I am a scholar of early modern English literature, performance history, and the practices of literary studies. As a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Faculty of English & Junior Research Fellow at St Hilda’s College at the University of Oxford, I am currently working on two new research projects. The first explores ideas, images, and metaphors of climate and climate change in early modern literature from John Heywood’s The Play of the Weather to John Milton’s Paradise Lost to Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels to the poetry of the Romantic poets. The second project investigates the material traces of rehearsal to show how the distributed intentions of producing a play can reshape our scholarly work on and with dramatic texts. This project will be based on extensive archival research in theatre archives in the UK, Europe, and the US.
My first book project “Writing Performance: Early Modern Drama and the Work of Interpretation” explores how dramatic texts from the early modern period depend on interpretation to unfold their theatricality. The book shows how the audience of early Tudor interludes is separated by a conceptual interpretive boundary from the performance space, how character is realized in humanist drama through acts of interpretation, how plays written for the commercial theater teach the interpretation of moving bodies and props, and how the accounts of royal entertainments offer competing ways of interpreting their textual status.
My previous research focused on early modern drama, theory of drama, and the history of performance and I’m also interested in questions of methodology and the practices of literary studies. I was selected to present insights from my practical research on sixteenth-century stage technologies as part of the NextGenPlen at the Shakespeare Association of America’s 2025 Annual Meeting. I’ve published on “intention” in the context of sixteenth-century translation theory, I discuss the role “performance” plays as an interpretive category in genre theory in a forthcoming book chapter on (so-called) closet drama, and explore how “plot” functions in Shakespeare source study in an article forthcoming in Shakespeare Survey.
patrick.durdel@ell.ox.ac.uk
Patrick Durdel 