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Tanya Pollard

Brooklyn College of CUNY, English, Faculty Member

Graduate Center of the City University of New York, Dept. of English, Faculty Member

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I write on early modern English plays, bodies, senses, alchemy, and responses to Greek theater. I also work with New York actors, directors, and theaters on productions, and am researching the impact of Shakespeare's actors on his plays.
Address: https://tanyapollard.commons.gc.cuny.edu/

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Cardiff University

Richard P Martin

Stanford University

Armando Marques-Guedes

UNL - New University of Lisbon

Ucla

Toronto Metropolitan University

Antonis K . Petrides

Open University of Cyprus

Macquarie University

Södertörn University

Francisco de Paula Souza de Mendonça Júnior

UFSM - Universidade Federal de Santa Maria

Yannis Hamilakis

Brown University

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Books by Tanya Pollard

Ben Jonson, The Alchemist (Arden Early Modern Drama)

Ben Jonson, The Alchemist, 2023

My edition of Ben Jonson's The Alchemist (1610) is forthcoming with Bloomsbury in September 2023

Reader in Tragedy: An Anthology of Classical Criticism to Contemporary Theory, co-edited with Marcus Nevitt (2019)

Reader in Tragedy collects original writings about tragedy from Aristotle and Plato to Martha Nus... more

Pollard, Greek Tragic Women on Shakespearean Stages (2017)

Greek Tragic Women on Shakespearean Stages argues that ancient Greek plays exerted a powerful and... more Greek Tragic Women on Shakespearean Stages argues that ancient Greek plays exerted a powerful and uncharted influence on early modern England's dramatic landscape. Drawing on original research to challenge longstanding assumptions about Greek texts' invisibility, the book shows not only that the plays were more prominent than we have believed, but that early modern readers and audiences responded powerfully to specific plays and themes. The Greek plays most popular in the period were not male-centered dramas such as Sophocles' Oedipus, but tragedies by Euripides that focused on raging bereaved mothers and sacrificial virgin daughters, especially Hecuba and Iphigenia. Because tragedy was firmly linked with its Greek origin in the period's writings, these iconic female figures acquired a privileged status as synecdoches for the tragic theater and its ability to conjure sympathetic emotions in audiences. When Hamlet reflects on the moving power of tragic performance, he turns to the most prominent of these figures: 'What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba/ That he should weep for her?'

Through readings of plays by Shakespeare and his contemporary dramatists, this book argues that newly visible Greek plays, identified with the origins of theatrical performance and represented by passionate female figures, challenged early modern writers to reimagine the affective possibilities of tragedy, comedy, and the emerging genre of tragicomedy.

Homer and Greek Tragedy in Early Modern England's Theatres (2017): Special Issue of Classical Receptions Journal, co-edited by Tania Demetriou and Tanya Pollard

by Tanya Pollard and Tania Demetriou

Milton, Drama, and Greek Texts, co-edited with Tania Demetriou (Routledge, 2017; previously published as special issue of The Seventeenth Century)

This collection reconsiders Milton's engagement with Greek texts, with particular attention to th... more This collection reconsiders Milton's engagement with Greek texts, with particular attention to the theological and theatrical meanings attached to Greek in the early modern period. Responding to new scholarship on early modern reactions to Greek authors – especially Euripides and Homer, Milton's particular favourites – the collection emphasizes the associations of Greek with both Protestantism and the origins of tragedy, two arenas frequently in tension, but crucially linked in Milton's literary imagination. The contributions explore a range of works spanning the whole of Milton's career, from the early masque Comus, through the political and religious prose, to the 1671 closet drama, Samson Agonistes. They consider the ways in which the authority and controversy attached to Greek authors framed Milton's approaches to their texts. Looking at both the texts and their interpretative traditions together, this book suggests that Greek authors shaped Milton’s attitudes to drama in ways even more extensive and surprising than we have yet recognized. This book was originally published as a special issue of The Seventeenth Century.

Milton, Drama, and Greek Texts (2016): Special Issue of The Seventeenth Century Journal, co-edited by Tania Demetriou and Tanya Pollard

by Tanya Pollard and Tania Demetriou

This collection of essays explores the connection between Milton's approach to drama and his enga... more This collection of essays explores the connection between Milton's approach to drama and his engagement with Greek antiquity. Paying attention to early Christian and early modern interpretive traditions as well as Geek literature, it situates the power of this conjunction for Milton within the larger project of the northern Renaissance.

Shakespearean Sensations: Experiencing Literature in Early Modern England

by Katharine Craik and Tanya Pollard

How did early modern writers imagine the effects of plays and poems on minds, bodies and souls? ... more How did early modern writers imagine the effects of plays and poems on minds, bodies and souls? In what ways might the history of theatrical or literary experience overlap with the history of humors, passions and emotions? Shakespearean Sensations brings together new essays by critics on both sides of the Atlantic exploring how early modern literary texts reflect on their power over, and dependence upon, audiences’ emotional and physiological responses.

