About

I am currently Research Fellow at the University of Roehampton, working on the Box Office Bears project exploring animal baiting and sports in early modern England.  I am also part of the Middling Culture (www.middlingculture.com) and Before Shakespeare project teams, the latter focusing on the first thirty years of the Elizabethan playhouses in London, from 1565-95 (www.beforeshakespeare.com). I am also the Editor for the Curtain records for Records of Early English Drama Online.  My first monograph, Strangeness in Jacobean Drama, is forthcoming with Routledge (September 2020), and I am currently completing my second book, What is a Playhouse? England at Play, 1520-1620. I also teach as a Globe Education Lecturer at Shakespeare’s Globe.

My research ranges across the Elizabethan and early Jacobean periods of English cultural history and explores the relationships between “play,” performance, philosophy, and language; it also combines literary criticism with detailed archival research.

Blog Posts

    Publications

    Monograph

    Strangeness in Jacobean Drama. (Routledge [Studies in Early Modern Performance], forthcoming September 2020.).

    Articles

    “Bowling Alleys and Playhouses in London, 1560-1590.” Early Theatre 22.2 (Winter 2019): 53-74.

    “Matter-Theatre: Cymbeline and Conspicuous Construction.” Spec. Issue of Shakespeare Bulletin ed. Sarah Dustagheer and Harry Newman. Vol. 36 Issue 1 (Spring 2018): 69-88.

    “Seeing Speech as Spectacle in The White Devil.” Literature Compass 13.9 (2016): 548-59.

    “Before (and Beyond) Shakespeare in the Digital Age.” With Andy Kesson. Shakespeare Newsletter 67.2 (2018): 114-17.

    Articles forthcoming

    “Elizabethan Commercial Playing at St Paul’s.” Old St Paul’s and Culture. Ed. Shanyn Altman, Katrina Marchant-Stone, and Nicole Mennell. (Palgrave Early Modern Literature in History, pub. expected 2021.)

    “Playing Prose and the Playhouses of Elizabethan England.” The Oxford Handbook of Thomas Nashe. (due Sep. 2021.)

    Edited Collection forthcoming:

    Practices of Ephemera in Early Modern England (with Catherine Richardson and Hannah Lilley), (Routledge, expected Dec. 2021.).

    Other

    A series of blog posts on theatre history, methodology, and archival material on the Before Shakespeare website, (under the tag http://www.beforeshakespeare.com/tag/callan-davies/).

    Reviews

    Book review.  “Moving Shakespeare Indoors: Performance and Repertoire in the Jacobean Playhouse edited by Andrew Gurr and Farah Karim-Cooper.”  Renaissance Quarterly 69.4 (2016): 1604-05.

    Book review.  “The Aesthetics of Spectacle in Early Modern Drama and Modern Cinema: Robert Greene’s Theatre of Attractions by Jenny Sager.”  Shakespeare Bulletin 32.4 (Winter 2014): 771-73.

    Book review.  “Environmental Degradation in Jacobean Drama by Bruce Boehrer.”  The European Legacy: Towards New Paradigms 21.1 (2016).

    Performance review. Summer’s Last Will and Testament.  Dir. Perry Mills. Perf. Edward’s Boys. Shakespeare (2018).

    Performance review. Tom Tyler and His Wife. Dir. Emma Whipday. For Early Modern Women Journal Vol. 12 Issue 2 (2018).

    Book review. “Lying in Early Modern English Culture by Andrew Hadfield” for Shakespeare Jahrbuch (2019)

    Book review. “Shakespeare and London by Duncan Salkeld” for The London Journal 44.3 (2019): 234-36.

    Callan Davies

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    @callanjd

    Active 4 years, 8 months ago