Matteo Pangallo

Associate Professor of English

Publications

Books

None a Stranger There: England and/in Europe on the Early Modern Stage. Co-edited with Scott Oldenburg. University of Alabama Press, forthcoming.

This volume gathers together leading scholarship on early modern English drama, written in response to, reflecting upon, or in light of Brexit and the debates it has provoked about the development of English identity and the nature of the relationship between England and (the rest of) Europe. The contributors employ a number of approaches, including theater history, literary criticism, and pedagogical theory. Their essays engage with a wide range of subjects in plays by Shakespeare, Marlowe, and other early modern dramatists, as well as from various domains, including itinerant and local religious theater, the commercial playhouses, university and academic drama, city pageants, and court masques. Subjects explored across the volume include dramatic representations of and responses to attitudes about and experiences of immigrants and refugees, xenophobia and tolerance, multiculturalism, assimilation, hybridity, and cultural exchange, nationalism, patriotism, and jingoism, racial and ethnic difference and identity, border-making and border-crossing, and transnational itinerancy.

None a Stranger There demonstrates how current political and cultural debates catalyzed in England by Brexit, in the United States by the Trump administration’s anti-immigration policies, and similar neonationalist efforts in other countries reflect, but also importantly differ from, debates about national identity, immigration, and borders in the early modern period. To examine those historical debates, the contributors to this collection consider how they manifested themselves in English plays, masques, pageants, and other forms of cultural expression. These essays speak to how notions about Englishness, identity, and difference intersected with the developing sense of Europe as a concept as much as a physical geographic unit, as well as with debates in the period about England’s relationship to Europe—debates that, in many ways, can seem remarkably prescient for our current moment. Enmeshed within these debates and how they were represented in the drama of the period were ongoing negotiations about race and ethnicity, national sovereignty, language, religion, economic relationships, and the broader nature of transnational cultural contact and exchange. The contributors to None a Stranger There draw upon a wide range of early modern texts—literary works, such as plays, poems, and masques, as well as legal treatises and laws, religious works, medical texts, ballads and broadsides, and even dueling treatises. Their work connects to and contributes to an extremely diverse and fruitful branch of scholarship on early modern culture, literature, and politics. And their methodologies incorporate literary criticism, theater history, performance studies, pedagogical theory, linguistics, book history and text criticism, and a range of other disciplinary approaches.

Teaching the History of the Book. Co-edited with Emily Todd. University of Massachusetts Press, 2023.

“This well-conceived collection is the first to investigate book history pedagogy itself, and it does so in a generous and inclusive way. It manages to be a comprehensive resource for current pedagogy in book history while also providing ideas and inspiration for future instructors. The editors have done an excellent job in bringing together a wide range of voices and perspectives.”—Shafquat Towheed, coeditor of Reading and the First World War: Readers, Texts, Archives

“This collection, the first of its kind on the teaching of book history, offers a nicely diverse list of contributors, including major scholars who have been involved in this field for a long time.”—Christine Pawley, author of Organizing Women: Home, Work, and the Institutional Infrastructure of Print in Twentieth-Century America

“In Teaching the History of the Book, editors Matteo Pangallo and Emily B. Todd bring together an interdisciplinary group of scholars and practitioners to deliver a comprehensive and engaging volume. The volume includes a broad range of chapters on a variety of topics, including conceptual overviews of book history, lesson plans, activity ideas, and full course outlines, among others. As this work is the first on teaching book history, it serves both as an introduction to this field for readers and as a call for more research and investigation into teaching in this discipline. A broader SoTL audience, even those without a background in book history, will gain new ideas and strategies for use in their own classrooms. The book covers themes of interdisciplinary collaboration, online teaching, making history relevant to contemporary students, and disrupting the Western, White, male-centered canon, all of which are extremely relevant to SoTL at large…. For those who teach or are interested in teaching book history, this volume is essential. Pulling together authors from many diverse backgrounds and experiences, the book serves as a crucial component to anyone who is planning a lesson, activity, or full curriculum. For those outside this discipline, this volume contains many creative ideas behind teaching in the humanities, from digital versions of manuscripts to specific activity ideas that center students’ agency.“—David X. Lemmons, Teaching & Learning Inquiry