Shakespearean Sensations: Experiencing Literature in Early Modern England (2013; paperback 2015)

How did early modern writers imagine the effects of plays and poems on minds, bodies and souls? ... more How did early modern writers imagine the effects of plays and poems on minds, bodies and souls? In what ways might the history of theatrical or literary experience overlap with the history of humors, passions and emotions? Shakespearean Sensations brings together new essays by critics on both sides of the Atlantic exploring how early modern literary texts reflect on their power over, and dependence upon, audiences’ emotional and physiological responses. Published 2013, reprinted in paperback 2015.

Drugs and Theater in Early Modern England (2005)

Drugs and Theater in Early Modern England asks why Shakespeare and his contemporary playwrights w... more Drugs and Theater in Early Modern England asks why Shakespeare and his contemporary playwrights were so preoccupied with drugs and poisons and, at a deeper level, why both critics and supporters of the theater, as well as playwrights themselves, so frequently adopted a chemical vocabulary to describe the effects of the theater on audiences. Drawing upon original medical and literary research, the book shows that the potency of the link between drugs and plays in the period demonstrates a model of drama radically different than our own, a model in which plays exert a powerful impact on spectators' bodies as well as minds.

Shakespeare's Theater: A Sourcebook (2004)

As the popularity of the theater exploded in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, ... more As the popularity of the theater exploded in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, so debates about its effects on audiences grew more and more heated. This book brings together in one volume the most significant Elizabethan and Jacobean texts on the theater. They includes attack on the stage by moralists, defenses by actors and playwrights, letters by magistrates, mayors and aldermen of London, and extracts from legislation. Many of these texts are made widely available here for the first time. A general introduction and short prefaces to each piece situate the writers and debates in the literary, social, political and religious history of the time.

Papers by Tanya Pollard

Shakespearean Sensations

by Tanya Pollard and Katharine Craik

Pollard, Other Epic Afterlives: Genealogies of Achilles' Female Counterparts

MLN, 2020

As a symbol of epic’s imperial power, the Iliadic Achilles conjures a pervasively masculine model... more As a symbol of epic’s imperial power, the Iliadic Achilles conjures a pervasively masculine model of heroism that has reverberated in later conquerors and poets. Other authors and genres, however, imagined different versions of Achilles’ legacy. In particular, an extensive tradition identified him closely with women. Literary depictions of Penthesileia, Polyxena, and Iphigenia pair them with Achilles and present them as sharing his boldness, as well as his choice to earn fame by embracing an early death. Identified with heroism, death, and glory, these figures suggest not only additional versions of Achilles’ afterlives, but alternative versions of Achilles himself.

Translating and Transgendering Orestes in Early Modern England

Translation and Literature, 2020

From canonical plays such as Hamlet and King Lear to less familiar ones such as Titus Andronicus ... more From canonical plays such as Hamlet and King Lear to less familiar ones such as Titus Andronicus and Timon of Athens, Shakespeare's tragedies are almost exclusively named for singular male protagonists. Even the partial exceptions, Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra, pair their female protagonists with male leads whose names precede theirs. Shakespeare's plays are especially consistent in this respect, but they participate in a larger early modern pattern, with prominent tragic precedents including Thomas Preston's Cambyses, Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville's Gorboduc, and Marlowe's Tamburlaine and Doctor Faustus. This emphasis on singular male figures seems to be specific to tragedy; none of the titles of Shakespeare's comedies features a protagonist's name. For Shakespeare and many of his contemporaries, tragedy becomes a genre substantially defined by a focus on individual male suffering. The predominantly male face of early modern tragedy may appear unsurprising to us now, but it acquires a new strangeness in the light of the period's growing interest in the genre's Greek origins. English writers identified the term with its Greek lexical roots: Thomas Lodge attributed 'the name of tragedy … to his original of tragos', and Thomas Heywood observed, '[t]he word Tragedy, is derived from the

Knowing Kin and Kind in The Winter's Tale, in Blind Spots (2019)

in Blind Spots of Knowledge in Shakespeare and his World, 2019

Why do Shakespeare’s characters have so much trouble recognizing family members? Rosalind evades... more Why do Shakespeare’s characters have so much trouble recognizing family members? Rosalind evades Duke Senior by wearing a cap; Sebastian is stymied by Viola’s male apparel; Cymbeline has no idea that the young men who save his kingdom are his sons, and the Ephesian Antipholus unwittingly lives in the same town as his long-lost mother. In Winter’s Tale, Leontes’ notorious failures of cognition find parallels in multiple failures of recognition. Leontes wonders whether Mamilius is his son, and swears that Perdita is not his daughter; Florizel debates his father heatedly without identifying him; and Leontes greets his grown daughter as a stranger. Alongside the shape-changing that makes characters appear unfamiliar, the play famously shifts between genres, and the final scene’s simultaneous discovery of family and form suggests links between its generic and genealogical puzzles. This essay proposes that the challenges of knowing kin have something in common with those of knowing literary kind, and that Shakespeare escalates theatrical and affective force by obstructing both these forms of knowledge.

