Research Projects

In her recent discussion of the imagination in the Elizabethan Playhouse, Helen Hackett observes how reporting was used to describe the unrepresentable and to help steer the audience’s imagination towards a multitude of other places and times. In this project, I argue that reporting and offstage events played a more complex dramaturgical role in early modern plays than has been suggested to-date. Looking at the repertoire of plays performed by the Chamberlain’s/King’s Men at the first Globe, I will discuss how playwrights strategically placed some action off stage, out of sight, so as to expose and make visible what is otherwise invisible, namely, the consciousness of characters on stage. For example, by placing Caesar’s triumph off stage, Shakespeare more effectively exposes Brutus’s innermost fears on stage. Finally, reading these scenes using cognition and affect theories, I will show how the interplay between on- and off-stage action allows for intricate representations of both individual and collective consciousness at work in the playhouse (both on and off the stage), and how dramatists used such scenes as metatheatrical moments to reflect on the impact of theatre on audiences more generally.

This project was inspired by a talk I first gave at the Zürich Advanced Research Colloquium in November 2022 on “Stage/Page: reading Julius Caesar’s material affordances”, where I discussed how the material conditions of the Globe playhouse and the spatial relationship between audience and actors on and off the stage and readers and words on and off the page was a material condition (environment) taken into consideration by Shakespeare as he wrote the play. This was further developed in a lecture I gave in April 2023 on “How to read Dramatic Personae and Dramatic Space” and in a MA seminar on “The Material Environments of Early Modern Drama” also given in the spring semester 2023. I will further present on this topic at the 2024 RSA conference in Chicago.

In my doctoral research I studied how extracts from early modern plays were extracted and gathered in printed and manuscript collections in the first half of the seventeenth century. In particular, in my thesis I complicate the current understanding that the practice of extracting from plays elevated vernacular drama to a ‘literary’ status. I did so by offering a detailed analysis of how drama was manipulated, presented, used and valued in these collections using a large corpus of archival evidence found in the Bodleian Library and the British Library. I am currently working on the publication of this research in a newly structured book.

Since 2015 I have also collaborated with Prof. Laura Estill (St Francis Xavier University, Nova Scotia, Canada) on a digital project called DEx: A Database of Dramatic Extracts, for which I am, as of October 2021, the co-editor.