Claire Landis

Thesis Title:  The Voices of Coriolanus: Merit, Law, and Necessity

 

Supervisor: Colin Burrow and Lorna Hutson (David Norbrook, emeritus) 

 

Research Interests:  Classical receptions in sixteenth and 'long' seventeenth-century literature, including figures like Shakespeare, Chapman, Donne, Milton, Marvell, and Margaret Cavendish; political thinkers such as Machiavelli, Lipsius, Bodin, Hobbes, Locke, Burke, and Rousseau; international relations and Atlantic history, especially from 1500 to 1800; the relationships between fictional worlds and political/legal history; utopias; the Enlightenment(s).

 

Doctoral Research: My dissertation develops a novel methodology for exploring political thought in Shakespearean drama. Instead of identifying partisan commitments or an impartial staging of opposing ‘sides’, a close reading of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus (c. 1608) traces a subtle but highly structured and reiterative interplay between numerous strands of thought (neo-Stoic, Aristotelian, Machiavellian, etc.). The authorial patterns are individually unobtrusive but develop an undeniable collective force, inviting several important deductions and enriching the dramatic texture.  Current projects include 'Diverging traces: early modern receptions of Hesiod's Theogony', as well as  Lex Facit Regem: The Rule of Law in Early Modern Jurisprudence and Shakespearean Tragedy. Published work has appeared in Renaissance Quarterly, Notes & Queries, and with Routledge.

 

She has also been thanked for her contributions to:

Lorna Hutson, England’s Insular Imagining: The Elizabethan Erasure of Scotland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023). View on Google Books:
https://www.google.com/books/edition/England_s_Insular_Imagining/VpvVEAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=claire%20landis

Quentin Skinner, From Humanism to Hobbes: Studies in Rhetoric and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). View on Google Books:
https://www.google.com/books/edition/From_Humanism_to_Hobbes/If5DDwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=claire%20landis

Lorna Hutson, ed., The Oxford Handbook of English Law and Literature, 1500-1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). View on Google Books:
https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Oxford_Handbook_of_English_Law_and_L/xjoqDwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=claire%20landis

David Norbrook, Lucretius and the Early Modern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). View on Google Books:
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Lucretius_and_the_Early_Modern/h9TNCgAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=claire%20landis

Quentin Skinner, Forensic Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). View on Google Books:
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Forensic_Shakespeare/365GBAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=claire%20landis