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.
- Early Modern theatre and print culture
- women鈥檚 drama
- household theatre
- history and theory of landscape architecture
- life writing
Women's Household Drama: 'Loves Victorie', 'A Pastorall', and 'The concealed Fansyes'
Co-editor with Sara Mueller (2018; winner of the 2018 Prize for Best Teaching Edition, Society for the Study of Early Modern Women & Gender).
Shakespeare鈥檚 Stationers: Studies in Cultural Bibliography
Editor.
The Book of the Play: Playwrights, Stationers, and Readers in Early Modern England
Editor.
Privacy, Playreading, and Women鈥檚 Closet Drama, 1550-1700
- 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)