Teaching the History of the Book is the first collection dedicated to book history pedagogy. With contributions from a diverse range of teachers, scholars, and practitioners in literature, language studies, history, book arts, library science, and archives, the collection presents a variety of methods for teaching book history both as its own subject and as an approach to other subjects. Each of the 39 chapters describes lessons, courses, and programs centered on the latest and best ways of teaching undergraduate and graduate students both about and with book history. Beginning with chapters that apply particular pedagogical and critical theories to the book history classroom, the book then covers effective ways to organize courses devoted to book history, classroom activities that draw upon book history in other courses, and an overview of selected print and digital tools for book history classes. Contributors draw on their own experiences in the classroom to bring to life some of the rich possibilities for teaching book history in the twenty-first century.

Shakespeare’s Audiences. Co-edited with Peter Kirwan. Routledge, 2021.

Shakespeare wrote for a theatre in which the audience was understood to be, and at times invited to be, active and participatory. How have Shakespeare’s audiences, from the sixteenth century to the present, responded to that invitation? In what ways have consumers, across different cultural contexts, periods, and platforms, engaged with the performance of Shakespeare’s plays? What are some of the different approaches taken by scholars today in thinking about the role of the Shakespearean audience and its relationship to performance? Written by a diverse group of scholars, teachers, and actors, the essays in this collection use a variety of methods and approaches to explore the global history of audience experience of Shakespearean performance in theatre, film, radio, podcast, and digital media. The approaches that these contributors take look at Shakespeare’s audiences through a variety of lenses, including theater history, dramaturgy, film studies, fan studies, popular culture, pedagogy, and performance. Together, they provide both close studies of particular moments in the history of Shakespeare’s audiences as well as a broader understanding of the various, often complex, connections between and among those audiences across the long history of Shakespearean performance.

Playwriting Playgoers in Shakespeare’s Theater. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017.


“An extremely substantial contribution to the field. Playwriting Playgoers in Shakespeare’s Theater has the potential to reconfigure current debates about theatrical authorship and spectatorship, and it also acts as an invaluable primer on a range of neglected material.”—Lucy Munro, King’s College London

“Readers…will gain much from this book. I know I have…. One of the most exciting and rewarding qualities of Playwriting Playgoers is Pangallo’s insistence that we should not condescend to these playwrights (nor to the past more generally) by assuming that amateurism equals naivety or failure… [T]he book offers…exciting material….[R]eaders will be proud to own this book in thirty years. I’m certainly a fan.”—Jonathan Lamb, University of Kansas

“Matteo Pangallo’s elegantly written book focuses on a group of writers long-neglected in traditional accounts of the professional early modern stage…. As well as shedding new light on a fascinating and under-researched body of early modern plays, the book’s findings serve to challenge a number of long-held assumptions about amateur playwriting and audiences in this era…. Playwriting Playgoersis an important and timely contribution to the field of early modern playwriting and audience studies and essential reading for anyone keen to learn more about the early modern theatre world, its playwrights, and their mutual impact on each other.”—Siobhan Keenan, De Montfort University

“This book intervenes in scholarly attempts to distinguish amateur and professional playwriting by exploring the dramatic creations of audience members…. Each case Pangallo presents problematizes the assumptions underlying such distinctions [between amateur and professional] by showing how playgoers not only wrote plays of comparable interest and quality, but as they did so, harboured no intention of professionalizing — each writer, that is, maintained their roles as ‘spectators’, a role that did not compromise their writing but in fact enhanced it….Pangallo offers a substantial discussion of early modern ideas about playgoers as playwrights [and provides] ample evidence to support the notion that audiences played a more creative and participatory role than the older ‘orchestration’ theory allows….All of these cases, in their unique ways, illuminate corners of early modern theatrical history that, when examined closely, broaden and diversify the reader’s view of the period’s creative output and practices. Pangallo’s intervention in presumed binaries of professional and amateur, particularly as they relate to class identity (a point Pangallo addresses) is important and, for the most part, successful….[S]cholars and students of the early modern English stage will benefit greatly from Pangallo’s insights into playgoers’ creative production, an area that sheds new light on previous scholarly assumptions about professionals, audiences, and everyone inhabiting the grey area in between.”—Laurie Ellinghausen, University of Missouri-Kansas City

