Early Modern Drama at the Universities: Institutions, Intertexts, Individuals

This is the first history of Oxford and Cambridge drama in the Tudor and Stuart period. It guides the reader through the theatrical experiences of students at university in early modern England and follows the students on the journey from schoolboys to scholars to graduates in the workplace. Early Modern Drama at the Universities is structured to make the subject as accessible as possible, mitigating the difficulties of this sizeable and complex body of evidence. The hundreds of plays that we have inherited from Oxford and Cambridge are steeped in Classical culture, and the academic establishment’s bias against print culture means that most evidence remains in manuscript form. Opening up these plays to a wider readership, this study carves three main roads into the corpus, introducing key institutions, intertexts, and individuals. For the first time, we can see the extent to which institutional culture made the drama what it is: pedagogically-inspired, homosocial, and self-reflexive. Early Modern Drama at the Universities argues that it was primarily on a college level that students lived, worked, and proved themselves to the community, and that if we are to understand university drama as a whole, we must create it from the building blocks of individual college histories.