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Lycoming College’s annual James and Emily Douthat lecture series will this spring host Alan B. Farmer, Ph.D., for a talk entitled “New Directions in Shakespearean Biography: Shakespeare’s Authorial Networks,” on Thursday, March 26, at 7:30 p.m., in the Trogner Presentation Room in Krapf Gateway Center. The event is free and open to the public.
Farmer is helping to bring to publication the nearly-finished work of the late Meghan C. Andrews, Ph.D., a Shakespearean scholar, educator, and beloved member of the Lycoming College community who passed in 2023 at the age of 36 following a lengthy battle with cancer. Farmer, an associate professor of English at the Ohio State University, will talk about Andrews’ book and Shakespeare research during his lecture, as well as meet with Lycoming faculty and students while on campus.
“What could there possibly be to say about Shakespeare’s biography that has not already been said before? This question is one that every biographer of Shakespeare nervously confronts, and it is one that leads to each biographer constructing his or her own version of Shakespeare, some more speculative than others. Despite the challenges of this kind of project, there are nonetheless new directions that can be taken for the study of Shakespeare’s life as a playwright and an author. This talk grows out of my experience editing Meghan C. Andrews’s forthcoming monograph, “Shakespeare and Authorial Networks in Early Modern Drama,” said Farmer.
“Meghan’s work puts forward a compelling new approach for thinking about Shakespeare’s extended social and theatrical networks and explains how these networks affected the plays he wrote. Her research helps historians and literary critics understand how Shakespeare engaged with other playwrights, with possible patrons, and with the theatrical culture of London. Meghan’s work, I also want to suggest, helps us to see Shakespeare not only as a playwright concerned with the performance of his plays in the theater but also as an author whose professional networks included booksellers and an ongoing concern with the printing of his plays in revised and corrected texts.”
Farmer has written extensively about Renaissance drama and the history of the early modern book trade, including essays on the popularity of playbooks, the history of Shakespeare in print, and widow publishers in Renaissance England. He is the co-creator, with Zachary Lesser, of “DEEP: Database of Early English Playbooks,” one of the longest-running digital humanities projects in English Renaissance Studies. He is the co-editor, with Adam Zucker, of “Localizing Caroline Drama: Politics and Economics of the Early Modern English Stage, 1625–1642” (2006).
He is currently working on two research projects, one on lost books in Renaissance England and the other on Shakespeare, print, and popularity in the early modern book trade. Along with Elizabeth Zeman Kolkovich and Sarah Neville, he has recently co-edited Andrews’s posthumous monograph, “Shakespeare and Authorial Networks in Early Modern Drama,” which is forthcoming from Manchester University Press in 2026.
James and Emily Douthat Distinguished Lectureship
The lecture is sponsored by the James and Emily Douthat Distinguished Lectureship Series in the liberal arts and sciences, named for James Douthat, former president of Lycoming College, and his wife Emily, for their years of service to the College. The annual lecture, which is not field-specific, attracts top scholarly guest speakers to the College and has featured Nobel prize and Pulitzer prize winners. Lycoming’s chapter of Phi Kappa Phi, a national honor society for all academic disciplines, organizes the lectureship.