Derek Dunne

PhD Student

dunned5@tcd.ie

Biography

I am from Dublin and studied English Literature and Classical Civilisation at Trinity College Dublin, from 2001-2005. I completed an M Phil in Renaissance Literature at St. John’s College, Cambridge, and am currently finishing my PhD at Trinity Dublin under the supervision of Amanda Piesse.

Research

‘Socio-Legal Critique in Early Modern Revenge Tragedy’
My thesis looks at the growth of revenge tragedy in the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century, linking the popularity of revenge plays with contemporaneous changes in the early modern legal system. Long seen as the antithesis of law and order, in my analysis of these plays I show how the stage revenger is forced to take justice into his own hands because of the failings of the legal system. The fact that litigation was at an all time high during this period undermines the traditional notion that revenge tragedy catered to the vengeful impulses of an Elizabethan populace. Instead I suggest that it is because of the ubiquity of the law that the stage revenger grows in popularity. I use this as a starting point to examine the representation of communal justice in the genre of revenge tragedy, and how this intersects with questions of courtroom procedure, the interpretation of evidence, and even the debate over prerogative powers that exercised lawyers throughout the early modern period. By showing that these preoccupations manifest themselves in the genre of revenge tragedy, I hope to show that the genre is full of acute social commentary and deserves to be read from a socio-legal perspective. In the process I explode many of the critical myths that have dogged the genre since Fredson Bowers’ monograph on the subject, in particular the idea of the lone private revenger. I demonstrate that revenge on the early modern stage is an intensely public, intensely political act, which marks a direct intervention in state affairs, from evidence gathering and weakening jury powers, to food riots, piracy, and treason. Finally I argue that the representation of communal justice with which many of these plays end acts as a form of nascent political consciousness among the middling sort who thronged to the early modern playhouse.

My other interests include Shakespearean dram more widely; the intersection of law and literature in the period (particularly within the Inns of Court); cony-catching pamphlets and popular print; 1590s London as a time of social upheaval; the accession of James I, absolutist politics and the slide to civil war.

Research Papers:

• ‘The Tragedy of Hoffman, or Hamlet without the Prince’. To be presented at Britgrad 2012, in the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham (June 2012)
• ‘“Partialitie in a Iudge, is a Turpitude”: Partial Judges and Impartial Revengers in Early Modern English Drama’. Presented at ‘The Emergence of Impartiality’ in the Freie Universität, Berlin (July 2011)
• ‘“My scars can witness, dumb although they are”: Sensory Deprivation and the Unfreedom of Speech in Titus Andronicus’. Presented at ‘Renaissance Shakespeare: Shakespeare Renaissances’ (International Shakespeare Association) in Charles University, Prague (July 2011)
• ‘“Partialitie in a Iudge, is a Turpitude”: Partial Judges and Impartial Revengers in Early Modern English Drama’. Presented at ‘The Letter of the Law: Law Matters in Language and Literature’ (Hellenic Association for the Study of English) in Athens University (May 2011)
• ‘The Gesta Grayorum: Staging Transgression on the Early Modern Stage’. Presented at ‘Staging Early Modern Transgression’, in Trinity College Dublin/University College Dublin (August 2010)
• ‘Performing Hate on the Early Modern Stage’. Presented at the Interdisciplinary Hate Symposium, Schools of Philosophy and English, Trinity College Dublin/ University College Dublin (January 2010)
• ‘Revenge Tragedy and the Changing Face of the Law’. Presented at Borderlines XIV, Queens University Belfast (June 2009)

Publications:

• ‘“Partialitie in a Iudge, is a Turpitude”: Partial Judges and Impartial Revengers in Early Modern English Drama’, in Kathryn Murphy and Anita Traninger (eds.), The Emergence of Impartiality: Towards a History of Objectivity, Intersections series (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming)
• ‘Revenge Tragedy’s Representation of Communal Action’, Emerging Perspectives: Postgraduate Journal in English Studies, 2 (2011), pp. 42-53
• ‘Review: The Merry Wives of Windsor’, Cahiers Élisabéthains, 80 (2011), pp. 82-6
• ‘Review: Macbeth’, Cahiers Élisabéthains, 77 (2010), pp. 71-3