Dr Douglas Clark

I am a specialist in early modern literature and intellectual culture. I joined Wadham in 2025, having previously worked in British, Irish, and Swiss universities. My research broadly focuses on Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, the depiction of the mind in early modern literary culture, and the history of poetics.

I have recently published in Renaissance Drama, The Seventeenth Century, Studies in Philology, and Women’s Writing on: Elizabethan and Jacobean testamentary drama; how mental distress was portrayed through maritime metaphors in English Renaissance poetry; John Donne’s contribution to the genre of the lyric; and how civility was codified in early modern conduct literature and drama. My forthcoming book, The Will in English Renaissance Drama (Cambridge University Press, 2025) argues that the performance of the will – as both a faculty of the soul and as a legal document – indelibly shaped the nature of early Elizabethan and late Jacobean dramatic culture. English Renaissance playwrights were preoccupied with reflecting on the influence that wills exerted over one’s life and afterlife.

I am currently completing two new book projects. The first, Shakespeare at the End, considers the topic of narrative closure across Renaissance plays to offer new insights into how genre, life, and time were conceived in early modernity, while reflecting on the purpose of studying Shakespeare as humanity faces the possibility of its own end. The second, Thinking Makes it So? Brains and Being in Early Modernity, offers a new story about how early modern writers thought about the nature of the mind. This book integrates new poetic and dramatic manuscript sources I have found through funded fellowships at the Newberry Library, Chicago and the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C.