Dr Stephen Purcell

General


BA; MA; PhD (Kent). I joined Warwick in October 2011 from Southampton Solent University , where I co-developed and led the English Literature degree scheme. I direct for the theatre company The Pantaloons.

Research interests

My research focuses on the performance of the work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries on the modern stage and on screen. My particular research interests include theories of the audience, space, popular culture, parody, adaptation, and comedy, and I am as interested in ‘Shakespeare’ as a 20th- and 21st-century cultural phenomenon as I am in Shakespeare the dramatist. I am currently working on a practical research project with Dr Andy Kesson ( University of Kent ) and The Pantaloons, and am in the final stages of a book on The Audience for Palgrave’s Shakespeare in Practice series. I regularly lead practical workshops on Shakespeare at conferences and elsewhere.

Publications

Recent publications include:

  • Shakespeare in Practice: The Audience (Palgrave MacMillan, forthcoming 2013)
  • ‘Touch and Taboo in Rah-e-Sabz’ The Comedy of Errors’ in Shakespeare Beyond English (eds Bennett & Carson, Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2013)
  • Reviews of The Comedy of Errors, Hamlet, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Pericles and Troilus and Cressida in A Year of Shakespeare: Re-Living the World Shakespeare Festival (eds Edmondson, Prescott & Sullivan, Arden Shakespeare, forthcoming 2013)
  • ‘The Impact of New Forms of Public Performance’ in Digital Shakespeare: A Shifting Landscape (eds Carson & Kirwan, Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2013)
  • ‘“What Country, Friends, Is This?”: Cultural Identity and the World Shakespeare Festival’ (Shakespeare Survey 66, forthcoming 2013)
  • The Shakespeare Handbooks: The White Devil (Palgrave, 2012)
  • ‘Shakespeare on Television’ in The Edinburgh Companion to Shakespeare and the Arts (eds Burnett, Streete & Wray, Edinburgh University Press, 2011)
  • ‘Marcello Magni’ in The Routledge Companion to Actors’ Shakespeare (eds Brown & Ewert, Routledge, 2011)
  • ‘“That’s not Shakespeare”: Policing the Boundaries of “Shakespeare” in Reviews’ (Shakespeare 6:3, 2010)
  • Popular Shakespeare: Simulation and Subversion on the Modern Stage (Palgrave Shakespeare Studies, 2009)

Teaching and supervision

I would be keen to supervise projects on Shakespeare and his contemporaries in performance, and on modern performance theory and practice. I am keen to encourage practice-as-research projects.