Brian Walsh

Assistant Professor of English

Address: LC 410
Phone: 203-432-9070
Email: brian.walsh@yale.edu
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M.A., Ph.D., Rutgers University
B.A., St. John Fisher College

Brian Walsh’s research interests have centered on how Shakespeare and his contemporaries used dramatic performance as a means to explore history: not merely the facts of history, or the topical uses to which it might be put, but the very concept of history itself. This work culminated in his 2009 book Shakespeare, the Queen’s Men, and the Elizabethan Performance of History (Cambridge UP), which won the 2010 Samuel and Ronnie Heyman Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Publication at Yale. He has written also about prophecy and political subversion in Elizabethan popular theater, postmodern re-writings of Shakespeare, as well as “bardolatry” and Shakespeare commemoration in the Bankside area of London. He is currently developing a book project on how theatrical performance inflected the understanding of religious beliefs, practices and identities in Elizabethan and Jacobean England.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS:

--Shakespeare, the Queen's Men, and the Elizabethan Performance of History (Cambridge University Press, 2009)

--“Shakespeare in Stained Glass: The Shakespeare Memorials of Southwark Cathedral and ‘Local’ Bardolatry,” Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 7.1 (2012) [on-line].

--“‘Deep Prescience’: Succession and the Politics of Prophecy in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 23 (2010) 63-85.

--“Charismatic Authority and Political Subversion in John of Bordeaux,” Research Opportunities in Medieval and Renaissance Drama 48 (2009) 1-21.

--“Chantry, Chronicle, Cockpit: Henry V and the Forms of History,” in Shakespeare and The Middle Ages, eds. Curtis Perry and John Watkins (Oxford University Press, 2009) 251-271.

--“Theatrical Temporality and Historical Consciousness in The Famous Victories of Henry V,” Theatre Journal 59:1 (March 2007) 57-73.

--“Performing Historicity in Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday,” Studies in English Literature 46:2 (Spring 2006) 323-348.

--“‘Unkind Division’: The Double Absence of Performing History in 1 Henry VI,” Shakespeare Quarterly 55:2 (Summer 2004) 119-147.

--“The Rest is Violence: Muller Contra Shakespeare,” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 69 (2001) 44-55.

UNDERGRADUATE COURSES: European Literary Tradition, Major English Poets, Shakespeare, Drama of Shakespeare’s Contemporaries

GRADUATE COURSES: Early Modern Drama and the English Reformation