Christopher Shirley | University of Essex (original) (raw)

Christopher Shirley (Ph.D., Northwestern) researches and teaches Early Modern British literature and culture, with special interests in the history of the book, the history of reading, manuscript studies, poetry, Shakespeare and theater, gender and sexuality studies, and medical humanities. He has designed and delivered courses ranging from English composition to First-Year Seminars on Renaissance representations of sex to upper-level seminars on utopian literature, Ovidian poetry, Shakespeare, and American Romanticism.

His published work includes "Sodomy and Stage Directions in Christopher Marlowe's Edward(s) II," published in SEL, and "The Devonshire Manuscript: Reading Gender in the Henrician Court," published in English Literary Renaissance. The former considers the material conditions of Marlowe's play—signally, that the stage direction that would describe how Edward is executed, the act that many scholars use to describe the play as antihomophobic—and their implications for its interpretation. It holds that Marlowe condemns Edward's murder, but not by defending sodomy; rather, the play reveals that the act of punishing sodomy is itself sodomitic and thus deconstructs Elizabethan sexual mores. The latter considers the activities of several prominent women in Henry VIII's court, specifically their manipulations of and reactions to misogynistic poetry in the 1530s miscellany now known as the Devonshire manuscript. It contends that these women reacted to misogyny in a wide variety of ways, including by formulating an apparently paradoxical subjectivity it calls "misogynistic femininity." Another article on the Devonshire manuscript, focusing on the excerpts from Chaucer it contains, is currently under review.

He is also at work on a book, Reading by Hand: Manuscript Poetry and Reader Subjectivity in Early Modern Britain. This book considers approximately 100 reader-produced early modern manuscripts in libraries across the UK and the US to reconstruct their compilers’ sexual subjectivities. It considers verse by Wyatt, Marlowe, Ralegh, Donne, Katherine Philips, and Anne Bradstreet and uncovers several unexpected readerly interventions in these poems, including a form of eroticism structured not by gender of object choice but by economics in the circulation of Marlowe and Ralegh’s famous poems “The Passionate Shepherd” and “The Nymph’s Reply,” the construction (and interruption) of hegemonic masculinity by Donne’s readers through the medium of bells, and a dual form of friendship—one egalitarian and homosocial, the other hierarchical and heterosocial—among Katherine Philips’s coterie. It concludes by considering the circulation of print and manuscript in the transatlantic world, investigating the only manuscripts which contain work by Bradstreet and which scholars have not considered previously.

His other book project, Wasted Words: Alcoholism and Literature in Early Modern Britain, considers representations of the figure of the drunkard in British literature and popular culture. He is a member of the network of scholars at work on the University of Sheffield-based project Intoxicants & Early Modernity: England, 1580-1740.

less