Subha Mukherji, ed., Blind Spots of Knowledge in Shakespeare and his World* (Medieval Institute Publication, 2019)

by Subha Mukherji, Tanya Pollard, Supriya Chaudhuri, Michael Witmore, and Stephen Spiess

Blind Spots of Knowledge in Shakespeare and his World*, 2019

A "blind spot" suggests an obstructed view, or partisan perception, or a localized lack of unders... more A "blind spot" suggests an obstructed view, or partisan perception, or a localized lack of understanding. Just as the brain "reads" the "blind spot" of the visual field by a curious process of readjustment, Shakespearean drama disorients us with moments of unmastered and unmasterable knowledge, recasting the way we see, know and think about knowing. Focusing on such moments of apparent obscurity, this volume puts methods and motives of knowing under the spotlight, and responds both to inscribed acts of blind-sighting, and to the text or action blind-sighting the reader or spectator. While tracing the hermeneutic yield of such occlusion is its main conceptual aim, it also embodies a methodological innovation: structured as an internal dialogue, it aims to capture, and stake out a place for, a processive intellectual energy that enables a distinctive way of knowing in academic life; and to translate a sense of intellectual "community" into print.

Milton, drama, and Greek texts: preface

The Seventeenth Century, 2016

Milton, Drama, and Greek Texts - Preface, by Tania Demetriou and Tanya Pollard (2016)

by Tanya Pollard and Tania Demetriou

This collection of essays looks at the conjunction between Milton's approach to drama and his eng... more This collection of essays looks at the conjunction between Milton's approach to drama and his engagement with Greek antiquity, a tradition often linked by early moderns to the origins of the theatre. The idea of bringing this work together stems from the recent revival of critical attention to the Renaissance afterlife of Greek texts. This new scholarship has begun to give Greek authors a new place in the literary landscape of early modern Europe, not least Homer and Euripides, the poets reported to have been Milton's particular favourites. 1 It has also illuminated the rich legacy of the Reformation on these authors' early modern interpretations, in works long-known to have formed part of Milton's reading. 2 Such studies have also opened new perspectives on the early modern theatre, by probing the multi-faceted impact on drama of Aristotle's Poetics, through a commentary tradition familiar to Milton. 3 The reception of

“Encountering Homer through Greek Plays in Sixteenth-century Europe" (2018)

Epic Performances: from the Middle Ages into the Twenty-first Century, ed. Fiona Macintosh and Justine McConnell, 2018

Originally received as oral performances, Homer’s epics circulated in sixteenth-century Europe no... more Originally received as oral performances, Homer’s epics circulated in sixteenth-century Europe not only as printed literary texts, but also through performances of a different sort. This chapter argues that fifth-century Greek plays on Homeric material played a crucial role in shaping the epics’ early modern reception. In a phrase widely circulated in the sixteenth century, Aeschylus reportedly claimed that all of his tragedies were “slices from the great banquets of Homer.” Although Virgil and Ovid were more familiar vehicles for Homeric material, Greek plays made distinctive contributions to perceptions of Troy and its aftermath through their links with performance, and their status as models for dramatic genres. The versions of Homer transmitted through Greek plays had an important role in shaping not only early modern understandings of Homer, but also the development of the early modern popular stage. Although at a casual glance they may seem worlds apart, early modern responses to Greek plays show that Homer’s legacy had a crucial role in driving the success of sixteenth-century commercial theaters. In particular, his poems and the plays they inspired modeled strategies for capturing audiences’ emotions through experimenting with generic conventions and dramatic structure.

Homer and Greek Tragedy in Early Modern England's Theatres - An Introduction, by Tania Demetriou and Tanya Pollard (2017)

by Tanya Pollard and Tania Demetriou

This special issue's opening essay traces the circulation of Homer's epics and Greek tragedies in... more This special issue's opening essay traces the circulation of Homer's epics and Greek tragedies in sixteenth-century England, and explores their consequences for England's commercial theatres. Bringing together new and familiar evidence on English pedagogy, translation, theatrical production, and printing, the authors argue both that these texts acquired significantly more visibility during this period than has been recognized, and that the stage offered a privileged site for their reception. The essay reflects on the distinctive methodological challenges raised by Greek transmission in a period identified by preoccupations with classical texts. After developing the foundation for the special issue, it closes by introducing the essays that follow.

