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 argues that we need to change the way that we think about marriage in early modern drama. While it has become a critical commonplace to describe marriage as the exchange of women, this is an oversimplification that can be attributed to the tendency to focus on elite marriage in Shakespearean drama. By analysing city comedies and domestic tragedies, which more closely represent the sections of early modern society who made up the majority in the playhouse audiences, I aim to show that middling marriage was staged as a reciprocal exchange in which both bride and groom were active agents.

My project also uses this new understanding of marriage to re-evaluate how we think about the early modern household and community, as staged in middling marriage plays.

Publications

• 2024: “Knives and Femininity on the Early Modern Stage”, Shakespeare Bulletin 3, 327-46

Teaching

• 2023/24 and 2022/23: Transformations (SEL1023)

Conferences, Workshops, and Presentations

• June 2024: “Marriage as Reciprocal Exchange in The Wise Woman of Hoxton”, The British Graduate Shakespeare Conference
• 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