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Marta Straznicky

Biography

My research is focused primarily on plays written by women between about 1550 and 1650 鈥 their material texts, places of performance, and histories of reception. Since coming to Queen鈥檚, I have been exploring the question of why women wrote plays in this period at all, when they had no access, as playwrights, to the public theatre. My first book, Privacy, Playreading, and Women鈥檚 Closet Drama (2004) was about the plays women wrote primarily for reading rather than performance. That work led me to delve into two related areas, the history of reading and the place of drama in the early modern book trade. I published two essay collections on these topics, The Book of the Play: Playwrights, Stationers, and Readers in Early Modern England (2006), and Shakespeare鈥檚 Stationers: Studies in Cultural Bibliography (2013). I have recently returned to work on women playwrights, with an edition of plays by Lady Mary Wroth and the Cavendish sisters (Women鈥檚 Household Plays, 2018), I remain deeply interested in the early modern book trade as a cultural field in which the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries found a completely different material expression than they did in the theatre. I contributed an essay on 鈥淪hakespeare in the Book Trade鈥 to The Arden Research Companion to Shakespeare and Text, edited by Lukas Erne (2021). Beyond my research in early modern literature and culture, I am launching new work on life writing, specifically diaries and immigrant letter-writing practices.

Research Interests
  • Early Modern theatre and print culture
  • women鈥檚 drama
  • household theatre
  • history and theory of landscape architecture
  • life writing
Selected Publications
  • 鈥淪hakespeare in the Book Trade,鈥 in The Arden Research Companion to Shakespeare and Text (2021)
  • 鈥淲ilton House, Theatre, Power,鈥 The Intellectual Culture of the English Country House, 1500鈥1700 (2015)
Areas of Study
Diaspora and Globalization Studies
Gender and Sexuality Studies
Performance Studies
Print Culture and Textual Studies
Genres and Forms
Autobiography and Memoir
Travel Writing

Department of English, 成人大片 University

Watson Hall
49 Bader Lane
Kingston ON K7L 3N6
Canada

Telephone (613) 533-2153

Undergraduate

Graduate

成人大片 is situated on traditional Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe territory.