Randall Martin

My current research interests are Shakespeare and early modern drama and culture, environmentalism, ecocriticism, and ecodramaturgy.

My most recent book is Shakespeare, St Paul, and Dramatic Emancipation: Disability, Gender, Race, Ecology (Oxford University Press, 2025; SSHRC funded). It rediscovers an early modern pluralized and rhetorized Paul as a significant resource for Shakespeare's innovative characterization and dramaturgy in a diverse range of plays.

Other recent books include: Shakespeare and Ecology (OUP, 2015), an ecocritical study of selected plays; Shakespeare/Adaptation/Modern Drama: Essays in Honour of Jill L. Levenson, co-edited with Katherine Scheil (University of Toronto Press, 2011); and Women, Murder, and Equity in Early Modern England, a book about the effects of early modern print journalism on the trials of accused women murderers (Routledge, 2007; SSHRC funded).

I have also published several critical editions including Every Man Out of His Humour for the Cambridge Complete Works of Ben Jonson (2011), Henry VI Part Three for the Oxford Shakespeare (2001; SSHRC funded), and Women Writers in Renaissance England, Longmans, UK (1997, 1999; 2nd edition with a new Preface by Christina Luckyj, 2010; SSHRC funded).

A special issue on “Eco-Shakespeare in Performance” co-edited with Evelyn O’Malley for Shakespeare Bulletin (36.3 Fall 2018) initiated the study of academic-practitioner collaborations in the field Shakespearian ecodramaturgy. It led to a three-year SSHRC-funded international eco-theatrical project, Cymbeline in the Anthropocene (2019-2022).

Among my 50 articles and essays, the most recent are “Creation/Recreations/Becomings,” in Shakespeare/Natural, ed. Charlotte Scott (Arden Shakespeare, 2023); “Cymbeline in the Anthropocene: A global eco-theatrical collaboration,” MIT Global Shakespeares (2022); and “Ecocritical studies” [including a case-study of Coriolanus] for The Arden Research Handbook to Contemporary Shakespeare Criticism, ed. Evelyn Gajowski (London: Bloomsbury, Arden Shakespeare).

My current essays-in-progress are "Recovering the environmental politics of Hamlet through sound, affect, and memory" for "Shakespeare and Ecological Crisis, ed. Carolyn Sale and Rebecca Lemon (Edinburgh University Press, 2026), and "'Dire combustion': Anthropocene Fire in Shakespeare," Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Nature, ed. Karen Raber and Todd Andrew Borlik (2027).

Supported by a new SSHRC grant, I am now researching a new book under contract by Arden Shakespeare, Shakespeare and Critical Theories of the Anthropocene.