Beatrice Bradley and Tanya Pollard, "Tragicomic Conceptions: The Winter’s Tale As Response to Amphitryo," English Literary Renaissance 47:2 (2017)

Critics have long seen The Winter’s Tale’s mixture of tragic and comic elements as rejecting clas... more Critics have long seen The Winter’s Tale’s mixture of tragic and comic elements as rejecting classical conventions. Yet the play’s tragicomic frame has an important classical model, Plautus’ Amphitryo, a play celebrated in the sixteenth century for coining the term tragicomoedia to describe its generic playfulness. Shakespeare’s engagement with Plautus has been well established, but typically identified with his early plays. Amphitryo, which dramatizes the emotional suffering of a pregnant wife wrongfully accused of adultery, haunted Shakespeare’s dramatic imagination, especially as a model for intermingling tragic and comic modes. In revisiting the play’s juxtaposition of pregnancy, unjust accusations, divine intervention, and miraculous reconciliation, The Winter’s Tale similarly explores the tragicomic potential of the fertile female body. With its focus on the processes of childbearing and its delayed resolution, the play calls upon the language of origin, birth, and growth to explore generic conventions and rethink the production of authorship. [B.B. and T.P.]

Ben Jonson, The Alchemist (Arden Early Modern Drama)

Ben Jonson, The Alchemist, 2023

My edition of Ben Jonson's The Alchemist (1610) is forthcoming with Bloomsbury in September 2023

Reader in Tragedy: An Anthology of Classical Criticism to Contemporary Theory, co-edited with Marcus Nevitt (2019)

Reader in Tragedy collects original writings about tragedy from Aristotle and Plato to Martha Nus... more

Pollard, Greek Tragic Women on Shakespearean Stages (2017)

Greek Tragic Women on Shakespearean Stages argues that ancient Greek plays exerted a powerful and... more Greek Tragic Women on Shakespearean Stages argues that ancient Greek plays exerted a powerful and uncharted influence on early modern England's dramatic landscape. Drawing on original research to challenge longstanding assumptions about Greek texts' invisibility, the book shows not only that the plays were more prominent than we have believed, but that early modern readers and audiences responded powerfully to specific plays and themes. The Greek plays most popular in the period were not male-centered dramas such as Sophocles' Oedipus, but tragedies by Euripides that focused on raging bereaved mothers and sacrificial virgin daughters, especially Hecuba and Iphigenia. Because tragedy was firmly linked with its Greek origin in the period's writings, these iconic female figures acquired a privileged status as synecdoches for the tragic theater and its ability to conjure sympathetic emotions in audiences. When Hamlet reflects on the moving power of tragic performance, he turns to the most prominent of these figures: 'What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba/ That he should weep for her?'

Through readings of plays by Shakespeare and his contemporary dramatists, this book argues that newly visible Greek plays, identified with the origins of theatrical performance and represented by passionate female figures, challenged early modern writers to reimagine the affective possibilities of tragedy, comedy, and the emerging genre of tragicomedy.

Homer and Greek Tragedy in Early Modern England's Theatres (2017): Special Issue of Classical Receptions Journal, co-edited by Tania Demetriou and Tanya Pollard

by Tanya Pollard and Tania Demetriou

Milton, Drama, and Greek Texts, co-edited with Tania Demetriou (Routledge, 2017; previously published as special issue of The Seventeenth Century)

This collection reconsiders Milton's engagement with Greek texts, with particular attention to th... more This collection reconsiders Milton's engagement with Greek texts, with particular attention to the theological and theatrical meanings attached to Greek in the early modern period. Responding to new scholarship on early modern reactions to Greek authors – especially Euripides and Homer, Milton's particular favourites – the collection emphasizes the associations of Greek with both Protestantism and the origins of tragedy, two arenas frequently in tension, but crucially linked in Milton's literary imagination. The contributions explore a range of works spanning the whole of Milton's career, from the early masque Comus, through the political and religious prose, to the 1671 closet drama, Samson Agonistes. They consider the ways in which the authority and controversy attached to Greek authors framed Milton's approaches to their texts. Looking at both the texts and their interpretative traditions together, this book suggests that Greek authors shaped Milton’s attitudes to drama in ways even more extensive and surprising than we have yet recognized. This book was originally published as a special issue of The Seventeenth Century.

Milton, Drama, and Greek Texts (2016): Special Issue of The Seventeenth Century Journal, co-edited by Tania Demetriou and Tanya Pollard

by Tanya Pollard and Tania Demetriou

This collection of essays explores the connection between Milton's approach to drama and his enga... more This collection of essays explores the connection between Milton's approach to drama and his engagement with Greek antiquity. Paying attention to early Christian and early modern interpretive traditions as well as Geek literature, it situates the power of this conjunction for Milton within the larger project of the northern Renaissance.

Shakespearean Sensations: Experiencing Literature in Early Modern England

by Katharine Craik and Tanya Pollard

How did early modern writers imagine the effects of plays and poems on minds, bodies and souls? ... more How did early modern writers imagine the effects of plays and poems on minds, bodies and souls? In what ways might the history of theatrical or literary experience overlap with the history of humors, passions and emotions? Shakespearean Sensations brings together new essays by critics on both sides of the Atlantic exploring how early modern literary texts reflect on their power over, and dependence upon, audiences’ emotional and physiological responses.

