Rachael Hodge

Supervisor: Professor Laurie Maguire

Research Interests: Early modern drama; genre theory; theatre history; performance

Doctoral Research: My DPhil research explores the development of dramatic genre in the early years of professional English theatre, with a particular focus on dramatic tragedy. I am interested in how genre was signalled in performance, both via physical features of staging and through the use of metadramatic framing devices like choruses. Examining lesser-known anonymous plays alongside the more famous drama of Marlowe and Kyd, my thesis seeks to ask how coherent "tragedy" was as a generic category in the 1580s and early 1590s, and how much dramatic genre mattered to playgoers in this period.