Faculty Profiles

My dissertation, Mysterious Harmonies: Robert Johnson, Musical Collaboration, and Shakespeare’s Last Plays, considers the formal influence exerted by composers and musicians upon early English drama. Facing competition from the Jacobean masque, and having leased the musically-famed Blackfriars Playhouse in 1608, the King’s Men radically increased the musical elements within their plays. In spite of this development, critics have overlooked the role that composers have had in the production of Shakespeare’s plays, reading their contributions to theatre music as negligible when compared with company clowns and players. As my project shows, however, the royal lutenist and composer Robert Johnson actively helped the King’s Men develop what I am calling a dramaturgy of “mysterious harmony” in Shakespeare’s last plays--from Pericles (1607/09) to Henry VIII (1613). Within this theatrical mode, music reveals what is not known, influences minds, repairs broken relationships, and compensates for failures in language.

My project is supported by a University and Louis Bevier Completion Fellowship, and an article derived from it, titled "'All Sorts, All Sects, Associate Me Thither': Robert Johnson and the Music of Henry VIII," is under review with the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. I have also written on the Reformation's influence on poetic style, and my essay, "'Through a Glass, Darkly': Paradise Lost and Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians," has been published in Milton Studies.