Welcome to The History of European Theatre Podcast Website and thanks for joining me through millennia of theatrical history.

Stephen Watkins

Stephen Watkins is a writer and researcher working mainly Shakespeare and Early Modern literature, with a particular focus on how writers and theatre makers recycle, adapt and remediate source texts to both register and resist historical and cultural change. He has published widely on Restoration adaptations of Shakespeare and the important figure, William Davenant. His book Shakespeare and the Restoration Repertory, Cambridge University Press, was published in February. It demonstrates how Davenant’s adaptations of Shakespeare were shaped as much by the transformed commercial and repertorial logics that came to govern the patent companies in the 1660s as they were by shifting aesthetic and political concerns in the period. Stephen has taught English at the Universities of Oxford, Nottingham, and Derby, and is currently based at the University of Greenwich.

June 1, 2025

Shakespeare in the Restoration: A Conversation with Stephen Watkins

Episode 171: For today’s guest episode it is a warm welcome to Stephen Watkins who is going to take us a little way forward in the timeline to the world of Restoration England where after fourteen years of closures theatres w...