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The History Of European Theatre
Shakespeare in the Restoration: A Conversation with Stephen Watkins
Episode 171:
For today’s guest episode it is a warm welcome to Stephen Watkins who is going to take us a little way forward in the timeline to the world of Restoration England where after fourteen years of closures theatres were again legally opened and where, as we shall hear, performance of Shakespeare plays formed a significant part of the repertoire, and this discussion does focus very much on Shakespeare in the Restoration, we will, of course, get to a look at the other playwrights and players of that period all in good time.
Stephen Watkins is a writer and researcher working mainly on Shakespeare and Early Modern literature, with a particular focus on how writers and theatre makers recycle, adapt and remediate source texts to both register and resist historical and cultural change. He has published widely on Restoration adaptations of Shakespeare and the important figure of that time, William Davenant. His book ‘Shakespeare and the Restoration Repertory’, as part of the Cambridge University Press, ‘Elements in Shakespeare Performance’ series was published in February 2025. In it Stephen demonstrates how Davenant’s adaptations of Shakespeare were shaped as much by the transformed commercial and repertorial logics that came to govern the patent companies in the 1660s as they were by shifting aesthetic and political concerns in the period. Stephen has taught English at the Universities of Oxford, Nottingham, and Derby, and is currently based at the University of Greenwich.
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