Summary
Since joining the English faculty in 2006, James Mardock has taught undergraduate courses in Shakespeare's tragedies and comedies, the drama of Marlowe, Webster and Jonson, early English drama and other literatures of the 16th and 17th centuries, as well as graduate seminars in Jacobean city comedy, Spenser's epic, "The Faerie Queene" and the drama of the English Reformation.
He also serves as general textual editor for the Internet Shakespeare Editions and has worked as the house dramaturge for the Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festival and Reno Little Theater. He has directed productions of Shakespeare's "Henry V" and "The Winter's Tale," and played, among other roles, Troilus, Laertes, Oliver, Antonio and Juliet's father. In 2011, appearing with his wife and as-yet-unborn son, he played Claudius in the Nevada Reportory's production of "Hamlet" in the original pronunciation. His early drama reading group, The Blood, Love, and Rhetoric School, stages amateur readings of lesser-known plays like "'Tis Pity She's a Whore," "The Jew of Malta," and "Gammer Gurton's Needle."
He has published articles on Spenser, Shakespeare, Jonson, Dickens and John Taylor the "water-poet." His book Our Scene is London (2008) examines Jonson's representation of urban space as an element in his strategy of self-definition. His edition of Henry V (2014) appears in print from Broadview Press and online at the Internet Shakespeare Editions. He co-edited Stages of Engagement, a collection of essays on drama and religion in post-Reformation England and his current projects include a book-length study of Calvin's influence on early modern drama.
Research interests
- Renaissance literature
- Shakespeare
- Jonson
- Drama
- Theater history
- Protestant reformation
Notable exhibitions or performances
- The Exit Interview (director), Reno Little Theater, 2016
- Hamlet (Claudius), Nevada Reportory, 2011
- Romeo and Juliet (Capulet), Nevada Reportory, 2009
Courses taught
- CH 201: To Hell with the Humanities
- CH 202: Modernity and Will
- ENG 298: Writing about Literature
- ENG 311: Transatlantic Survey 1
- ENG 312: Transatlantic Survey 2
- ENG 433A: Shakespeare, Histories and Tragedies
- ENG 433B: Shakespeare, Comedies and Romances
- ENG 441A: The Renaissance
- ENG 442A: The Seventeenth Century
- ENG 464A: Drama Before Shakespeare
- ENG 465A: Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama
- ENG 711: Intro to Graduate Study
- ENG 761: The Faerie Queene and its Contexts
- ENG 764: City Comedy
- ENG 764: Drama and the Reformation
Publications
- Stages of Engagement: Drama and Religion in Post-Reformation England, ed. James D. Mardock and Kathryn McPherson (Duquesne University Press, 2014)
- Henry V: A Broadview Internet Shakespeare Edition, ed. James D. Mardock (Broadview Press, 2014)
- (with Eric Rasmussen) "What does textual evidence reveal about the author?" in Shakespeare Beyond Doubt: Evidence, Argument, Controversy, ed. Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells (Cambridge University Press, 2013)
- Our Scene is London: Jonson's City and the Space of the Author. (New York: Routledge, 2008)
Education
- Ph.D., Renaissance Literature, Wisconsin, 2004
- M.A., English Literature, Wisconsin, 1997
- M.A., Shakespeare Studies, Shakespeare Institute, 1996
- B.A., English, Kansas, 1995