My principal research interests are in Shakespeare and early modern literature, with an emphasis on performance practices, book history, wartime culture, and the global reception and afterlives of texts. My research often involves interdisciplinary approaches that show how texts participate in the construction of genre, historical narrative, and ideas of belonging and community. It considers the interplay between literature and history, including how written histories make use of literary techniques and narrativizing strategies and how literature engages with the historical past and becomes part of it through the influence of significant texts on specific communities.
My first monograph, Publishing the History Play in the Time of Shakespeare: Stationers Shaping a Genre (Cambridge University Press, 2022; paperback 2024), offers a reappraisal of the ‘history play’ and draws attention to the assumptions that underlie discussions of the genre, particularly in relation to the critical dominance of Shakespeare’s English histories. My book shows how the publication process and its agents have controlled the survival of drama from the commercial stages and shaped the plays’ presentation in print in ways that both disclose and direct readings of ‘history’.
My second monograph, Wartime Shakespeare: Performing Narratives of Conflict (Cambridge University Press, 2023), considers how Shakespeare has been used – or ‘mobilized’ – in performance during periods of war from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century. It proposes a new critical framework of production and reception networks that highlights the underappreciated malleability of Shakespeare within wartime contexts that has significant ramifications for understanding the role of the arts during conflict. This book is accompanied by a collection (Shakespeare at War: A Material History, CUP 2023), which I co-edited with Sonia Massai, and features chapters from a wide range of cross-disciplinary contributors, including Shakespeare scholars, social scientists, public military figures (such as Colonel Tim Collins and Major General Jonathan Shaw), and theatre directors (including Maria Aberg, Nicholas Hytner, Iqbal Khan, Julia Pascal, and Maggie Smales). It doubles as a companion for ‘Shakespeare and War’, a public exhibition that we curated at the National Army Museum (open 6 October 2023 to 1 September 2024). You can read more about this project through this feature for Oxford's Spotlight on Research.
My third monograph – Authorships and Authority in Early Modern Dramatic Paratexts (Routledge, forthcoming) – examines playbook paratexts as a critical site for negotiating and developing ideas of ‘authorship’, imitation, and influence during the period. It argues that print publication propelled a paratextual discourse of authorships that reveal a dual emphasis on practices of creation and control.
In addition to these book projects, I am the author of over a dozen articles and chapters on topics linked to early modern book history, the porous boundary between literature and history during early modernity, and wartime culture across the longue durée. I am co-editing Edward III for LEMDO and preparing the introduction for the new Oxford World's Classics edition of 1 Henry VI.
Monographs
1. Publishing the History Play in the Time of Shakespeare: Stationers Shaping a Genre (Cambridge University Press, 2022)
2. Wartime Shakespeare: Performing Narratives of Conflict (Cambridge University Press, 2023)
3. Authorships and Authority in Early Modern Dramatic Paratexts, Studies in Early Modern Authorship (Routledge, forthcoming)
Edited Collections
1. Shakespeare at War: A Material History, ed. by Amy Lidster and Sonia Massai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023). *Shortlisted for the Templer Medal Book Prize from the Society for Army Historical Research
Journal Articles
1. ‘At the Sign of the Angel: The influence of Andrew Wise on Shakespeare in print’, Shakespeare Survey 71 (2018), 242-54
2. ‘Shakespeare and the implications of paratextual attribution’, Shakespeare Studies, 46 (2018), 150-55
3. ‘Challenging monarchical legacies in Edward III and Henry V’, English: Journal of the English Association, 68:261 (2019), 126-42
4. ‘“With much labour out of scattered papers”: The Caroline reprints of Thomas Heywood’s 1 and 2 If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody’, Renaissance Drama, 49:2 (2021), 205-28 [**Winner of the Palmer Award in 2023 for Best New Essay]
