Dr Margaret Shewring

 

Biography
 
Dr. Margaret Shewring joined the staff of Theatre Studies in Autumn 1978. She took her undergraduate degree in English Language and Literature at the University of Birmingham (1971-74). Her doctoral research, at the Shakespeare Institute (University of Birmingham), concentrated on a critical edition of The Great Favourite; or, the Duke of Lerma (1668), attributed to Sir Robert Howard. A revised and updated version of this thesis was published by Garland publishing, New York, in 1988.

Margaret’s teaching and research interests focus on the analysis of performance in both an historical and a contemporary context. She specialises in the theatre of the Renaissance and Restoration periods, Renaissance and Early Modern European Festivals, Modernism in Europe and Shakespeare on the Contemporary Stage both in Britain and abroad.

Postgraduate Supervision
 
Margaret welcomes applications from graduate students for research degrees particularly from students specialising in performance spaces, in Renaissance and Early Modern Festivals, in the theatre of the English and European Renaissance and in the work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries in performance on the 20th and 21st century stage in Britain and abroad.
 
 
Links to recent conferences co-organised by Margaret Shewring
 
 
 
 
 
Research Interests
Margaret’s research has developed in three main directions:
1) Renaissance Festivals;
2) Shakespeare in Performance including work towards a monograph on Design for Shakespeare;
3) Performance spaces including the Guildhall in Stratford-upon-Avon from the late medieval period to the 18th century.
 
Margaret's single-author publications include a book on Richard II for the Manchester University Press Shakespeare in Performance Series (1996). She was Associate Editor for fifteen volumes in this series. She has also published articles on Shakespeare and his contemporaries as well as on Max Reinhardt. She is currently writing a book on Design for Shakespeare and contributed a paper concerned with design in recent productions of Richard II to a seminar at the International Shakespeare Conference in Stratford-upon-Avon in August 2008.
 
In December 2008, she gave a paper on ‘Hamlet in performance in the 21st Century in Great Britain and abroad’ for a Colloquium hosted by S.I.R.I.R. at the Sorbonne. (S.I.R.I.R. is an interdisciplinary research centre concerned with the Renaissance and with Renaissance plays in the context of subsequent performances.) A revised version of her paper will appear as a chapter in Silence au temps de la Renaissance, edited by Margaret Jones-Davies (Brepol: forthcoming).
 
With Professor Ronnie Mulryne she has co-edited several multi-author volumes on aspects of performance in the European Renaissance: Theatre and Government under the Early Stuarts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993; reprinted in paperback, 2009), Italian Renaissance Festivals and their European Influence (Edwin Mellen Press: Lampeter, 1992), Theatre of the English and Italian Renaissance (Macmillan: London, 1990), and War, Literature, and the Arts in Sixteenth-Century Europe (Macmillan: London, 1989). One of their most recent multi-author volumes is Shakespeare and the Japanese Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

Margaret Shewring and Ronnie Mulryne own a small, independent publishing company based in Stratford-upon-Avon. Their publications, devised and edited by themselves, concern recent developments in theatre and performance: This Golden Round: The Royal Shakespeare Company at the Swan (1989: in collaboration with the Royal Shakespeare Company), Making Space for Theatre: British Architecture and Theatre since 1958 (1995: in collaboration with the British Council), Shakespeare's Globe Rebuilt (1997: in association with Cambridge University Press; reprinted in paperback,2009), and Infinite Riches in a Little Room: scenography and performance at the Cottesloe Theatre, 1977-98 ( 1999, in association with the Royal National Theatre).
 
As a member of Warwick’s Centre for the Study of the Renaissance from 1978, Margaret contributed to the development and implementation of the MA Course in English and European Drama (1978-2000) and the MA Course in the Culture of the European Renaissance that replaced the MA in English and European Drama from 2000. She was MA Course Director and Examinations Secretary in the Centre for much of her career at Warwick (until 2003). She helped to devise the first graduate level ERASMUS programme to be funded by the EU and was co-organiser of fifteen research conferences for the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance, University of Warwick, in collaboration (variously) with: the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham; the European Humanities Research Centre, University of Warwick; the School of Theatre Studies, University of Warwick; the University of Oxford; the University of Leicester; Columbia University, New York; Cambridge University Press; and The European Science Foundation.
 
Margaret was a member of the steering group for a major international research project for the AHRC Centre for the Study of Renaissance Elites and Court Cultures (based in Warwick’s Centre for the Study of the Renaissance). This ambitious project, entitled 'Europa Triumphans,' was concerned with the translation, introduction, annotation and analysis of clusters of Renaissance Festival Books, situating them in their historical, political, and performance contexts. The project resulted in a two-volume collection, edited by J. R. Mulryne, Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly and Margaret Shewring, Europa Triumphans: Court and Civic Festivals in Early Modern Europe (Aldershot and Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2004). This collection sold out within eighteen months and, with Ronnie Mulryne, Margaret has prepared an electronic edition of the two-volume collection, with additional introductory material and an enhanced Index, to be published by Ashgate in late 2009.
 
Margaret was also co-director, with Professor Ronnie Mulryne, of a project (funded by the AHRB/C) that, in collaboration with the British Library, made available in fully-searchable, digitised form 253 Renaissance Festival Books from the British Library's collections. The site can be accessed at www.bl.uk/treasuresinfull.
 
She is currently developing a Renaissance Festivals web-site for the University of Warwick that will complement this British Library site. This new Warwick-based site is being developed in collaboration with Robert O’Toole and the University’s E-lab. It has a Steering Group including senior Renaissance scholars, librarians (from the BL, the Warburg Institute and the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel) and experts in digitisation (from the BL, the Warburg Institute, Wolfenbüttel and the University of Warwick). The Warwick site will include introductions, commentaries, biographies (of Festival writers, devisers and performers), and a targeted bibliography. All these elements will be searchable using the same keyword search-terms as those on the BL and (in German) on the Wolfenbüttel sites and as developed for the electronic edition of the two-volume Europa Triumphans collection.
 
