of Explorations in Renaissance Culture, a journal associated with the RSA's regional South-Central Renaissance Conference (he's always looking for good submissions and would love to hear from you about your work). He works on the Dutch in the English imagination, having published a note on The Dutch Courtesan in American Notes and Queries and longer essays in Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900; Shakespeare Yearbook; and Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England. The monograph he’s working on is called The Dutch Device: English Representations of the Dutch 1588-1688. The Dutch Courtesan figures importantly in one of its chapters. Read more about Fleck's work in our Conference Discoveries.
Liz Fox (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)
Liz Fox earned her PhD in English from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, specializing in early modern drama and culture. Her current research project, Theater of Exchange: The Cosmopolitan Stage of Jacobean London, examines how theatre shaped and reflected London’s global interactions. Organized around popular goods, including coins, art objects, and plays themselves, as well as commercial services such as the sex trade, this project argues that Jacobean drama engaged its audiences in processes of re-evaluation across economic and cultural networks in ways that promoted cosmopolitan attitudes. Liz’s essay, “‘These Very Pictures Will Surmount My Wealth’: Aesthetic and Economic Competitions in Thomas Heywood’s If You Know Not Me, II” is forthcoming in Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England. She currently serves as the Editorial Assistant for English Literary Renaissance.Read more about Fox's work in our Conference Discoveries.
Erin Julian (University of Toronto)
Erin Julian (PhD, McMaster) focuses her research on sexual violence in early modern drama (particularly comedy), and diversity and equity work more generally. Her recent and forthcoming publications include ‘Practicing Diversity at the Stratford Festival of Canada: Shakespeare, Performance, and Ethics in the Twenty-First Century’ in The Arden Research Companion to Shakespeare and Contemporary Performance (eds Kirwan and Prince, Bloomsbury, 2020); 'What's Funny about The Dutch Courtesan?' (Early Theatre, 2020); 'Labour of Care: Academic Theatre Research in the Commercial Theatre' (Shakespeare Bulletin, forthcoming); ‘New Directions in Jonson Criticism’ (Early Theatre, 2014); and The Alchemist: A Critical Reader (eds Julian and Ostovich, Bloomsbury, 2013). She is also co-editor of The Dutch Courtesan for the Oxford University Press The Complete Works of John Marston. Read more about Julian's work in our Conference Discoveries.
Noam Lior (University of Toronto)
Noam is one of the co-founders of Shakespeare at Play, working as its dramaturge, editor, annotator, and occasional performer (playing older male roles when better actors are not available). Noam is an alumnus of the University College Drama Program and the Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies at the University of Toronto, where his dissertation focused on digital multimedia Shakespeare editions. He also works as a director and dramaturge (sometimes even on non-Shakespeare plays!), and is serving as dramaturge and judge for Spur-of-the-Moment Shakespeare Company's ShakesBeers Showdown. He is also Finance and Publications Co-ordinator for the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies. Read more about Lior's work in our Conference Discoveries.
Lucy Munro (King’s College London)
Lucy Munro is currently finishing a book, Shakespeare in the Theatre: The King’s Men (Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2020), which explores the impact of the playing company on the composition, performance and revival of Shakespeare’s plays between 1603 and 1642. She has recently held research fellowships at the Huntington Library and Folger Shakespeare Library for work on a new project, ‘Cultural Histories of the Early Modern Playhouse’. As an editor, she is preparing texts of John Marston, William Barksted, and Lewis Machin’s The Insatiate Countess and James Shirley’s The Gentleman of Venice. She has worked with PAR techniques in the editing of two plays, The Queen and Concubine and The Demoiselle for Richard Brome Online, gen. ed. Richard Allen Cave (Royal Holloway, University of London, Sheffield University, 2009), and in three collaborative projects: ‘Ages and Stages’, a project on theatre, ageing, and cultural memory (Keele University, 2009-12); ‘Before Shakespeare’ (Roehampton University/King’s College London, 2016-18), a project on the beginnings of the London commercial theatre; and ‘Engendering the Stage’ (Roehampton University/King’s College London, 2018, ongoing), a project on gender and performance. Read more about Munro's work in our Conference Discoveries.
