Research Description

My area of research and publication is early-modern English drama, poetry and culture, with a central focus on Shakespeare and other playwrights of the Tudor-Stuart period (1558-1642). My work is generally characterized by a new historicist commitment to revealing the cultural and formal force of literature in its historical context. I am especially sympathetic to the recent trend in the discipline towards the historicization of form and genre. Since coming to the University of Manitoba, I have developed three distinct, though related, research projects.

"Shakespeare's Pastors: Drama and the Professionalization of the Protestant Ministry in Post-Reformation England" investigates the links between the professionalizing Protestant ministry and the developing theatre industry in Tudor-Stuart England. Archival research in England for this project has been funded by several internal U of M grants and is the subject of a current SSHRC SRG proposal. The project has generated four recent conference papers on drama, satire and ministerial discourse, and two published articles: "Zeal or Vengeance?: Anger, Performance, and Ministerial Figures in Marston and Shakespeare" (forthcoming in Religion and Literature) and "Speaking Daggers: Shakespeare's Troubled Ministers" (in Shakespeare and Religious Change, eds. Kenneth Graham and Philip Collington, Palgrave 2009).

I am also revising my doctoral dissertation, entitled Drama and the Culture of Commercial Hospitality in Early Modern England, for publication. This project investigates the relationships between the culture developing within the taverns, inns and alehouses ubiquitous in early-modern London and that city's commercial theatre. The development of the complex ideal of civility has become a central theme in the project, and has been explored in several conference papers and two articles: "The Civil Mutinies of Romeo and Juliet" (forthcoming in ELR) and "Civil Conversation, Religious Controversy, and The New Inn" (Renaissance and Reformation 28.4, 2004).

My interest in the institutions, industries, ideologies, discourses and architecture of early-modern London prompted my collaboration with several colleagues to organize the interdisciplinary conference City Limits? The European City, 1400-1900, held at the U of M in 2004. As a result of the conference, I joined with Judith Owens and Greg Smith as co-editors of the volume City Limits: Perspectives on the Historical European City (McGill-Queens UP, 2010). This volume offers thirteen chapters from a variety of disciplinary perspectives on the conceptual, spatial, administrative and subjective limits and opportunities of the post-medieval, pre-twentieth century European city.

Along with these larger projects, I have a special interest in the work of playwright Philip Massinger. My biographical article on Massinger is available online in The Literary Encyclopedia.