Shakespearean Sensations: Experiencing Literature in Early Modern England (2013; paperback 2015)

How did early modern writers imagine the effects of plays and poems on minds, bodies and souls? ... more How did early modern writers imagine the effects of plays and poems on minds, bodies and souls? In what ways might the history of theatrical or literary experience overlap with the history of humors, passions and emotions? Shakespearean Sensations brings together new essays by critics on both sides of the Atlantic exploring how early modern literary texts reflect on their power over, and dependence upon, audiences’ emotional and physiological responses. Published 2013, reprinted in paperback 2015.

Drugs and Theater in Early Modern England (2005)

Drugs and Theater in Early Modern England asks why Shakespeare and his contemporary playwrights w... more Drugs and Theater in Early Modern England asks why Shakespeare and his contemporary playwrights were so preoccupied with drugs and poisons and, at a deeper level, why both critics and supporters of the theater, as well as playwrights themselves, so frequently adopted a chemical vocabulary to describe the effects of the theater on audiences. Drawing upon original medical and literary research, the book shows that the potency of the link between drugs and plays in the period demonstrates a model of drama radically different than our own, a model in which plays exert a powerful impact on spectators' bodies as well as minds.

Shakespeare's Theater: A Sourcebook (2004)

As the popularity of the theater exploded in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, ... more As the popularity of the theater exploded in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, so debates about its effects on audiences grew more and more heated. This book brings together in one volume the most significant Elizabethan and Jacobean texts on the theater. They includes attack on the stage by moralists, defenses by actors and playwrights, letters by magistrates, mayors and aldermen of London, and extracts from legislation. Many of these texts are made widely available here for the first time. A general introduction and short prefaces to each piece situate the writers and debates in the literary, social, political and religious history of the time.

Shakespearean Sensations

by Tanya Pollard and Katharine Craik

Pollard, Other Epic Afterlives: Genealogies of Achilles' Female Counterparts

MLN, 2020

As a symbol of epic’s imperial power, the Iliadic Achilles conjures a pervasively masculine model... more As a symbol of epic’s imperial power, the Iliadic Achilles conjures a pervasively masculine model of heroism that has reverberated in later conquerors and poets. Other authors and genres, however, imagined different versions of Achilles’ legacy. In particular, an extensive tradition identified him closely with women. Literary depictions of Penthesileia, Polyxena, and Iphigenia pair them with Achilles and present them as sharing his boldness, as well as his choice to earn fame by embracing an early death. Identified with heroism, death, and glory, these figures suggest not only additional versions of Achilles’ afterlives, but alternative versions of Achilles himself.

Translating and Transgendering Orestes in Early Modern England

Translation and Literature, 2020

From canonical plays such as Hamlet and King Lear to less familiar ones such as Titus Andronicus ... more From canonical plays such as Hamlet and King Lear to less familiar ones such as Titus Andronicus and Timon of Athens, Shakespeare's tragedies are almost exclusively named for singular male protagonists. Even the partial exceptions, Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra, pair their female protagonists with male leads whose names precede theirs. Shakespeare's plays are especially consistent in this respect, but they participate in a larger early modern pattern, with prominent tragic precedents including Thomas Preston's Cambyses, Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville's Gorboduc, and Marlowe's Tamburlaine and Doctor Faustus. This emphasis on singular male figures seems to be specific to tragedy; none of the titles of Shakespeare's comedies features a protagonist's name. For Shakespeare and many of his contemporaries, tragedy becomes a genre substantially defined by a focus on individual male suffering. The predominantly male face of early modern tragedy may appear unsurprising to us now, but it acquires a new strangeness in the light of the period's growing interest in the genre's Greek origins. English writers identified the term with its Greek lexical roots: Thomas Lodge attributed 'the name of tragedy … to his original of tragos', and Thomas Heywood observed, '[t]he word Tragedy, is derived from the

Knowing Kin and Kind in The Winter's Tale, in Blind Spots (2019)

in Blind Spots of Knowledge in Shakespeare and his World, 2019

Why do Shakespeare’s characters have so much trouble recognizing family members? Rosalind evades... more Why do Shakespeare’s characters have so much trouble recognizing family members? Rosalind evades Duke Senior by wearing a cap; Sebastian is stymied by Viola’s male apparel; Cymbeline has no idea that the young men who save his kingdom are his sons, and the Ephesian Antipholus unwittingly lives in the same town as his long-lost mother. In Winter’s Tale, Leontes’ notorious failures of cognition find parallels in multiple failures of recognition. Leontes wonders whether Mamilius is his son, and swears that Perdita is not his daughter; Florizel debates his father heatedly without identifying him; and Leontes greets his grown daughter as a stranger. Alongside the shape-changing that makes characters appear unfamiliar, the play famously shifts between genres, and the final scene’s simultaneous discovery of family and form suggests links between its generic and genealogical puzzles. This essay proposes that the challenges of knowing kin have something in common with those of knowing literary kind, and that Shakespeare escalates theatrical and affective force by obstructing both these forms of knowledge.

