Madeleine Saidenberg

Thesis Title: Shakespeare on the Dublin Stage, 1698-1801

Supervisor: Dr. David Taylor

My DPhil thesis investigates the possibilities for national expression opened up by Shakespeare performances on the eighteenth-century Dublin stage. Shakespeare, scholars agree, emerged as the “national poet” across the eighteenth century. But between 1707 and 1801, Ireland occupied an ambiguous national status: politically and economically in thrall to Westminster, but technically a separate kingdom outside of the Union. This project rethinks the eighteenth-century theatrical landscape as a “circum-national” network, a cultural feedback loop between London, Dublin, and other regional playhouses. Without concrete national designations, how did practitioners and audiences use their repertory to define their culture? And how did these definitions shape Shakespeare performances, and the “national” dramatist we now know?

Beyond my thesis, I am one of the 2022 Krasis Junior Teaching Fellows working at the Ashmolean Museum. I also co-convene the Queer Intersections Network for the Oxford Research Centre for the Humanities (TORCH) and, with Helen Dallas, co-host the  Practice Makes podcast for TORCH’s Reimagining Performance Network, which features conversations between Oxford scholars and leading theatre practitioners (https://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/series/practice-makes-oxford-reimagining-perfo...). 

Before coming to Oxford, I worked in theatre and television as an assistant director, script editor, and dramaturg; I’m particularly interested in literary adaptations and in restored theatre spaces like Shakespeare’s Globe and the Smock Alley Theatre. Other research interests include Shakespearean afterlives, eighteenth-century theatre, and Irish literature more broadly, as well as memory, queer performance, and the idea of the ‘classic.’