Rebecca Yearling

My work focuses on English Renaissance culture and literature. My current research project explores how people in the past interpreted physical pain and suffering, and the extent to which their interpretations were shaped by their moral and/or religious beliefs, and uses this approach as a way of thinking about the likely contemporary emotional responses to scenes of violence and bodily harm in the works of Shakespeare.

I studied English language and literature at Worcester College, Oxford University, and stayed on at Oxford to do an M.Phil and a D.Phil. I completed my doctorate on English Renaissance drama in 2007 and then taught at the universities of Sussex and Bristol before coming to Keele University in September of 2013.

My doctoral thesis explored the development of dramatic satire in the early years of the 17th century, looking at why dramatic satire was so popular at this time, how it worked on stage, and the kinds of relationships it established between playwrights and theatregoers. My monograph Ben Jonson, John Marston and Early Modern Drama: Satire and the Audience was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2016.