I have, for a long time, been interested in Shakespeare, theatre
history and performance studies. My main focus has been on the cultural
reception of Shakespeare's plays in the latter half of the twentieth century.
In particular, I've been intrigued by the ways in which performance can
highlight issues which are only hinted at in the playtexts. This has involved
work on figures who are normally marginalised in literary criticism, such as
the dead bodies in Hamlet or the silent figure of Lavinia in Titus Andronicus. My book on this
subject, Shakespeare's Violated Bodies:
Stage and Screen Performance, was published by CUP in 2004, and a
collection of essays that reflects the same research interest, Remaking Shakespeare: Performance across
Media, Genres and Cultures, was published by Palgrave in 2003. My past work
furthermore includes essays on drama theory, Restoration comedy, as well as on
Henry Green's novel Blindness.
I
have also written a book on Jacobean
Drama for the Palgrave Macmillan ‘Reader's Guide to Essential Criticism'
series (forthcoming, 2010). The book is a metacritical introduction to and
evaluation of the most important research in the field. The book includes
discussions of milestones of twentieth-century criticism and assesses, in
particular, developments in the fields of textual criticism, theatre history,
historically-informed studies, genre criticism, studies of race, gender and the
body, and performance studies.
I
am currently pushing some of the research I did for this book further by investigating
how the plays of Shakespeare's contemporaries have fared in twentieth-century
and present-day performance. Some of this research is already in print (a
chapter in the Cambridge Companion to
English Renaissance Tragedy and an article on Mike Figgis's Hotel in Shakespeare Quarterly). I am aiming to build on this and write a
book, provisionally titled Counter-Shakespeares:
the ‘Contemporary Jacobean' Film, which will consider
film versions of the drama of Shakespeare's contemporaries as a coherent corpus,
bringing the methodologies of Shakespearean performance studies to the plays of
his contemporaries. It will argue that recent films by Alex Cox, Mike Figgis
and Marcus Thompson are best understood in the context of Derek Jarman's and
Peter Greenaway's ‘Jacobean' films of the Thatcher era, in which rebellion
against the Conservative government is conflated with an implicit rebellion
against heritage cinema and the figure of Shakespeare as an embodiment of
conservative values.
A related project is the co-editing of Performing Early
Modern Drama Today,
which I am undertaking with Kathryn Prince (Ottowa). This book is under
contract for Cambridge University Press (2011). The volume addresses the
surprising under-representation in criticism of the contemporary performance of
non-Shakespearean early modern drama. Each contribution represents a useful and
distinctive performance-oriented approach, ranging from the original practices
productions of the Shenandoah Shakespeare Express to the analysis of acting
techniques in recent productions of early modern plays. The volume is intended
primarily to facilitate a more performance-oriented approach to the
undergraduate teaching of early modern drama, in Theatre as well as English
departments. By modelling approaches applicable to early modern drama rather
than concentrating on the performance possibilities of a single play, the book
will provide readers with the tools to produce their own contributions to this
field. Contributors include: Kathryn Prince, Sarah Tom and Rebecca McCutcheon, Roberta Barker, Pascale Aebischer, Paul
Prescott, Farah Karim-Cooper, Lucy Munro, Coen Heijes interviewing Michael
Boyd, Bridget Escolme, Jaq Bessell, and Karin Brown.
My more long-term research is concerned with the place of Shakespeare
in the life-writing of actors in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
(provisional title: Shakespeare in the English Theatrical Memoir). I am aiming
to provide the first historical and generic analysis of the theatrical memoir
and highlight the value of these texts for theatre history, exploring in the
process the genre's playful disrespect for the boundaries between ‘truth' and
‘fiction'. Theatrical memoirs, I want to argue, may, through the very nature of
actors' need for self-publicity and the resulting falsification of historical
fact, be an invaluable source for theatre historians' cultural understanding of
key periods of British theatre. The book project thus fills a crucial gap in
the field of theatre history and the critical corpus concerned with
autobiography, while representing a timely intervention in cultural studies. I
have already done some work on the memoirs of George Vandenhoff, Ellen Terry
and Edward Gordon Craig and am slowly trawling through a large number of dusty
nineteenth-century memoirs.
I am interested in supervising PhD students in any of these areas
and on related topics. Currently, I am supervising four students, who are
working on the afterlives of The Duchess
of Malfi (Jem Bloomfield), masculinity in mainstream Shakespeare films
(Jennifer Barnes), food in the plays of Shakespeare and Jonson (Sally
Templeman) and the representation of violence in early modern fighting manuals
and Shakespeare's plays (James King).
