Christopher Matusiak

Associate Professor, Literatures in English
Phone: 607-274-7371
Office: Muller Faculty Center 326, Ithaca, NY 14850
Specialty: Shakespeare, Early English Theater History, Renaissance Literature

Education

PhD, English, The University of Toronto (2009)

MA, BA, English and Film Studies, Carleton University, Ottawa (2000)

Current research

A critical edition of Henry VI, Part 1  for The Oxford Marlowe: Collected Works 

REED London: The Cockpit-Phoenix : an edited collection of seventeenth-century manuscripts and printed documents illustrating the history of the Cockpit-Phoenix playhouse in Drury Lane (for The Records of Early English Drama)

Shakespearean Actors and their Playhouses in Civil War London, a book on the fates of seventeenth-century actors and their commercial venues during the English Civil Wars and Interregnum, the eighteen-year period (1642-60) when public performances were ostensibly prohibited by the revolutionary English Parliament.

Other interests:

  • seventeenth-century poetry
  • editing early English drama
  • horror in literature, film, and philosophy

Selected Courses

ENGL-312, Modern Comedy: Text, Stage, Film

ENGL-311:  Early Modern English Drama by Women

ENGL-210, Modern Horror Fiction

ENGL-219, Why Shakespeare Now? 

ENGL-420, Hamlet and its Mysteries

ENGL-373, Tragedy after Marlowe

ENGL-331, English Renaissance Beasts

Recent Publications

"Holland House in the 1650s: Evidence and Possibilities of Performance," Huntington Library Quarterly 85.1 (2022), 41-70.

"The Drury Lane Cockpit at War, 1646-49," Shakespeare Bulletin 37.1 (2019), 67-87.

"Was Shakespeare 'not a company keeper'? William Beeston and MS Aubrey 8, fol. 45v," Shakespeare Quarterly 68.4 (2017),  351-373.

A Critical Edition of Robert Greene’s The Honorable History of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (Q1594)Queen’s Men Editions.  General Ed. Helen Ostovich, with Peter Cockett and Andrew Griffin, 2017.

“Marlowe and Theater History,” Christopher Marlowe at 450, eds. Sara Munson Deats and Robert A. Logan. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2015, 281-308.

“Lost Stage Friars and their Narratives,” in Lost Plays in Shakespeare’s England, eds. David McInnis and Matthew Steggle. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, 208-228.

"Elizabeth Beeston, Sir Lewis Kirke, and the Cockpit's Management during the English Civil Wars."  Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 27 (2014),161-191.