“Pangallo’s focus is certainly conducive to some of the wider aims of audience and reception studies…. Playwriting Playgoers in Shakespeare’s Theatershould thus be regarded as a welcome contribution to both of the two disciplines it straddles: early modern studies and audience and reception studies.”—Anna Blackwell, De Montfort University

“It is the very specificity of [its] approach in which the value of Playwriting Playgoers inheres…. Scrutiny of these neglected scripts will…provide us with a more sophisticated, precise, and intimate sense of how individuals responded intellectually, imaginatively, and emotionally to the theatre they consumed…. [T]his is a provocative contribution to early modern drama studies, shedding light on works and writers too often relegated to the status of curiosities in footnotes or ignored altogether. It prompts us to look afresh at these amateur playwrights as competent, often successful, dramatists in their own right, however they came to learn their craft, and to explore the myriad and protean ways they attempted to contribute to the commercial theatre industry of their day.”—Stephen Watkins, University of Derby

“This concept is fascinating…. [Playwriting Playgoers in Shakespeare’s Theater] tell[s] the story of some all-but-forgotten playwrights with passion and flair, and brings to our attention texts that have not played a large part in the scholarly conversation, reminding us why they deserve our attention.”—Tiffany Stern, University of Birmingham

“Playwriting Playgoers in Shakespeare’s Theateroffers a fresh take on the study of early modern audiences and their role in theatrical production…. Taking his readers through manuscript revisions, stage directions, and verse analysis, Pangallo presents an unconventional and largely convincing bid to take amateur playwrights—and the things they can tell us about early modern audience experience—more seriously…. Ultimately, Playwriting Playgoers in Shakespeare’s Theater offers a significant contribution to a number of early modern fields, including the study of audiences, authorship, theatricality, and dramaturgy. Furthermore, it should remain a useful primer on a number of previously overlooked playwrights for years to come.“—Emma Katherine Atwood, University of Montevallo

“[An] impressive first monograph” that is “notable [for its] original research.“—Joshua McEvilla, University of Toronto

“[Playwriting Playgoers] contributes to audience studies[an] important monograph on amateur playwrights in the professional theatre. Playwriting Playgoers in Shakespeare’s Theater reframes thinking about attitudes towards spectatorship, in both the early modern period and today.[The book] reshape[s] overall understanding of this important aspect of early modern theatrical culture and offers access to the creative vision of this community.—Elizabeth Sharrett, University of Lynchburg

“Pangallo encourages a positive attitude towards this material so often overlooked….This invitation to challenge past perspectives on this material is the book’s main contribution. Pangallo also inspires us to think more about non-canonical works, to open up new avenues of investigation, and to reflect on the importance of adding ‘a different voice to the conversation’ (163), which can be used as ‘direct testimony’ (187) of how professional plays were staged and performed in the first half of the seventeenth century.“—Beatrice Montedoro, Lincoln College, University of Oxford

“Pangallo’s study…illustrate[s] how a less restrictive approach to determining which plays we deem worthy of attention, along with an expansion of the kinds of investigations we undertake, might reveal potentially productive, oblique angles of inquiry into early modern playmaking, playgoing, and the correlations between the two.“—Mark Albert Johnston, University of Windsor

