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Theatre, Representation, and Performance

Research is ongoing in Oxford on theatrical and performance cultures from all over the early modern world, ranging from comedia dell'arte through explorations of language and transnational identity in Portuguese theatre, to the textual worlds of Chinese court theatre 1600-1800 and to the reception of classical theatre in early modern Italian, French and English drama. There is work on gesture and the body, on race and identity, on music and opera, on the performance cultures of governance and authority. Here you will find links to current and past projects, resources, podcasts and publications.

Shakespeare and Religious War: A Shakespeare Connected online exhibition in collaboration with Elisabetta Tarantino, with additional information on each slide available here

TextCourt: Linking the Textual Worlds of Chinese Court Theater ca.1600-1800

 

Race and Identity in Early Modern Drama

 

Folio400: Printing Shakespeare

 

Professor Emma Smith on Shakespeare

 

Spectacles of Court Corruption on the Early Modern Stage

 

Theatre, Anatomy and the Early Modern Doctor onstage

 

Staging the Archive

Matthew Leigh, The Masons and the Mysteries in 18th Century Drama (Berlin, 2020)

 Stephen Harrison, 'After the Aeneid: Ascanius in eighteenth-century opera' in Stephen Harrison,  Fiona Macintosh, Justine McConnell, and Claire Kenward, eds., Epic Performances from the Middle Ages into the Twenty-First Century (Oxford, 2018), 377-88.

—— ‘Apuleius in France: La Fontaine's Psyché and its Apuleian Model' in Simone Finkmann, Anja Behrendt and Anke Walter (eds.), Antike Erzähl- und Deutungsmuster. Zwischen Exemplarität und Transformation (Berlin, 2018), 385-99

—— ‘Apuleius at the court of Louis XIV. Psyché (1671, 1678) and its English version (1675)' in Regine May and Stephen Harrison, eds., Cupid and Psyche: The Reception of Apuleius' Love Story since 1600 (Berlin, 2020), 47-59.

—— ‘An Apuleian Masque? Thomas Heywood's Love's Mistress (1634)', in Bistagne, F., Boidin, C. and Mouren, R., eds., The Afterlife of Apuleius (Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies Supplement 140, 2020), 79-90.

Lucy Rayfield, Poetics and Politics in French and Italian Renaissance comedy (Cambridge, 2022)

Ben Higgins, Shakespeare's Syndicate: The First Folio, its Publishers, and the Early Modern Book Trade (Oxford, 2022)

Amy Lidster, Publishing the History Play in the Time of Shakespeare: Stationers Shaping a Genre (Cambridge, 2022)

Emma Smith, This Is Shakespeare (London, 2019).

Lorna Hutson, Circumstantial Shakespeare (Oxford, 2015).

—— The Invention of Suspicion (Oxford, 2007)

Bart Van Es, Shakespeare in Company (Oxford, 2013)

Jennifer H. Oliver, Shipwreck in French Renaissance Writing (Oxford, 2019)

Jessica Goodman, Goldoni in Paris: La Gloire et le Malentendu (Oxford, 2017)