Some of the PhD candidates currently undertaking research in the Centre.
Shanyn Altman
Tolerating Persecution: “Double-think” in Early Stuart England
The research I am currently undertaking is concerned with religious toleration in early Stuart England, with particular reference to John Donne, James VI and I, and Anthony Copley. Through an examination of the works and influence of these writers, I explore the relationship between Church and State and the way in which this impacted on Catholic pleas for toleration.
Katharine Fletcher
Form and Void: Imagining Space in the Early Modern Period (working title).
My research examines the relationship between ideas about physical space and the mental, verbal, and visual tools used to convey them. I am particularly interested in the way ideas and the imagination work at the boundaries between the known and the unknown and have focused my thesis on the work of several individuals who were redefining these boundaries in the Early Modern period: Galileo Galilei, Robert Hooke, Robert Boyle, and John Milton.
Duncan Fraser
Ram Alley, or Merry Tricks (Lording Barry, 1611): A Critical Edition.
The object of this thesis is to produce a critical edition of Lording Barry’s play Ram Alley (first published in 1611). The edition will consist of (a) an annotated, modernised spelling version of the text based on a bibliographic study of the first quarto, and (b) an introduction which will cover, inter alia: the printing of the first quarto (in particular the working practices of the printer, George Eld, who was also responsible for the first quarto of Troilus and Cressida and of Shakespeare’s Sonnets), the life of Lording Barry and his critical reception, and the play’s place in and contribution to early Jacobean city comedy, specifically in relation to the use of wit and bawdy in masculine self-definition. The annotation will be very much fuller than is normal for an edition of an early modern play text, aiming to provide not just explanation but also commentary on and contextualisation of the language, contemporary and cultural references, characterisation, and action. This play is something of a by-water in the early Jacobean drama, and, like its author, is little known. It is, however, a competent example of the type of comedy produced for the private theatres and reflects, therefore, on the work of other, better known dramatists, in particular Thomas Middleton.
This study maps already existing work on the concept of melancholia, as grounded in Galen's theory of the four humours, while systematically revealing an overlooked connection to same sex desire in the classical and early modern periods. To do this, my research looks at ancient myth, especially its representations in the works of writers such as Shakespeare, Marlowe and Barnfield; and also extensively draws upon the revered Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton. In so doing, this study compliments and extends work already done in queer theory.
Maria Kirk
I am working on an AHRC funded collaborative project, between the University of Sussex and the National Trust, focussing on a collection of Early Modern plays at Petworth House. The main focus of my research is the relationship between dramatic performance and consumption at Petworth and in the wider seventeenth-century English country house scene. My work centres on the idea of "performing consumption and consuming performance", including depictions of celebratory feast, luxury and plenty in drama and other literature, social commentary on the dangers of consumption, metaphors of consumption, anthropomorphic and allegorical depictions of food, conspicuous consumption, consumerism, and the collection of goods for display and for reading.