I don’t go to enough plays. I wonder if other academics working on theatre feel the same way? I suppose I (or they) could play the ‘theatre history’ card, and say that I don’t need to attend contemporary productions because I’m too busy trying to reconstruct what happened in a theatre three hundred years ago,…

There’s a very famous, perhaps apocryphal phrase, uttered either by Louis XV or Madame de Pompadour. It goes something like: Après moi, le déluge. The literal meaning of this is: ‘after me, the deluge’ or (and I prefer this biblical inflection) ‘after me, the Flood’. What Madame de Pompadour or Louis XV actually meant, however,…

It’s been almost three years since I last wrote a personal blogpost. It is no coincidence that my silence coincides with my appointment to a lectureship in Restoration and eighteenth-century literature at Newcastle University, a job whose challenges and rewards have left me little time for the kind of reflection this kind of writing represents.…