5. ‘“Not on his Picture, but his Booke”: Shakespeare's First Folio and Practices of Collection’, Shakespeare, 20:1 (2024), 28-55, DOI: 10.1080/17450918.2023.2244463
Chapters in Edited Collections
1. ‘Publishing King Lear (1608) at the Sign of the Pied Bull’, in Old St Paul’s and Culture, ed. by Shanyn Altman and Jonathan Buckner, Early Modern Literature in History (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2021), 293-318
2. [With Catherine Evans], ‘Resources’, Arden Research Handbook for Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, ed. by Michelle Dowd and Tom Rutter (London: Bloomsbury Arden, 2022), pp.327-38
3. ‘Making Sense of Error in Commercial Drama: The case of Edward III’, in Printing and Misprinting: A Companion to Typos and Corrections in Renaissance Europe (1450-1650), ed. by Geri Della Rocca de Candal, Anthony Grafton, and Paolo Sachet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023), pp.418-31
4. ‘Hamlet Mobilized: Propaganda during the Napoleonic Wars (1803-15)’, in Shakespeare at War: A Material History, ed. by Amy Lidster and Sonia Massai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), pp. 38-49
5. [With Sonia Massai], 'Introduction: A Material History', in Shakespeare at War: A Material History, ed. by Amy Lidster and Sonia Massai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), pp.1-5
6. ‘Preliminaries and Paratexts’, in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Authorship, ed. by Rory Loughnane and Will Sharpe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2025)
7. ‘Negotiating patronage: Nashe and his “toys for private Gentlemen”’, in The Oxford Handbook of Thomas Nashe, ed. by Andrew Hadfield, Jennifer Richards, and Kate De Rycker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming)
Critical Editions
1. The Reign of King Edward III, ed. by Amy Lidster and Sonia Massai, Internet Shakespeare Editions/Linked Early Modern Drama Online
[old-spelling edition, modern edition, and textual introduction are published on ISE; full critical edition is forthcoming with LEMDO]
2. Henry VI: Part 1, introduction by Amy Lidster, ed. by Sarah Neville (from the New Oxford Shakespeare), Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2026)
Other Publications
1. Review of Erin McCarthy, Doubtful Readers: Print, Poetry, and the Reading Public in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020) in The Spenser Review, 51.3.9 (Fall 2021)
2. Amy Lidster and Sonia Massai in conversation with Maria Aberg, ‘Who Pays the Price? Maria Aberg on Roy Williams’s Days of Significance (Royal Shakespeare Company, 2007)’, in Shakespeare at War: A Material History, ed. by Amy Lidster and Sonia Massai (Cambridge University Press, 2023), pp. 231-37 [published interview with theatre director Maria Aberg]
3. Amy Lidster and Sonia Massai in conversation with Nicholas Hytner, ‘“May I with Right and Conscience Make this Claim?”: Testing the “Just War” Tradition in Nicholas Hytner’s Henry V (National Theatre, 2003)’, in Shakespeare at War: A Material History, ed. by Amy Lidster and Sonia Massai (Cambridge University Press, 2023), pp. 213-19 [published interview with theatre director Nicholas Hytner]
4. Amy Lidster and Sonia Massai in conversation with Iqbal Khan, ‘“Thou Hast Set Me on the Rack”: Torture and Modern Warfare in Iqbal Khan’s Othello (Royal Shakespeare Company, 2015)’, in Shakespeare at War: A Material History, ed. by Amy Lidster and Sonia Massai (Cambridge University Press, 2023), pp. 249-54 [published interview with theatre director Iqbal Khan]
5. Amy Lidster and Sonia Massai in conversation with Julia Pascal, ‘Framing the Jew: Julia Pascal’s The Shylock Play (Arcola Theatre, London, 2007)’, in Shakespeare at War: A Material History, ed. by Amy Lidster and Sonia Massai (Cambridge University Press, 2023), pp. 185-91 [published interview with writer and theatre director Julia Pascal]
6. Amy Lidster and Sonia Massai in conversation with Maggie Smales, ‘Forgotten Histories: The Barnbow Lasses in Maggie Smales’s Henry V (Upstage Centre, 41 Monkgate, York, 2015)’, in Shakespeare at War: A Material History, ed. by Amy Lidster and Sonia Massai (Cambridge University Press, 2023), pp. 129-35 [published interview with theatre director Maggie Smales]
7. Review of Jason Scott-Warren, Shakespeare’s First Reader: The Paper Trails of Richard Stonley (University of Philadelphia Press, 2019) in The Sixteenth Century Journal, LV/1-2 (2024), 470-72
8. 'Shakespeare and War', in Oxford Bibliographies in British and Irish Literature, ed. by Andrew Hadfield (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2024)
