My seminar takes off from the question of female agency and theatricality in Jacobethan drama, encapsulated in the titular catchphrase from Barry’s The Family of Love. Through discussion of comedies and tragedies staged in Melbourne and Auckland over the past 8 years I will explore the feminist potential of this mainly non-Shakespearean drama in production. The productions featured are Rob Conkie’s The Merry Wives of Windsor and  Bartholomew Fair, Michael Hurst’s The Changeling, Gloriana & Company’s  The Maid’s Tragedy and the University of Auckland Drama students’ The Family of Love.

Sophie Tomlinson is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand. Her chief areas of research specialisation are early modern performance history and criticism; women’s writing of the early modern period, and scholarly editing. As well as numerous book chapters and articles, she has published a monograph, Women on Stage in Stuart Drama (2005) and two critical editions: Fletcher’s The Wild-Goose Chase, as part of the Revels Companion Library volume Three Seventeenth-Century Plays on Women and Performance, with Hero Chalmers and Julie Sanders (2006) and in January of this year, in the Revels Plays series, Lording Barry’s The Family of Love.

About EMLAC

EMLAC is the University of Sydney’s Early Modern Literature and Culture research group which is based in the English Department. It meets on the last Friday of the month during term from 1-2.30pm.

EMLAC is a friendly and supportive gathering of early modernist researchers including tenured staff, casual staff, research students, alumni and honorary associates. We are mainly focussed on English literature, but have strong cross-disciplinary interests.

Online event

All meetings will be delivered via Zoom.

Contact: Liam Semler (liam.semler@sydney.edu.au).