Shakespeare and the Idea of Apocrypha

My 2015 monograph, published by Cambridge University Press, offers the first book-length history and theorization of the concept of the “Shakespeare Apocrypha”, the group of plays often attributed to Shakespeare but rarely included in copies of the Complete Works.

The book sets out the historical processes and value judgements that led to the formation of the Shakespeare canon in its current form, introduces the core debates and methods that continue to reshape the canon, and argues for different models of organising the field that might allow the neglected but fascinating plays of the Apocrypha to return to the critical conversation.

Shakespeare and the Digital World

This 2014 collection from Cambridge University Press, co-edited with Christie Carson, offers a state-of-the-field overview of how Shakespeare Studies has been transformed by digital technologies across research, pedagogy, publication and practice. Contributors from scholarship and industry reflect, not just on high-end digital humanities projects, but on changes in working practices have impacted on day-to-day encounters with Shakespeare in the theatre, classroom and library.

Contributors include: Christie Carson, John Lavagnino, Bruce R. Smith, Farah Karim-Cooper, David McInnis, Peter Kirwan, Erin Sullivan, Sarah Grandage, Julie Sanders, Sheila T. Cavanaugh, Kevin A. Quarmby, Sharon O’Dair, Eleanor Collins, Katherine Rowe, Peter Holland, Sylvia Morris, Paul Edmondson, A. J. Leon, Ryan Nelson and Stephen Purcell.

Shakespeare in Lockdown

In collaboration with Erin Sullivan, this special reviews section of Shakespeare Bulletin (38.3, 2020) offered one of the first sets of critical responses to the Shakespeare productions put out during the early stages of the COVID-19 closure period. Contributors reflected on archival productions, new digital productions, and the embodied experience of watching theatre in isolation.

Contributors include: Peter Kirwan, Erin Sullivan, Paul Menzer, Rachael Nicholas, Stephen Purcell, Elizabeth E. Tavares, Benjamin Broadribb, Christie Carson, Henry Bell, Beth Sharrock, Emily R. Lathrop, Gemma Allred, Pascale Aebischer and Emma Greenfleaf.

Shakespeare’s Audiences

This 2021 collection, co-edited with Matteo Pangallo and published by Routledge, responds to developments in audience studies and surveys the influence of audiences – both as imagined intended recipients and as active participants in the moment of performance – on the reception of Shakespeare. Viewing audiences as co-creators, the collection showcases fascinating case studies of performance communities across history and geography, suggesting new areas for research.

Contributors include: Matteo Pangallo, Peter Kirwan, Stephanie Shirilan, Joe Falocco, Jennifer A. Low, Romola Nuttall, Miles Drawdry, Koel Chatterjee, Pascale Aebischer, Edel Lamb, Adam Sheaffer, Louise Geddes, Valerie M. Fazel, Rachael Nicholas and Emily Lathrop.

William Shakespeare & Others: Collaborative Plays

This 2013 Royal Shakespeare Company volume (published by Palgrave Macmillan) aimed to update the so-called ‘Shakespeare Apocrypha’. Edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen with Jan Sewell and Will Sharpe, the book includes modern-spelling editions of ten plays which have enjoyed a doubtful association with Shakespeare but which are rarely if ever found in Complete Works volumes.

As Associate Editor, I contributed ‘Key Facts’ statistics for each of the plays, and an appendix of interviews with actors and directors involved in contemporary productions of plays. Interview subjects include: Terry Hands, James Wallace, Caroline Faber, David Rintoul, Michael Boyd, Robert Delamere, Nigel Cooke, Stephen Unwin, Alex Hassell and Gregory Doran.

Learning and Teaching Resources

From Alison Findlay and Liz Oakley-Brown’s Twelfth Night: A Critical Reader (Bloomsbury, 2013). This chapter surveys the available resources – including critical editions, useful anthologies, and accessible productions – that the teacher of Twelfth Night can draw upon, along with suggestions for approaches in the classroom.

“From the table of my memory”: Blogging Shakespeare in/out of the Classroom

From my co-edited collection with Christie Carson, Shakespeare and the Digital World (Cambridge University Press, 2014). This chapter, taken from the section on pedagogy, discusses my use of blogs and wikis in the classroom as a way of developing student ownership and knowledge.

A Tale of Two Londons: Locating Shakespeare and Dickens in 2012

Co-written with Charlotte Mathieson, from Paul Prescott and Erin Sullivan’s Shakespeare on the Global Stage (Bloomsbury, 2015). This chapter contrasts the 2012 World Shakespeare Festival – based primarily in London – with the international Dickens Festival of the same year, looking at how the two festivals offered competing strategies for aligning the cultural capital of the authors and the city in which they worked.

“May I subscribe a name?”: Terms of Collaboration in 2016

From Tian Yuan Tan, Paul Edmondson and Shih-pe Wang’s 1616: Shakespeare and Tang Xianzu’s China (Bloomsbury, 2016). My contribution to this innovative volume, pairing scholarly discussions of English and Chinese theatrical cultures in 2016, focuses on print representations of authorship in the year 1616, with particular attention to Jonson’s Folio and the B-text of Doctor Faustus.