“Playwriting Playgoers in Shakespeare’s Theater focuses ingeniously on a model of theatrical dramatic authorship that has been almost totally understudied….Pangallo opens a window onto the world of theatrical consumption rather than theatrical production: on how important audience experience and audience taste were…. The book is a vital and original contribution on the problem of theatrical audiences, significantly advancing our understanding not only of who attended plays or how they responded to them but of drama itself as a fundamentally collaborative entertainment enterprise.“—Henry S. Turner, Rutgers University

Interview with Henry Jenkins, University of Southern California, on Playwriting Playgoers in Shakespeare’s Theater (three parts)

Interview with Dr. Brooke Newman, Associate Director of the Humanities Center at Virginia Commonwealth University, on Playwriting Playgoers in Shakespeare’s Theater(podcast)

Among the dramatists who wrote for the professional playhouses of early modern London was a small group of writers who were neither members of the commercial theater industry writing to make a living nor aristocratic amateurs dipping their toes in theatrical waters for social or political prestige. Instead, they were largely working- and middle-class amateurs who had learned most of what they knew about drama from being members of the audience.

Using a range of familiar and lesser-known print and manuscript plays, as well as literary accounts and documentary evidence, Playwriting Playgoers in Shakespeare’s Theatershows how these playgoers wrote and revised to address what they assumed to be the needs of actors, readers, and the Master of the Revels; how they understood playhouse materials and practices; and how they crafted poetry for theatrical effects. The book also situates them in the context of the period’s concepts of, and attitudes toward, playgoers’ participation in the activity of playmaking.

Plays by playgoers such as the rogue East India Company clerk Walter Mountfort or the highwayman John Clavell invite us into the creative imaginations of spectators, revealing what certain audience members wanted to see and how they thought actors might stage it. By reading Shakespeare’s theater through these playgoers’ works, Matteo Pangallo contributes a new category of evidence to our understanding of the relationships between the early modern stage, its plays, and its audiences. More broadly, he shows how the rise of England’s first commercialized culture industry also gave rise to the first generation of participatory consumers and their attempts to engage with mainstream culture by writing early modern “fan fiction.”

 

Peer-Reviewed Articles and Notes

Reviews

  • “Shakespeare, Violence, and Early Modern Europe, by Andrew Hiscock.” Shakespeare Quarterly 73.3–4 (Fall-Winter 2022).
  • “Stages of Loss: The English Comedians and their Reception, by George Oppitz-Trotman.” Shakespeare Bulletin 39.3 (Fall 2021): 523–27.
  • “Shakespeare Quartos Archive“. “Early Modern Digital Review”, in Renaissance and Reformation 42.3 (2019): 170-73.
  • “Producing Early Modern London: A Comedy of Urban Space, 1598-1616, by Kelly Stage”. Early Theatre 22.1 (2019): 179-82.

Peer-Reviewed Online Articles

Book Chapters

 

Editions

  • The English Traveller, The Royal King and the Loyal Subject, and Dick of Devonshire for The Collected Works of Thomas Heywood. General editor, Grace Ioppolo. Oxford University Press, forthcoming.
  • The Launching of the Mary, or the Seaman’s Honest Wife by Walter Mountfort, for Digital Renaissance Editions. Coordinating Editor, Brett Hirsch; General Textual Editor, Will Sharpe. Forthcoming.
  • The Memorable Masque by George Chapman, for British Virginia. In progress.
  • The Triumphs of Fame and Honour by John Taylor, for Map of Early Modern London: Mayoral Shows Anthology. In progress.
  • The Amazon by Edward Herbert, for The Malone Society Collections XVII. With Cristina Malcolmson and Eugene Hill. Manchester University Press, 2016.
  • The Tragedy of Antigone, the Theban Princesseby Thomas May, for The Malone Society. Manchester University Press, 2016.
  • Titus Andronicus. Assistant Editor, to William Proctor Williams, for the New Variorum Shakespeare(MLA). In progress.

Digital Humanities Projects

  • Creator and General Editor of the Database of English Manuscript Drama(DEManD), ongoing.
  • General Editor for Stages of Transition: The 1603-1604 London Theater Season. In progress.

Articles for General Readers