Dr Christopher Fell
Thesis Title: A Cultural History of the Arden Shakespeare Series
Supervisors: Professors Bart van Es and Adam Smyth
Doctoral Research: The focus of my research was on editorial activity. The thesis aimed to investigate the origins and development of the Arden series of Shakespeare editions (1899-2020). Each series, I argued, comprises multivocal editions that expose specific critical investments. Such critical priorities illustrate particular cultural, intellectual, and institutional pressures of their moment of production. A central argument was that many of the critical commitments in the Arden series are recursive, continuing to resurface, often in unexpected ways, in today’s critical climate. The three series as a whole provide a rich storehouse of editorial activity for future Arden editors, and the recent completion of the third Arden series offered a timely moment in which to tell the story of how the series began, how editorial thinking developed, and how a return to the foundations of the early Arden series offers a pathway to a richer understanding of the nature of editorial thinking in the current moment.
In its concern with both a series of important book-historical projects and their dominant critical assumptions, my approach took inspiration from the emergence of the interdisciplinary field of Book History and particularly the concern with editorial ideologies developed by Margreta de Grazia and Leah S. Marcus in the 1990s. Key research questions included: how did each project come into being? What were their operating assumptions? What was their impact on the general readership? What were the commercial and intellectual pressures existing on those editions? As recent decades have made increasingly clear, the practice of editing remains far from a straightforward science; its pressures, puzzles, and peculiarities offer no assurances of finality. Ultimately editorial business is never finished and provides no logical endpoint.
Book reviews: I have written reviews of editions of Shakespeare and non-Shakespeare editions for The Review of English Studies and The Year's Work in English Studies. You can read my review of Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen's RSC Complete Works second edition (2022) here: https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgac048. For my YWES piece on 'Editions and Textual Matters' excluding Shakespeare published in 2021, see: https://doi.org/10.1093/ywes/maae022.
Publications: In 2022, I delivered a paper at the IASEMS conference in Florence, which was designed to provide an opportunity to discuss Shakespeare's First Folio in the lead up to the 400th anniversary of its publication. My paper was published as part of the conference proceedings in 2023, which you can access here: http://www.iasems.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/The-First-Folio-at-400-... I am also in the process of preparing my doctoral thesis for publication as a monograph.
Editing projects: I am currently editing Beaumont and Fletcher's Cupid's Revenge for the Revels Plays series.
Blog posts: For the English Faculty's 'Telling Our Stories Better' project (2021), I contributed a piece on Lady Ademola (1913-2002), the educator and advocate for women's education: https://www.english.ox.ac.uk/lady-kofoworola-ademola-educator-and-advoca.... As part of a micro-internship with Oxford Heritage Partnerships (June 2024), working with the London Charterhouse, I contributed a piece on the repair and restoration work carried out by the London architects Seely & Paget following the Blitz bombings that gutted the site on 10-11 May 1941: https://www.torch.ox.ac.uk/article/seely-and-paget-restoring-the-london-...
Research Interests: Textual editing; Shakespeare studies; The works of Beaumont and Fletcher; early modern drama; editing in theory and practice; cultural history; book history.
