MARGARET JANE KIDNIE
Professor
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PhD, The Shakespeare Institute, University University College 284 Office Hours: |
Courses Recently Taught
Undergraduate
Shakespeare and Adaptation
Topics in Renaissance Drama
Shakespeare and Drama
Loving Them to Death: Early Modern Domestic TragedyGraduate
“[O]ur Other Shakespeare: Canon, Collaboration, and The Collected Works of Thomas Middleton
Journeymen Dramatists: Making a Career in the Early Modern Theatre
Modernist Shakespeare and After
Bibliography and Textual Studies
Research Interests
My research interests in early modern drama bridge the fields of performance and textual studies. My most recent book, Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation – published in 2009 with the support of a SSHRC Standard Research Grant – is an attempt to bring these two fields together to understand better fundamental questions about the identity of Shakespeare’s drama. In particular, I draw on the fraught category of adaptation to explore current conceptions of the Shakespearean work. To adapt implies there exists something to alter, but what constitutes the category of the “play”, and how does it relate to adaptation? How do “play” and “adaptation” relate to drama’s twin media, text and performance? What impact might answers to these questions have on current editorial, performance, and adaptation studies? In Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation I argue that “play” and “adaptation” are provisional categories – mutually dependent processes that evolve over time in accordance with the needs of users. Adaptation thus emerges as the conceptually necessary but culturally problematic category that results from partial or occasional failures to recognize a shifting work in its textual-theatrical instance.
Current Projects
I’m writing an article provisionally called “Staging Audience Pleasure in Stage Beauty and The Eyre Affair” , and completing two editions of early modern drama. The first is of an anonymous manuscript play discovered at Arbury Hall, Warwickshire which has been assigned the title of The Humorous Magistrate. It is forthcoming with The Malone Society, and this research is supported by a SSHRC Collaborative Research Grant. The second edition is of Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness for the Arden Early Modern Drama series.
Selected Publications
Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation. London: Routledge, 2009.
Near Neighbours: Another Early Seventeenth-Century Manuscript of The Humorous Magistrate. English Manuscript Studies, 1100-1700. Vol. 13 (2007). 187-211.
Citing Shakespeare. Shakespeare, Memory and Performance, Peter Holland, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 117-32.
The Taming of the Shrew: A Guide to the Text and its Theatrical Life . Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
Where is Hamlet? Text, Performance, and Adaptation . Shakespeare and Performance, Barbara Hodgdon and W. B. Worthen, eds. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. 101-120.
Dancing with Art: Robert Lepage’s Elsinore. World-wide Shakespeares: Local Appropriations in Film and Performance, Sonia Massai, ed. London : Routledge, 2005. 132-40.
“What world is this?” Pericles at the Stratford Festival of Canada, 2003. Shakespeare Quarterly 55 (2004): 307-19
Textual Performances: The Modern Reproduction of Shakespeare’s Drama . Lukas Erne and Margaret Jane Kidnie, eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Staging Shakespeare’s Plays in Print Editions. Textual Performances: The Modern Reproduction of Shakespeare’s Drama, Lukas Erne and Margaret Jane Kidnie, eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press , 2004. 158-77.
“Enter [...] Lorenzo, disguised like an amazon”: Powerdressing in Swetnam the Woman-hater, Arraigned by Women. Cahiers Élisabéthains 62 (October, 2002): 33-45.
Philip Stubbes: The Anatomie of Abuses . Medieval and Renaissance Text Society. 7 th series, vol. 27. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, in conjunction with Renaissance English Text Society, 2002.
Text, Performance, and the Editors: Staging Shakespeare’s Drama. Shakespeare Quarterly 51 (2000): 456-73.
Ben Jonson: The Devil is an Ass and Other Plays . Oxford World’s Classics Series. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
“The Way the World is Now”: Love in the Troma Zone. Shakespeare, Film, Fin de Siècle, Mark Thornton Burnett and Ramona Wray, eds. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000. 102-20.
Awards, Honours, and Research Grants
Research Grants
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Collaborative Research Grant, 2006-2009, “Seventeenth-Century Play Manuscripts and the English Drama”
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Internal Travel Award, 2006 (supporting attendance at the World Shakespeare Congress)
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Standard Research Grant, 2005-2008, “Shakespeare’s Work(s) in Progress”
Research Awards
Awarded “Honorable Mention” from the Modern Language Association Committee on Scholarly Editions, 2003 for Philip Stubbes: The Anatomie of Abuses
Teaching Awards
USC Teaching Honour Roll Award of Excellence, 2006-7
Bank of Nova Scotia, University of Western Ontario Alumni Association and University Students’ Council Award of Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, Nomination, 2006-7
USC Teaching Honour Roll Award of Excellence, 2004-5
USC Teaching Honour Roll Award of Excellence, 2003-4
Bank of Nova Scotia, University of Western Ontario Alumni Association and University Students’ Council Award of Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, Nomination, 2003-4
USC Teaching Honour Roll Award of Excellence, 2002-3
Areas
- Drama to the Restoration
- Textual Studies