Research Event Explores English Jacobean Dramatist John Webster

Playwright John Webster’s masterpiece The Duchess of Malfi will be a topic under discussion during a guest lecture at St Mary’s University College Twickenham on Wednesday 27th November. Entitled ‘Prince Henry Stuart and the Duchess of Malfi’, the lecture will be delivered by Assistant Professor of English at Marymount University, Dr Amy Scott-Douglass, and will explore an alternative inspiration for the play. John Webster began writing the masterpiece in 1612, the same year that ended in the sudden death of Britain’s heir apparent Prince Henry Stuart. Traditionally, scholars have read The Duchess of Malfi as having been modelled primarily after Queen Elizabeth I, but could Webster have had another monarch in mind? During the lecture, Dr Scott-Douglass will draw on prophecies, portraiture and literature about the much beloved and mourned prince to put together a case for the heir apparent as the inspiration for Webster’s play. As a leading academic in medieval and early modern literature, Dr Scott-Douglass has published several works including her most recent, Shakespeare Inside: The Bard Behind Bars (Continuum, 2007), ‘Theatre’ in Shakespeares after Shakespeare: An Encyclopedia of the Bard in Mass Media and Popular Culture (Greenwood, 2006) along with several works on early modern women authors and film and stage adaptations of Renaissance drama. She has also worked extensively in developing Shakespearean plays with inmates in the US prison system. Organised by the History department at St Mary’s School of Arts and Humanities, the research event is free to attend and open to members of the public. It will take place at 4pm on Wednesday 27th November at St Mary’s Strawberry Hills campus. For more information please contact Dr Sinead McEneaney at Sinead.mceneaney@stmarys.ac.uk.