Dr Ted Tregear

My research ranges across the poetry and drama of early modern England, with a special emphasis on Shakespeare. My first book, Anthologizing Shakespeare, 1593-1603, offered new readings of Shakespeare’s formative works, from Venus and Adonis to Hamlet, in light of the passages chosen and anthologized by some of his earliest readers. I have published essays on Shakespeare’s poems and plays, and am currently working on an introduction to the New Oxford Shakespeare edition of his final tragedy Coriolanus.

My new project takes off from a style of seventeenth-century poetry often known as ‘metaphysical’, and asks what (if anything) is metaphysical about it. Drawing on philosophy, theology, intellectual history, and critical theory, it looks closely at a handful of poets, from John Donne to Margaret Cavendish, to explore the surprising affinities between poetry and metaphysics in early modern writing. This work will form the basis of my second monograph, as well as several collaborative projects currently on the go.

Other topics of interest include: early modern poetics and literary criticism; the early modern Baroque; Marxist political, economic, and aesthetic theory; and the German philosophical tradition from Immanuel Kant to Theodor Adorno.

My teaching covers literature in English between 1550 and 1760. At Merton, that means I teach the FHS papers 1 (Shakespeare), 3 (1550-1660), and 4 (1660-1760). For the English Faculty, I co-teach a paper 6 option with Prof Joe Moshenska, ‘Experiments in the First Person’. I also offer undergraduate lecture courses on Shakespeare and on early modern lyric.