This lecture will present Shakespeare’s contemporary satirist and playwright, John Marston (1576-1634), and focus on his linguistic experiments (his neologisms, the elasticity of his syntax, his linguistic variety) in the diptych Antonio and Mellida and Antonio’s Revenge (1599, 1600), which he wrote for “The Children of Paul’s” just when the “War of the Theatres” broke out in Elizabethan England.

Pascale Drouet is Professor of 16th- & 17th-Century British Literature at l’Université de Poitiers, and a member of the Centre d’études supérieures de civilisation médiévale (CESCM). She is the author of Shakespeare and the Denial of Territory: Banishment, Abuse of Power, and Strategies of Resistance (Manchester UP, 2021), among dozens of other books, chapters, and articles. She is currently a 2023-24 delegate with the Institute for Research on the Renaissance, the Neo-Classical Age, and the Enlightenment (IRCL), a joint research centre of CNRS (French National Centre for Scientific Research) and the University of Paul-Valéry Monpellier 3.

The lecture is sponsored by the Marco Institute for Medieval & Renaissance Studies, with support from the Department of English. A reception with light refreshements will be provided after the lecture.