Not-Shakespeare and the Shakespearean Ghost

From James C. Bulman’s landmark The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Performance (Oxford University Press, 2017). This is one of my most important book chapters, setting out the ways in which a perceived Shakespearean aesthetic generates a counter-aesthetic of ‘not-Shakespeare’, leading to ideological divisions between the works of Shakespeare and those of his contemporaries on the modern stage.

Marlowe’s Early Books: The Contention and a “Marlowe Effect”

From Kirk Melnikoff and Roslyn L. Knutson’s Christopher Marlowe, Theatrical Commerce, and the Book Trade (Cambridge UP, 2018). This chapter contributes to the volume’s interest in Marlowe’s early print history by asking, if he was a co-author of The First Part of the Contention, what that might tell us. I argue that the quarto of The Contention utilises performative typography through speech prefixes, interruptions and sequential stage directions to create a distinctively Marlovian effect.

“High astounding terms”: Tamburlaine and Tamburlaine on Stage

From David McInnis’s Tamburlaine: A Critical Reader (Bloomsbury, 2020). This chapter offers the first major performance history of Tamburlaine, exploring how the play’s excesses have been both formally and interpretatively central to responses. The complex and problematic engagement of productions with racialisation and Islamophobia are a key part of this survey.

The Shakespeare Canon from the Sixteenth to the Twenty-First Century

From Lukas Erne’s The Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Textual Studies (Bloomsbury, 2021). This chapter, drawing on my work on the Shakespeare Apocrypha, offers a history of the formation of the Shakespeare canon framed as a tension between inclusion and exclusion, and arguing for the need to recognise the ideological underpinnings of any ‘Complete Works’.

“This is my gaff”: Shakespeare, Safe Spaces, and Cultural Property

From Laura Kressly, Aida Patient and Kimberly A. Williams’s Notelets of Filth (Routledge, 2023), this chapter on Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s Emilia explores the play’s representation of proprietorial misogyny and social exclusion, with a particular focus on challenges to Shakespeare’s cultural hegemony within the environment of Shakespeare’s Globe itself.

“Eke out our performance with your minds”: The Impact of the RSC’s Complete Works Festival on Audience Expectations and Involvement

This 2007 article in Cahiers Élisabéthains 71 (special issue on the RSC Complete Works Festival) synthesises my MA research into the Festival, arguing for the unique value of the Festival for Stratford audiences in its challenges to playing space, language, and interpretation.

The First Collected “Shakespeare Apocrypha”

This short article in Shakespeare Quarterly 62.4 (2011) corrects an error that had crept into scholarship concerning a bound volume in the Royal Library marked ‘Shakespeare, vol. 1’. Rather than belonging to the library of Charles II, it in fact dates to the 1630s and the library of Charles I, making it the first collection of Shakespeare dubitanda.

Canonising the Shakespeare Apocrypha: Shakespeare, Middleton, and Co-Existent Canons

This 2012 article, published in Literature Compass 9.8, uses the overlapping plays in the Shakespeare and Middleton canon as a jumping-off point for questioning the value of complete works projects premised on authorial exclusivity.

The Roared-At Boys?: Repertory Casting and Gender Politics in the RSC’s 2014 Swan Season

In a special issue (11.3) devoted to the RSC’s summer season of 2014, this 2015 article looks at the pattern of doubling across productions of The Roaring Girl, Arden of Faversham and The White Devil, arguing that these avowedly feminist productions created patterns of male entitlement and supremacy that linked the three plays and the productions’ calls for resistance.

Artist Development and Collective Therapy in the Repertory: The Case of After Edward

This upcoming article in Early Theatre 25.2 (2022) focuses on Tom Stuart’s After Edward, performed at the Globe in repertory with a production of Edward II. It argues for the value of new writing within a repertory system to develop a praxis of artist development through ensemble building.

“If the law could forgive as soon as I”: A Yorkshire Tragedy at the White Bear Theatre Pub

This long-form review in Law and Humanities 4.1 (2010) considers the White Bear’s production of A Yorkshire Tragedy with particular attention to the legal questions raised by the play and in performance.

Theobald Restor’d: Double Falsehood at the Union Theatre, Southwark

From David Carnegie and Gary Taylor’s The Quest for Cardenio (Oxford UP, 2012). This long-form review reflects on another staging of Double Falsehood, by the company Mokitagrit, at the Union Theatre.

Ending Well: Reconciliation and Remembrance in Arpana’s All’s Well that Ends Well

From Susan Bennett and Christie Carson’s Shakespeare Beyond English (Cambridge UP, 2013). This book collates scholarly and practitioner responses to all productions in the Globe’s 2012 Globe to Globe Festival. I contributed a long-form account of Arpana’s All’s Well That Ends Well.

Editions and Textual Studies reviews

I served as the editions and textual studies reviewer for Shakespeare Survey volumes 68 (2015) to 73 (2020). In this role, I covered several major developments in Shakespeare textual studies including the New Oxford Shakespeare, many new and revised critical editions, the Arden Performance Editions, and a large range of monographs and collections. Links here to the 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020 reviews.