Subha Mukherji, ed., Blind Spots of Knowledge in Shakespeare and his World* (Medieval Institute Publication, 2019)

by Subha Mukherji, Tanya Pollard, Supriya Chaudhuri, Michael Witmore, and Stephen Spiess

Blind Spots of Knowledge in Shakespeare and his World*, 2019

A "blind spot" suggests an obstructed view, or partisan perception, or a localized lack of unders... more A "blind spot" suggests an obstructed view, or partisan perception, or a localized lack of understanding. Just as the brain "reads" the "blind spot" of the visual field by a curious process of readjustment, Shakespearean drama disorients us with moments of unmastered and unmasterable knowledge, recasting the way we see, know and think about knowing. Focusing on such moments of apparent obscurity, this volume puts methods and motives of knowing under the spotlight, and responds both to inscribed acts of blind-sighting, and to the text or action blind-sighting the reader or spectator. While tracing the hermeneutic yield of such occlusion is its main conceptual aim, it also embodies a methodological innovation: structured as an internal dialogue, it aims to capture, and stake out a place for, a processive intellectual energy that enables a distinctive way of knowing in academic life; and to translate a sense of intellectual "community" into print.

Milton, drama, and Greek texts: preface

The Seventeenth Century, 2016

Milton, Drama, and Greek Texts - Preface, by Tania Demetriou and Tanya Pollard (2016)

by Tanya Pollard and Tania Demetriou

This collection of essays looks at the conjunction between Milton's approach to drama and his eng... more This collection of essays looks at the conjunction between Milton's approach to drama and his engagement with Greek antiquity, a tradition often linked by early moderns to the origins of the theatre. The idea of bringing this work together stems from the recent revival of critical attention to the Renaissance afterlife of Greek texts. This new scholarship has begun to give Greek authors a new place in the literary landscape of early modern Europe, not least Homer and Euripides, the poets reported to have been Milton's particular favourites. 1 It has also illuminated the rich legacy of the Reformation on these authors' early modern interpretations, in works long-known to have formed part of Milton's reading. 2 Such studies have also opened new perspectives on the early modern theatre, by probing the multi-faceted impact on drama of Aristotle's Poetics, through a commentary tradition familiar to Milton. 3 The reception of

“Encountering Homer through Greek Plays in Sixteenth-century Europe" (2018)

Epic Performances: from the Middle Ages into the Twenty-first Century, ed. Fiona Macintosh and Justine McConnell, 2018

Originally received as oral performances, Homer’s epics circulated in sixteenth-century Europe no... more Originally received as oral performances, Homer’s epics circulated in sixteenth-century Europe not only as printed literary texts, but also through performances of a different sort. This chapter argues that fifth-century Greek plays on Homeric material played a crucial role in shaping the epics’ early modern reception. In a phrase widely circulated in the sixteenth century, Aeschylus reportedly claimed that all of his tragedies were “slices from the great banquets of Homer.” Although Virgil and Ovid were more familiar vehicles for Homeric material, Greek plays made distinctive contributions to perceptions of Troy and its aftermath through their links with performance, and their status as models for dramatic genres. The versions of Homer transmitted through Greek plays had an important role in shaping not only early modern understandings of Homer, but also the development of the early modern popular stage. Although at a casual glance they may seem worlds apart, early modern responses to Greek plays show that Homer’s legacy had a crucial role in driving the success of sixteenth-century commercial theaters. In particular, his poems and the plays they inspired modeled strategies for capturing audiences’ emotions through experimenting with generic conventions and dramatic structure.

Homer and Greek Tragedy in Early Modern England's Theatres - An Introduction, by Tania Demetriou and Tanya Pollard (2017)

by Tanya Pollard and Tania Demetriou

This special issue's opening essay traces the circulation of Homer's epics and Greek tragedies in... more This special issue's opening essay traces the circulation of Homer's epics and Greek tragedies in sixteenth-century England, and explores their consequences for England's commercial theatres. Bringing together new and familiar evidence on English pedagogy, translation, theatrical production, and printing, the authors argue both that these texts acquired significantly more visibility during this period than has been recognized, and that the stage offered a privileged site for their reception. The essay reflects on the distinctive methodological challenges raised by Greek transmission in a period identified by preoccupations with classical texts. After developing the foundation for the special issue, it closes by introducing the essays that follow.

Beatrice Bradley and Tanya Pollard, "Tragicomic Conceptions: The Winter’s Tale As Response to Amphitryo," English Literary Renaissance 47:2 (2017)

Critics have long seen The Winter’s Tale’s mixture of tragic and comic elements as rejecting clas... more Critics have long seen The Winter’s Tale’s mixture of tragic and comic elements as rejecting classical conventions. Yet the play’s tragicomic frame has an important classical model, Plautus’ Amphitryo, a play celebrated in the sixteenth century for coining the term tragicomoedia to describe its generic playfulness. Shakespeare’s engagement with Plautus has been well established, but typically identified with his early plays. Amphitryo, which dramatizes the emotional suffering of a pregnant wife wrongfully accused of adultery, haunted Shakespeare’s dramatic imagination, especially as a model for intermingling tragic and comic modes. In revisiting the play’s juxtaposition of pregnancy, unjust accusations, divine intervention, and miraculous reconciliation, The Winter’s Tale similarly explores the tragicomic potential of the fertile female body. With its focus on the processes of childbearing and its delayed resolution, the play calls upon the language of origin, birth, and growth to explore generic conventions and rethink the production of authorship. [B.B. and T.P.]

