Dr Stephen Longstaffe
Senior Lecturer in English
Dr Stephen Longstaffe’s first degree was in English and Theatre Studies, and his work is often interdisciplinary in inspiration. His doctoral thesis was on the English history play in the age of Shakespeare, and many of his publications are in this field. He has reviewed all critical work on Shakespeare’s histories for the authoritative critical bibliography The Year’s Work in English Studies since 1998, and has published on a variety of topics within early modern drama, including Marlowe in performance, editing Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s King John, Bakhtin and Carnival, censorship, and the representation of oppositional histories (and the historical past more generally). In 2002 he published the definitive edition of the 1592 play on the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt, Jack Straw.
One of the ultimate accolades for a Shakespearean is to have your work discussed in a critical edition, and Stephen is very pleased that his work on 2 Henry VI is discussed in the recent Arden edition of this play, and that his suggestions on the representation of stage ‘asides’ are adopted in the recent Oxford edition. He has also produced several student-oriented books, most recently, with Andrew Hiscock, The Shakespeare Handbook (2009). His current project is a collection of essays on Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV (2010).Outside early modern drama, Stephen has also published on the Lancashire playwright Jim Cartwright, and on the unjustly maligned film flopperoo, The Avengers. He has examined doctoral theses on Coleridge and the politics of the 1790s, festivity in early modern drama, and the life, times and works of Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth, and MPhil work on Shakespeare and tarot and the British ‘cosy catastrophe’ sub-genre of science fiction. In 2010 he was an invited keynote speaker at the English Subject Centre’s day one-day seminar on ‘Teaching the Renaissance’.
After many years of appearing in a range of amateur theatre and scholarly reconstruction productions (including mystery plays on pageant wagons in York and Durham, Shakespeare, semi-staged early modern plays, voicing the Quaker founder George Fox for a multimedia archive, up to plays by Terry Johnson and Kay Mellor), Stephen has for the last six years been throwing away the script as a member of the Lancaster-based improvised drama and comedy group Improv Xpress. This has recently fed through into his academic research on early modern drama, and he has begun to work on clowns and comedy in addition to his other interests, learning more about this area of practice via workshops on comedy, improvisation, and the commedia dell’arte.
Subjects of recent conference papers include improvisation and Shakespeare (Cardiff, 2007); Shakespeare’s clowns (Oxford, 2007); the nineteenth-century poet Laureate Robert Southey (Keswick, 2008); revisiting the impact of Bakhtin on Shakespeare studies (Arhus, 2008); the Shakespearean clown William Kemp (2008); and clowns and the early modern repertory (2009). In 2007 Longstaffe visited Washington DC to work on the undiscovered manuscripts of a Lancaster poet c. 1800, and is hoping to develop this work into a more general consideration of Romantic-era print cultures in the north Lancashire area.
Publications contracted and forthcoming include a collection of essays on Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV, and essays on the political drama, the English history play, Shakespeare’s clowns, and the Shakespearean source-play The Troublesome Reign of King John. Longer term projects include more work on Shakespeare’s clowns; Romantic-era writing; the history play; the publication of Shakespeare’s plays; the afterlife of the Peasants’ Revolt; and Bridget Jones’ Diary.
Selected publications:
The Shakespeare Handbook (with Andrew Hiscock, Continuum); wrote chapter on literary and cultural contexts and co-wrote introduction. ISBN 9780826495785.(2009)
Entries on Jim Cartwright, Road, and Bed in The Columbia Encyclopedia of Modern Drama, edited by Gabrielle Cody and Evert Sprinchorn (Columbia UP), ISBN 0231140320.(2007)
Shakespeare’s Histories and Counter-Histories (MUP), edited with Dermot Cavanagh and Stuart Hampton-Reeves, pp. 243. ISBN 0719070740. Includes chapter, ‘The commons will revolt: Woodstock after the Peasants’ Revolt’. (2006)
A Critical Edition of Jack Straw (1594) (Edwin Mellen Press), pp. 296. ISBN 0773471189.(2002)
York Notes Advanced: 1 Henry IV (York Press), pp. 121. ISBN 0582431603.(2002)
‘Puritan Tribulation and the Protestant English history play’, in Literature and Censorship in Renaissance England, ed. Andrew Hadfield (Palgrave), pp. 31-49. ISBN 0333794109. (2001)
‘Charm, Bowler, Umbrella, Leather Boots: Re-Making The Avengers’, in Retrovisions: Reinventing the Past in Film and Fiction, eds. Imelda Whelehan, I. Q. Hunter and Deborah Cartmell (Pluto), pp. 135-147. ISBN 074531578X.(2001)
‘Political drama’, in A Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture, ed. Mick Hattaway (Blackwell), pp. 486-98. ISBN 0631216685. This chapter will be revised for the new edition of the Companion which will appear in 2010.(2000)
‘A Short Report and Not Otherwise’: Jack Cade in 2 Henry VI’, Shakespeare and Carnival: After Bakhtin, ed. Ronald Knowles (London: Macmillan), pp. 13-35. ISBN 0333 711416. (1998)
‘The Limits of Modernity in Shakespeare’s King John’, Shakespeare Yearbook VI, eds. Holger Klein & Rowland Wymer (Lewiston/ Queenston/ Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press), pp. 90-119. ISBN 0-7734-8837-5, SY ISSN 1045-9456. This essay was reprinted in 1998 in Shakespeare Criticism Yearbook 37 (1996) (New York & London: Gale), pp. 132-143. ISBN 07876-11352. ISSN 0883-9123. (1996)