Dr Ted Tregear
Associate Professor and Tutor in English
Academic Subject(s): English and joint schools
RESEARCH
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, as well as an introduction to the New Oxford Shakespeare edition of his final tragedy Coriolanus. I’m also in the early stages of another book on Shakespeare, which explores his engagement with other early modern English poets.
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. It’s also inspired several collaborative projects currently on the go, including an edited collection on the 1601 anthology Love’s Martyr, under contract with Oxford University Press, and a special issue on the early modern Baroque, coming out in the Journal for Medieval and Early Modern Studies.
Other topics of interest include: early modern poetics and literary criticism; Marxist political, economic, and aesthetic theory; and the German philosophical tradition from Immanuel Kant to Theodor Adorno.
TEACHING
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 Lorna Hutson on ‘Verse’. I also offer undergraduate lecture courses on Shakespeare and race and on early modern lyric.
PUBLICATIONS
Introduction to William Shakespeare, Coriolanus, ed. Francis X. Connor (Oxford University Press, 2026)
Anthologizing Shakespeare, 1593-1603 (Oxford University Press, 2023)
‘Disusing the Ear: Samuel Daniel and the Poetics of Poetical Essays’, ELR 56.1 (2026), 58-81.
‘Humanism’, in The Routledge Companion to Shakespeare and Religion, ed. Will Stockton (Routledge, 2026)
‘Hope against Hope: Abraham Cowley and the Metaphysics of Poetry’, ELH 90.4 (2023), 979-1006.
‘Shakespeare’s Metaphysical Poem: Allegory, Metaphysics, and Aesthetics in “The Phoenix and Turtle”’, RES 74.316 (2023), 635-651.
‘Marvels and Commonplaces in the Elizabethan Anthologies’, Classical Receptions Journal 13.1 (2021), 49-66.
‘Music at the Close: Richard II in the Elizabethan Anthologies’, Studies in Philology 116.4 (2019), 696-727.