Pollard, Genre: Comedy and Tragedy, in The Routledge Research Companion to Shakespeare and Classical Literature (2017)

Early Modern Literary Studies Special Issue 26: John Ford

by Kibrina Davey, Lisa Hopkins, and Tanya Pollard

See table of contents at https://extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/journal/index.php/emls/issue/current

"Tragicomedy," in Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature (2015)

This chapter argues that the development of tragicomedy in the sixteenth century was firmly roote... more This chapter argues that the development of tragicomedy in the sixteenth century was firmly rooted in engagement with classical texts. The authority conferred by classical precedents was crucial to establishing the genre’s legitimacy and success, but these texts provided more than simply justification. Perhaps surprisingly, they also offered specific structural models for the conventions that made tragicomedy so popular with audiences. Even when playwrights diverged from their theoretical and practical models, tragicomic plays evolved in intimate relationship to the classical dramatic genres from which they drew their name. For more details, see https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-oxford-history-of-classical-reception-in-english-literature-9780199547555?cc=us&lang=en&#

"What’s Hecuba to Shakespeare?," in Renaissance Quarterly (2012)

Staging Ford in New York, 2015: An Interview with

Tanya Pollard (Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, CUNY), Jesse Berger discussed the proces... more Tanya Pollard (Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, CUNY), Jesse Berger discussed the process of developing a season of Ford, and the experience of directing 'Tis Pity. Excerpts appear below, with relevant web links following. Tanya Pollard: Why did Red Bull turn to Ford now, and how did you settle on 'Tis Pity for this year's main production? Jesse Berger: 'Tis Pity had come up in Red Bull's discussions of plays from the beginning. It was always in the mix, and seemed inevitable, as one of the most visible, colorful, well-known plays from the period. We've always been conscious of highlighting diversity of authors-we'd done plays by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, Kyd, Middleton, Webster, and othersbut nothing by Ford, aside from his contributions to The Witch of Edmonton. But it's a complicated play, and it took a while for us to develop the acting pool and growth to tackle it. We needed to be able to make it both moving and funny, both of which are crucial. We've had a lot of growth in the past ten years, and we knew we were ready. It was time. TP: How would you describe the visual style of the 'Tis Pity production, and how and why did you settle on it?

Staging Ford in New York, 2015: An Interview with Jesse Berger, Artistic Director of the Red Bull Theater, in EMLS special Ford issue (2017)

After the Red Bull Theater's production of John Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, I was asked to in... more After the Red Bull Theater's production of John Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, I was asked to interview Jesse Berger, the theater's artistic director, for a special issue of Early Modern Literary Studies on Ford. The full issue is online at https://extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/journal/index.php/emls/issue/current

"Hecuba," in Shakespeare's Myths: A Dictionary of Shakespeare's Classical Mythology (2015)

A Dictionary of Shakespeare's Classical Mythology, Jan 2015

This entry for A Dictionary of Shakespeare's Classical Mythology includes sections offering an ov... more This entry for A Dictionary of Shakespeare's Classical Mythology includes sections offering an overview of the figure of Hecuba, classical sources available to Shakespeare, secondary sources, contemporary references, passages from Shakespeare's own writings, and an analysis of Hecuba's significance to Shakespeare. The essay is available in its entirety online -- the cover page is at http://www.shakmyth.org/myth/107/hecuba and the separate sections are accessible through the links under "Brief Presentation."

"Greek Playbooks and Dramatic Forms in Early Modern England," in in Formal Matters: Reading the Materials of English Renaissance Literature (2013)

Kisery (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 99-123.

“Teaching Petrarch and Shakespeare,” in Approaches to Teaching Petrarch’s “Canzoniere” and Petrarchism (2014)

“Teaching Petrarch and Shakespeare” is published in Approaches to Teaching Petrarch’s “Canzonier... more

"Conceiving Tragedy," in Shakespearean Sensations (2013)

This essay examines links between the language of pregnancy and tragic affect in early modern tho... more This essay examines links between the language of pregnancy and tragic affect in early modern thought, with an emphasis on Shakespeare's Hamlet. Observing that the Greek plays identified with the origin of tragedy in the period identify pregnancy with both a privileged access to pain and a heightened ability to transmit this pain to audiences, the essay suggests that Shakespeare inherited a Greek conception of the inhabited body’s intense susceptibility to takeover by passionate emotion, with implications for the gendering of responses to tragic performance

Pollard, Bonds of Blood in Merchant; Program Notes for Theater for a New Audience, 2022

What does blood demand, and must it be paid? The Merchant of Venice puts these questions onstage,... more

Pollard, Wonder of Women, or Tragedy of Sophonisba; Program Notes (Red Bull, 2022)

Pollard, The Alchemist, Program Notes (Red Bull, 2021)

Program notes for a production on which I served as scholarly advisor and dramaturg.

