Lawrence Manley

Lawrence Manley’s fields of interest include the poetry, prose, and drama of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Britain, with emphasis on literature and society, theater history and performance studies, intellectual history, and the classical foundations of the English literary and critical traditions. He is the author of Literature and Culture in Early Modern London (1995) and Convention, 1500–1750 (1980), and the editor of London in the Age of Shakespeare: An Anthology (1986) and The Cambridge Companion to London in English Literature (2011). He has contributed to The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature, the Blackwell Companion to Renaissance Drama, and The Stanford Global Shakespeare Encyclopedia. His book with Sally-Beth MacLean, Lord Strange’s Men and Their Plays (2014), was awarded the Phylliis Goodhart Gordan Prize by the Renaissance Society of America. Current subjects of research include Erasmus and More on war and peace, the manuscript of A tragedie called Oedipus, the great hall screen at Lathom, Lancashire, and Shakespeare’s love duets.

Professor Manley is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor Emeritus of English. He received a BA from Dartmouth College in 1971 and a PhD from Harvard University in 1977.