Jacob Ridley

My project, supervised by Bart van Es and Daniel Wakelin, studies the morality plays printed by four stationers in London between the English Reformation and Shakespeare. This is the first attempt to understand the Protestant afterlife of this Catholic genre through its relationship to broader written culture. We only know these texts through printed books, but both the texts and the reasons for printing them in the first place have been neglected. By considering dramatic texts as part of a marketplace of printed didactic artefacts, I seek to understand their anticipated readers and reading habits, and the habits of mind which they promoted amongst England’s laypeople, as part of the sixteenth century ferment of adaptation and continuity. The payoff will be a more granular grasp of the workings of cultural reform, and new ways of understanding the dominant dramatic genre during the early life of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. This research is part-funded by the Clarendon Fund. I did my BA in English Language and Literature at Magdalen College, Oxford, in 2017-20, receiving a First, and I returned to Magdalen for the MSt in English (650-1550), receiving a Distinction. For the latter, I was fortunate to be awarded a Senior Mackinnon scholarship. In 2021 I published my first articles in Essays in Criticism and The Review of English Studies, on printed playbooks in the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. In addition to my doctoral project, I am researching a trio of papers on English and Latin proverbs in medieval literature.