Beyond Parnassus: University Drama in the Three Kingdoms, 1585-1615

My thesis will investigate how early modern university drama in the universities of the three kingdoms constructed, negotiated, and transgressed borders.

University life in this period was structured by borders, in the walled courts of the colleges' architectural landscape, in the institutional structures of membership in exclusionary and hierarchically stratified communities, and even the rigid codes of dress and behaviour that marked a student's existence.

Yet, in their literary productions and intellectual discourse, universities could also be sites of instability where these boundaries of the university could be disputed and unsettled, and where radical exchanges of culture, language, and political thought could occur across divides of geography and nationality.

Challenging established narratives of university drama as a contained and insular expression of the university's pedagogical ideals, my research will examine vernacular and Latin playtexts alongside archival university material to instead argue for a reading of these texts as self-aware acts of criticism of the very institutions in which they were written.

By examining university drama from the universities of England, Scotland, and Ireland, my research will break new ground in considering this field of literary culture.