PhD, University of Pennsylvania MA, University of Notre Dame
About
Kurt Schreyer teaches courses primarily in Shakespeare and early English drama but his interests extend to a wide range of texts from classical antiquity to the nineteenth century and beyond. His teaching tries to foster students' curiosity by making past cultures and literatures strange rather than familiar or relevant, underscoring, in other words, the differences between pre- and early-modern societies and our own.
I’m currently undertaking a book project with the working title Shakespeare at Sea: A Cultural History of Theatricality in the Royal Navy. Its aim is to help enrich our understanding of the theatrical and literary cultures of the Royal Navy from the Age of Sail to the present. My first book, Shakespeare’s Medieval Craft: Remnants of the Mysteries on the London Stage (Cornell University Press), demonstrates the central importance of stage properties, technologies, and theatrical practices from pre-Reformation religious drama to Shakespeare’s stagecraft.
ENGL 2370 – Drama: The Greatest Hits ENGL 3310 – English Literature before 1790 ENGL 4360 – Shakespeare’s Friends & Rivals ENGL 4370 – Shakespeare’s Tragedies & Romances ENGL 4380 – Shakespeare’s Comedies & Histories
Research Interests
Shakespeare Drama and Theater History Naval and Maritime History Amateur Theatre and Theatricals Film Noir and Crime Fiction Material Culture and the History of the Book
Selected Publications, Talks, and Other Works
Books
Shakespeare’s Medieval Craft: Remnants of the Mysteries on the London Stage, Cornell University Press, 2014.
Selected Book Chapters and Journal Articles
“‘And golden vizards on their faces’: Theatrical Awakening in All Is True,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 73.1-2 (Spring & Summer 2022), 121-45.
“Did Early Modern Drama Actually Happen?” in The Arden Handbook to Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama: Perspectives on Culture, Performance and Identity, eds. Michelle Dowd and Tom Rutter (Arden/Bloomsbury, 2023), 53-68.
“A Greenwich Night’s Dream: Shakespeare, Empire, and the Royal Navy in post-Armistice Britain,” in Memorializing Shakespeare: Commemoration and Collective Identity, 1916–2016, eds. Edmund G. C. King and Monika Smialkowska (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), 65-85.
“Stealing Shives: Titus Andronicus as Chaucerian anti-Romance.” Comparative Drama 55.2 (2021), 185-210.
“Moldy Pericles.” Exemplaria: Medieval, Early Modern, Theory 29.3 (Fall 2017), 210-233.
“Balaam to Bottom: Artifact and Theatrical Translation in the Sixteenth Century,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 42.2 (Spring 2012), 421-59.
Edited Works
Two plays from the 16th-Century Chester Mystery Cycle (“Cure of the Blind Man” and “Christ and the Leper”), in The Medieval Disabilities Sourcebook, ed. Cameron Hunt McNabb (Punctum Books, 2020), 419-33