Sophie Tomlinson (University of Auckland)
Sophie Tomlinson has won acclaim since 1992 for her focus on women’s participation in theatrical culture over the seventeenth century, shedding new light on professional drama written for the Jacobean, Caroline, and Restoration stages, on court and closet drama, and on drama by women. The cornerstone of her research is her book, Women on Stage in Stuart Drama (Cambridge, 2005). She documents and explores a pre-history dating from the early Stuart period in which women were vitally active in court theatricals and when the idea of the actress became a subject of controversy and debate on gendered subjectivity and performativity. Other major aspects of her research activity include editing early modern drama, particularly her 2006 edition of Fletcher's The Wild-Goose Chase (1621) (Revels Plays Companion Library series) and her in-progress Revels edition of Barry's The Family of Love. Read more about Tomlinson's work in our Conference Discoveries.
Rachel Warburton (Lakehead University)
Rachel Warburton teaches English and Women’s Studies at Lakehead University. Her areas of research include early modern literature, queer/gender/feminist theories, and histories of sexuality. Read more about Warburton's work in our Conference Discoveries.
Roundtable:
Speaker: Michael Cordner (University of York)
Michael Cordner is a well-known scholar and editor of seventeenth-century plays with particular interest in performance, as in his book with Peter Holland (eds), Players, Playwrights, Playhouses: Investigating Performance, 1660-1800 (2007). He has written many chapters and articles on early comedy, such as 'The Malcontent and the Hamlet Aftermath', Shakespeare Bulletin 31 (2013), 165-90; and 'Thomas Middleton’s A Mad World, My Masters: From Script to Performance', Shakespeare Bulletin 31 (2013), 3-28. He has directed Shirley’s Hyde Park, Middleton’s A Mad World, My Masters, Marston’s The Malcontent and The Dutch Courtesan. Aside from his production website on The Dutch Courtesan (2013), he has developed Early Modern Theatre on which he shows the film of all five of the productions directed at York, plus three films recently made with the Olivier-Award-winning actor Henry Goodman, about performing Ben Jonson today, based on his experience playing leading Jonson roles for the Royal Shakespeare Company. He was consultant on the 2019 RSC production of Vanbrugh’s The Provoked Wife.
Speaker: Oliver Jones (University of York)
Oliver Jones completed his PhD on The Queen’s Men and performance in guildhalls in 2012. As Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Kings College London and Shakespeare’s Globe he was part of the team responsible for the design and development of the Sam Wanamaker Theatre, and while the Humanities Research Centre Postdoctoral Fellow in Theatre at the University of York collaborated with Michael Cordner on the Dutch Courtesan project. Since 2014 he has been Lecturer in Theatre at the Department of Theatre, Film, Television and Interactive Media at York (UK). He has published on early modern theatre Practice as Research, as well as co-editing a special issue of Shakespeare Bulletin on the topic, and on the architectural and documentary evidence for early performance spaces, and is developing new research on the crossovers of these with editing, digital humanities, and live theatre broadcast.
Respondent: Peter Cockett (McMaster University)
Peter Cockett is a leading practitioner of Performance as Research (PAR) in early modern theatre studies. His work includes core collaboration on three major international conferences focused on PAR: Shakespeare and the Queen’s Men (2005), Chester 2010: Peril and Danger to her Majesty, and Performance as Research in Early English Theatre Studies: The Three Ladies of London in Context (2015). He has directed 10 PAR productions of medieval and early modern plays, and organized three intensive PAR workshops for scholars and practitioners. His research on the Queen’s Men appears online on Queen’s Men Editions, for which he is Associate Editor (Performance). Most recently he organized a PAR workshop in collaboration with Melinda Gough at the Stratford Festival, entitled “Engendering the Stage in the Age of Shakespeare and Beyond.” He has published articles on early modern performance practices and the use of performance as a tool for scholarship and research. Peter is also a professional actor on stage and screen. For McMaster’s yearly mainstage productions, he has directed three Canadian plays, devised four new plays, and adapted Shakespeare’s Hamlet (Hamlet’s Dorm, 2011), Henry V (2005) and Midsummer Night’s Dream (2014).
Read more about the Production Roundtable in our Conference Discoveries.