Dr Rory Loughnane

Rory Loughnane is Reader in Early Modern Studies at the University of Kent. He is the author or editor of nine books, including Early Shakespeare, 1588-1594 (Cambridge, 2020), The Death Arts in Renaissance England (Cambridge, 2022), and Memory and Mortality in Renaissance England (Cambridge, 2023). He is a General Editor of The Oxford Marlowe edition, The Revels Plays series, an Associate Editor of the New Oxford Shakespeare, and a Series Editor of Routledge’s Studies in Early Modern Authorship and Cambridge’s Shakespeare and Text.

About the event

In this presentation, Rory Loughnane will consider the various theories advanced for Shakespeare’s so-called ‘lost years’, the period between 1585 when his and Anne’s twins Judith and Hamnet were baptised in Stratford-upon-Avon and 1592 when he was referred to derogatively in print as an ‘upstart crow’. Dr Loughnane will situate Shakespeare’s absence from the records in the context of broader conditions of loss in the 1580s and propose some alternative possibilities for where Shakespeare was during this time. The presentation offers a sneak preview of some new material from his forthcoming study Shakespeare At Thirty (Princeton).

Tickets: Revisiting Shakespeare’s Lost Years