- Shakespeare
- Spenser
- early modern English and Welsh literature
- national identities
- archaeology and antiquarianism
Philip Schwyzer is interested in borders and boundaries - between nations, between periods, and between disciplines. Much of his work has focused on cultural and literary relations between the nations of Britain, particularly England and Wales. He has also sought in various ways to bridge the gap between ‘late medieval' and ‘early modern'. In disciplinary terms, he works near the borders of history, nationalism studies, and archaeology.
His first book, Literature, Nationalism and Memory in Early Modern England and Wales (Cambridge, 2004: see http://www.cambridge.org/uk/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=0521843030) explores the emergence of national consciousness in the Tudor era. Here he argues that Shakespeare, Spenser, and their contemporaries located the origins of the nation in a nostalgic vision of British antiquity; the nation they imagined was not in fact England, but Britain. His ongoing concern with the ‘British problem' in early modern literature is also expressed in two co-edited collections, Archipelagic Identities (Ashgate, 2004) and Shakespeare and Wales (forthcoming from Ashgate, 2008).
His most recent monograph is Archaeologies of English Renaissance Literature (Oxford, February 2007: see http://www.oup.com/uk/catalogue/?ci=9780199206605). Completed with the aid of a grant from the AHRC, this innovative book aims to uncover some buried affinities between the disciplines of archaeology and literary criticism, as well as exploring archaeological motifs and scenes in a series of late medieval and early modern texts. Miraculously preserved corpses, ruined monasteries, Egyptian mummies, and Yorick's skull all figure in this study of the early modern archaeological imagination.
Archaeology and literary studies intersect again in his current project, Shakespeare and the Remains of Richard III. This is conceived as a large-scale study, exploring the ‘life-history' of the traces of Richard III's reign (physical, textual, institutional and mnemonic) over the course of a century, from Bosworth Field to the first performance of Shakespeare's play.
Philip Schwyzer welcomes inquiries from potential research students. He is currently supervising doctoral dissertations on subjects including Shakespeare and court politics, death and the uncanny in Renaissance drama, Turks and Moors in Renaissance drama, and the representation of Boudica in early modern England.
