Katheryn Thompson

• Early modern drama
• Marriage, family, and the household in early modern culture
• Practice as research
• Gender, race, and power on the early modern stage
• Material studies

My project challenges the critical commonplace that “the exchange of women” is a given of marriage on the early modern stage. Since reciprocity was expected from marriage in early modern England, I use the lens of reciprocity to analyse the gift and property exchanges that both accompany and constitute the making of a marriage, and the power dynamics that these exchanges navigate. I ask what women and men brought to their marriages, and what was given (and expected) in return. By making economic and material considerations central to my analysis of these plays, I engage with a peculiarly early modern understanding of reciprocal exchange.

In a critical field dominated by Shakespeare, I focus on city comedies and domestic tragedies, as genres invested in marriage, and representative of the English middling sort who composed the majority in the London playhouse audiences. I dramaturgically close read these plays, using practice-as-research methods to analyse the performative potential of the texts, and using a material focus to analyse tangible as well as intangible exchanges. My project explores the structural relationship between marriage and genre; the power imbalance at the heart of early modern marriage; the cultural, and often critically misunderstood, conflation between romantic and transactional language; and the relationship between the married couple and their wider community – issues that matter for genre studies, gender studies, and material studies. I argue that women were partners, as well as gifts, in the exchange(s) of marriage.

Teaching

• 2022-23: Transformations

Conferences, Workshops, and Presentations

• October 2023: “Practice as Research: Research Methods for Early Modern Drama”, SELLL PGR & ECR Presentation Group at Newcastle University
• December 2022: organised and led a performance-as-research workshop on the final scene of The Wise Woman of Hoxton at Newcastle University
• September 2022: “Knives and Swords: Examining Gender on the Early Modern Stage”, Examining the Early Modern symposium at the University of Leeds
• June 2022: co-organised the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics Postgraduate Conference at Newcastle University
• June 2022: “Race and Racism in Englishmen for My Money”, Humanities and Social Sciences Research Conference at Newcastle University
• February 2022: “Mistress of All She Surveys: Whose Home in A Woman Killed with Kindness”, London Shakespeare Centre and Shakespeare’s Globe Graduate Conference
• November 2021: participated in a research and creative practice workshop on “Voicing Women from the Early Modern Past”, Interconnections Symposium at Newcastle University
• August 2021: “Why Does Portia Marry Bassanio?”, The British Graduate Shakespeare Conference

• MA in Renaissance Literature 1500-1700 at the University of York
• BA in Classics and English at the University of Oxford