John Colley

2025-26 Short-term Fellow

Muteness and Mute Characters from Antiquity to the Age of Shakespeare

My project explores how conventions surrounding mute characters developed from ancient drama up to the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. In doing so, it theorizes a concept of ‘muteness’ which is distinct from more general ideas or instances of silence in Renaissance drama. Muteness, I argue, is a hitherto overlooked aspect of classical dramatic form that playwrights appropriated, imitated, and adapted in early modernity.