Janet Clare is former Professor in Renaissance Literature at the University of Hull, where she was also Director of the Andrew Marvell Centre for Medieval to Early Modern Studies. She is now an Honorary Professor of English at the University of Bristol and a Leverhulme Emeritus Fellow. She has held a Visiting Professorship at the University of Florence and visiting fellowships at the Institute of English Studies, University of London; St Catherine’s College, Oxford, and the Plumer Fellowship, St Anne’s College, Oxford. She has lectured in European universities and research institutes in Austria, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Norway and Poland, as well as in Brazil and Japan.
She is the author of four books, numerous articles and book chapters, and has edited or co-edited six books and journals, encompassing materials from early Tudor women’s writing to the impact of Shakespeare on twentieth-century Irish writing. Her research has focused on early modern censorship; the drama of the Civil War and the English Republic; the cultural transition from the English Republic to the Restoration; revenge tragedy, and the theatre traffic of the early modern stage. In Shakespeare’s Stage Traffic she examines the theatrical transactions at the heart of Shakespeare’s plays, demonstrating how Shakespeare worked with materials that had already entered the dramatic tradition, moulding and converting them for his own use. Most recently, she has completed an edition of What You Will for The Complete Works of John Marston (OUP, 2026).
Janet Clare’s current research project, for which she has been awarded a Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship and on which she will be working while in Oxford, explores the intersections of evolving cosmographical knowledge and the early modern literary imagination. The project will consider how ‒ through a range of literary texts, including by More, Hakluyt, Shakespeare, and Browne ‒ cosmography’s indistinct borders between the unknown and the known, the imaginary and the real, variously perpetuated myth and legend, challenging beliefs and destabilizing fields of knowledge.
Selected Publications
Books
Shakespeare’s Stage Traffic: Imitation, Borrowing and Competition in Renaissance Theatre (CUP, 2014; pbk 2017).
Revenge Tragedies of the Renaissance, Writers and their Work (British Council, 2006).
Drama of the English Republic 1649-1660, The Revels Plays Companion Library (MUP, 2002; pbk 2005).
‘Art Made Tongue-tied by Authority’: Elizabethan and Jacobean Dramatic Censorship (revised 2nd edition), The Revels Plays Companion Library (MUP, 1999).
Books edited
Migrating Shakespeare: First European encounters, routes and networks (Arden Shakespeare, Bloomsbury, 2021).
From Republic to Restoration: Legacies and Departures (MUP, 2018).
Shakespeare and the Irish Writer, edited with Stephen O’Neill (UCD Press, 2010).
Contexts of Renaissance Comedy, edited with Roy Eriksen (Oslo: Novus Press, 1996).
Edited Journals
Journal of Early Modern Studies, ‘The Circulation of Cosmographical Knowledge in Early Modern Europe’, 12 (2023), edited with Sophie Chiari.
Journal of Early Modern Studies, ‘Shakespeare and Early Modern Popular Culture’, 2 (2013), edited with Paola Pugliatti.
Editions
John Marston’s What You Will for The Complete Works of John Marston, Gen Eds: Martin Butler and Matthew Steggle (OUP, 2026)
Articles (selected)
‘Cosmography, Knowledge in Transit: A Conspectus’, Journal of Early Modern Studies, 2023, 17-33.
‘“The Great Patrician of the Speaking Art”: Cicero, from the Republic of Letters to the English Republic’, Ciceroniana On Line, IV, 2 (2020), 353-75.
‘Order and Reform on the Elizabethan Stage: Sir Thomas More to Hamlet’, Shakespeare Jahrbuch, 154 (2018), 11-30.
‘Tracings and Data in The Tempest: Author, World and Representation’, Shakespeare Survey, 68 (2015), 109-17.
‘“Buried in the Open Fields”: Early Modern Suicide and the Case of Ofelia’, Journal of Early Modern Studies (2013), 241–252.
Chapters contributed to books (selected)
‘“[T]he commons, knit and united to one part”: Representing, Fearing and
Controlling the Commons’ in Representing the Commons in Early Modern England, ed. by Jeremy Elprin and Mickaël Popelard (Caen University Press, 2025).
‘William Davenant and The Siege of Rhodes’ in Handbook of English Renaissance Literature, ed. by Ingo Berensmeyer, Handbooks of English and American Studies (De Gruyter, 2019), 615-634.
‘Acts of Oblivion: Reframing the Drama, 1649-1665’ in From Republic to Restoration: Legacies and Departures (Manchester University Press, 2018), 147–167.
‘“I like not this”: Censorship, Self-Censorship and Collaboration in Early Modern Dramatic Manuscripts’ in Freedom and Censorship in Early Modern English Literature, ed. by Sophie Chiari (Routledge, 2018), 48-65.
‘“She’s turned fury”: Women Transmogrified on the Early Modern Stage’ in Revenge and Gender from Classical to Renaissance Literature, ed. by Lesel Dawson and Fiona McHardy (Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 221-39.
‘The Dramaturgy of The Revenger’s Tragedy’ in The Revenger’s Tragedy: The State of Play, ed. by Gretchen Minton, Arden Shakespeare Series (Bloomsbury, 2017), 159-82.
‘Licensing the King’s Men: From Court Revels to Public Performance’ in Brave New Theatres: 1616 in China and England, Arden Shakespeare Series (Bloomsbury, 2015), 108-20.
‘“Of Seditions and Troubles”: Censorship and the Late Elizabethan Crisis’ in Enforcing and Eluding Censorship: British and Anglo-Italian Perspectives, ed. by Giuliana Iannaccaro and Giovanni Iamartino (Cambridge Scholars Publishing: Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 2014), 1-14