Playing with the Dead in The Revenger's Tragedy, Pollard Program Notes (Red Bull, 2020)

Timon of Athens: A conversation with Gregory Doran, Simon Godwin, Jeffrey Horowitz, and Tanya Pollard (Theater for a New Audience, 2020)

Note: Kathryn Hunter was originally slated to participate, but was unable to join.

Unkind Timon; program materials for Simon Godwin's production at Theatre For A New Audience (2020)

What's Hecuba to Him? - Performing Greek Tragic Women and Shakespeare at The Public Theater (2019)

The Public Theater, 2019

Haunting Women in Macbeth; Pollard Program Notes, Red Bull Theater (2019)

Red Bull Theater, 2019

Icons and Aftershocks: Julius Caesar at Theater for a New Audience (2019)

360 Dialogues, 2019

Tales for Winter - Winter's Tale Program Notes at Theater for a New Audience (2018)

Theater for a New Audience 360 , 2018

Second Maiden's Tragedy Program Notes Red Bull Theater (2018)

Red Bull Theater Program, 2018

Eyeless Rage: Discussing Lear with Sam Waterston, F. Murray Abraham, and James Earl Jones at the Public Theater (2018)

A conversation about anger in Shakespeare’s tragedy of ungoverned rage and its consequences, Kin... more A conversation about anger in Shakespeare’s tragedy of ungoverned rage and its consequences, King Lear, featuring a group of veterans of the role at The Public Theater, including Sam Waterston, F. Murray Abraham, and James Earl Jones, in conversation with scholar Tanya Pollard and Public Shakespeare Initiative Director Michael Sexton.

Trading and Evading in Measure for Measure; program materials for Simon Godwin's production at Theatre For A New Audience (2017)

Coriolanus and the Modern Campaign - Public Theater Program (2016)

The Public Theater, 2016

Trevor Nunn on Shakespeare's Pericles for production at Theatre For a New Audience (2016)

This conversation with Trevor Nunn explores his thoughts on Shakespeare's Pericles, which he has ... more

Verona's Tragic Women: program materials for Fiasco's Two Gentlemen of Verona, at Theatre for a New Audience (2015)

Whores and other tragic heroines: program materials for 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, Red Bull Theater (2015)

Program Notes for Marston's Dutch Courtesan, Red Bull Theater (2015)

Shakespeare Uncovered: my conversation with Christopher Plummer on King Lear (PBS, 2015)

In this documentary about King Lear, Christopher Plummer and I discuss the history of Nahum Tate'... more

Shakespeare Uncovered: my conversation with Ethan Hawke, on Macbeth (BBC/PBS 2013)

In this documentary about Macbeth, I spoke with Ethan Hawke about the history of approaches to ac... more

Call for Manuscripts: Arden Studies in Early Modern Drama

by Tanya Pollard and Lisa Hopkins

This new series, co-edited by Lisa Hopkins and Tanya Pollard, offers fresh approaches to the play... more This new series, co-edited by Lisa Hopkins and Tanya Pollard, offers fresh approaches to the plays of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, or studies that put Shakespeare in dialogue with other playwrights of the period. The series does not seek to privilege any particular theoretical position but accommodates a range of new perspectives on how these plays work and why they still matter. Above all the series makes available new writing, including from emerging scholars, which is energised by the insights produced by recent editorial work on the plays and by enquiries and experiments into how they can work on the stage and what the effects of original performance conditions might be

Call for Manuscripts: Transcript, a new series published by Legenda

by Tanya Pollard, Matthew Reynolds, and Mohamed-Salah Omri

Transcript publishes books about all kinds of imagining across languages, media and cultures: tra... more Transcript publishes books about all kinds of imagining across languages, media and cultures: translations and versions, inter-cultural and multi-lingual writing, illustrations and musical settings, adaptation for theatre, film, TV and new media, creative and critical responses. We are open to studies of any combination of languages and media, in any historical moments, and are keen to reach beyond Legenda’s traditional focus on English and other modern European languages to embrace world cultures and the classics. Equally, we welcome work on canonical authors often seen as national icons — such as Shakespeare, Goethe or Cervantes — in a transnational context. We are interested in innovative critical approaches: we welcome not only the most rigorous scholarship and sharpest theory, but modes of writing that stretch or cross the boundaries of those discourses.

Formal Matters: Reading the Materials of English Renaissance Literature (ed. Allison Deutermann and András Kiséry)

by Tanya Pollard, András Kiséry, Shankar Raman, Adam Smyth, Alan Stewart, Amanda Bailey, and Allison Deutermann

Tragedy and Resistance - Literary Conversation at the Park Slope Food Coop