Jade Standing

My research focuses on Shakespeare, the history of ideas, and early modern drama and culture. My first book, The Play of Conscience in Shakespeare’s England, historicises the sixteenth-century idea of conscience, which was shaped by competing and overlapping theological discourses and juristic discourses on the principles of equity and common law. The book demonstrates why conscience is such a central and yet epistemologically messy aspect of human intelligence and examines how the internally contradictory range of meanings for conscience emerge through and shape the drama of the early modern stage. I have an essay published in Shakespeare Quarterly on Hamlet and why the different concepts of conscience available in Shakespeare’s time were immobilizing.

My other field of focus is the theatre history of fencing and sword-fighting. I interpret and practice historical fencing and this interest led me to my second book project: Shakespeare’s Playhouse Fencers. This project is a study of the relationship of Elizabethan and Jacobean fencers to playing companies. It provides a cultural history of fencers in the British Isles and Europe and examines the historical entanglement of fencing and theatrical performance, and subsequent entanglement of their production of meaning. The project reconceptualizes playhouse fencers as creators and performers and examines how swords could be used by fencers to tell stories and express cultural knowledge. I track international fencing networks, the presence of trained fencers in playing companies, and analyse fencers’ creative contributions to: first performances of Shakespeare, the collaborative process of playmaking, internal company dynamics, the training of players, and audience experience.