Ithaca College

Chris Matusiak, Assistant Professor of English, has published an article in the prestigious journal Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England (no. 27, 2014), one of the premier professional venues for research on the medieval and the early modern stage.  The article is entitled "Elizabeth Beeston, Sir Lewis Kirke, and the Cockpit's Management During the English Civil Wars," and it shows the sometimes surprising ways in which the mid-seventeenth century London stage served as a prominent political and social, as well as a cultural institution.

Matusiak examines a fascinating but poorly understood period in early modern theater history in London.  Between 1642 and 1660 the theaters were formally closed and for the most part the staging of plays was prohibited.  However, plays were indeed performed from time to time at a very few venues.  One of these, the Cockpit in Drury Lane, seems to have attracted particular attention from the authorities, and there is at least one recorded instance in which an official attempt to suppress a performance at the Cockpit turned violent.  Why, Matusiak asks, did this theater serve as such a lightning rod?

According to his research, which included the examination of previously neglected documents in the Privy Council Register and the UK National Archives, the Cockpit not only employed a group of actors with a number of prominent supporters of Charles I, but was in fact co-managed by a man, Sir Lewis Kirke, who had fought against the Parliamentary armies during the Civil Wars and a woman, Elizabeth Beeston, who may have been suspected by Parliament of serving as a royalist spy. Although Beeston had claimed to be in difficult financial circumstances following the death of her first husband, Matusiak suggests that her decision (and Kirke's) to reopen the Cockpit in 1646 may have had at least as much to do with politics as with monetary concerns.  As such, Matusiak makes a strong case for the early modern theater as an authentic site of social and political resistance.

Matusiak joined the Department of English in the fall of 2010, and teaches courses on Shakespeare, Renaissance drama, and Renaissance literature more generally.  His research focuses primarily on the history of the theater in seventeenth-century London, and on early modern cultures of dramatic production.  He also teaches in the IC seminar program, the IC honors program, and serves as a faculty co-adviser for the campus chapter of Sigma Tau Delta, the national English honor society.