Margaret continues to take part in conferences relating to Renaissance Festivals and Performance. (She chaired a session in December 2007 at IGRS, University of London, in an International Conference devoted to Renaissance Festival Entries.) She has recently organised an interdisciplinary, international conference on ‘Waterborne Pageants and Festivals in the European Renaissance’, held at Warwick’s Palazzo in Venice in March 2010. This conference will lead to the publication of a collection of essays, edited by Margaret Shewring, for publication by Ashgate in 2012.
 
 
Current projects for publication (in addition to the Warwick Renaissance Festivals website)
 
Margaret Shewring, ed., Waterborne Pageants and Festivities in the Renaissance (Aldershot and Burlington VT: Ashgate, due during 2012).
 
Margaret Shewring, Design for Shakespeare 1960-2010 (CUP have expressed interest in this monograph).
 
Margaret is preparing an article on dance in Middleton’s Women Beware Women.
 
 
Recent Invitations: publications and conference papers
 
Margaret has been invited to contribute a 10,000 word chapter to a collection on Richard II: ‘‘Richard II’ for the new millennium,’ in Jeremy Lopez, ed., Richard II: New Critical Essays (London: Routledge, due to be published in Spring 2012).
 
Margaret has been invited to work on the evidence that exists for visits by travelling players to the Guildhall in Stratford-upon-Avon in the late 16th Century. Work on this is ongoing and will be published as a chapter in a collection of essays on the Guildhall, ed., J. R. Mulryne, to be published by Ashgate.
 
Margaret was invited to co-organise a seminar on performance space for the International Shakespeare Conference (August 2010).
 
Margaret was invited to present a paper for a panel on ‘Shakespeare and Festival’ at the World Shakespeare Congress in Prague (July 2011), and presented a further contribution to 'Shakespeare and the Culture of Festival' at a conference on 'Early Modern Exchanges' at University College, London, in September 2011.
 
 
Research Publications (selected items from the earliest to the most recent)
 
*Margaret Shewring, ‘Reinhardt’s ‘Miracle’ at Olympia: a Record and a Reconstruction’, in New Theatre Quarterly, Vol. III, Number 9 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 3-23.
 
*Margaret Shewring, ‘The Two Noble Kinsmen Revived: Chivalric Romance and Modern Performance Images’, in M-T Jones-Davies, ed, Le Roman de Chivalerie au temps de la Renaissance (Paris: 1987), pp.107-32.
 
*Margaret Shewring, A Critical Edition of Sir Robert Howard’s The Great Favourite: or, the Duke of Lerma (New York: Garland Publishing, 1988). [Monograph]
 
*J.R. Mulryne and Margaret Shewring, eds, War, Literature and the Arts in Sixteenth Century Europe (London: Macmillan, 1989).
 
*J.R.Mulryne and Margaret Shewring, eds, This Golden Round: the RSC at the Swan (Stratford-upon-Avon: Mulryne and Shewring, 1989).
 
*J.R.Mulryne and Margaret Shewring, eds, Theatre of the English and Italian Renaissance (London: Macmillan, 1990).
 
*Margaret Shewring, ‘The Cultural Tradition and Shakespeare’s Richard II’, in M-T Jones-Davies, ed, Experience, Coutume, Tradition au temps de la Renaissance (Paris: 1992), pp.53-70.
 
*J.R.Mulryne and Margaret Shewring, eds, Italian Renaissance Festivals and their European Influence (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press’ 1992).
 
*J.R.Mulryne and Margaret Shewring, eds, Theatre and Government under the Early Stuarts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993; reprinted in paperback, 2009).
 
*J.R.Mulryne and Margaret Shewring, eds, Making Space for Theatre: British Architecture and Theatre since 1958 (Stratford-upon-Avon: Mulryne and Shewring, 1995).
 
*Margaret Shewring, Shakespeare’s Richard II in Performance (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996; reprinted in paperback, 1996.
 
*J.R.Mulryne and Margaret Shewring, eds, Shakespeare’s Globe Rebuilt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press with Mulryne and Shewring, 1997; reprinted in paperback, 2009).
 
*Margaret Shewring, ‘Heidiki Noda’s Shakespeare: the languages of Performance’, in Takashi Sasayama, J.R.Mulryne and Margaret Shewring, eds, Shakespeare and the Japanese Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 94 – 110. *Takashi Sasayama, J.R.Mulryne and Margaret Shewring, eds, Shakespeare and the Japanese Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
 
*J.R.Mulryne and Margaret Shewring, eds, The Cottesloe at the National: Infinite Riches in a Little Room (Stratford-upon-Avon: Mulryne and Shewring with the National Theatre, 1999).
 
*J.R.Mulryne, Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly and Margaret Shewring, eds, Europa Triumphans: Court and Civic Festivals in Early Modern Europe, 2 vols (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2004; published as an e-book, 2009).
 
*Electronic Publication. Digitisation of Renaissance and Early Modern Festival Books in the Collections of the British Library, March 2005: URL http:/www.bl.uk/treasures/festival books/homepage.html
 
*Margaret Shewring and J.R.Mulryne, ‘Dancing Towards Death: Masques and Entertainments in London and Florence as precedents for Thomas Middleton’s Women Beware Women’, in Dance Research 25.2: November, 2007 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007) 134-43.
 
*Margaret Shewring, ‘‘Hamlet’ in Performance in the 21st Century’, in Margaret Jones-Davies, ed., Le Silence au temps de la Renaissance (Turnhout, Belgium, and New York: Brepols, forthcoming 2011).