Dr Jitka Stollova, Trinity

js2084@cam.ac.uk

 

Biographical Information

email: js2084@cam.ac.uk

Twitter: @JitkaStollova

 

I am a Junior Research Fellow at Trinity College. Previously, I have held a Junior Research Fellowship at Jesus College, Oxford. I arrived at Cambridge for my PhD in 2013, after completing my BA and MA studies at Charles University in Prague. I have taught undergraduate courses at Oxford and Cambridge, as well as an MA core course at Queen Mary, University of London. 

 

Research Interests

My first monograph, currently in preparation, examines the continuities and disjunctions between Tudor and Stuart modes of interpreting the lessons of medieval English history. Specifically, it challenges the narrative that king Richard III was seen solely as an epitome of tyranny, as he was portrayed in Shakespeare’s eponymous play. Drawing on a range of hitherto unknown or under-researched sources, including poems, pamphlets and legal treatises, it shows that political pressures of the seventeenth century generated a more refined reading of his exemplum and the boundaries of tyranny he was commonly associated with. Against the background of critical periods such as the personal rule of Charles I and the Civil Wars, writers produced a complex and paradoxical view of the king who became seen, at once, as an illegitimate tyrant, a monarch elected by parliament, and an opponent of excessive taxation. My project also reconsiders Shakespeare’s Richard III in the context of other sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts about the Wars of the Roses.

I have a parallel interest in the history of the book, bibliography, and paratexts. I am particularly interested in the way dramatic characters are conceived in and through character lists in playbooks.

 

Selected Publications

Articles and essays in edited volumes

‘Svědomí Richarda III./Richard III’s Conscience.’ In Krajiny jazyka/Landscapes of Language (Prague: Faculty of Arts, Charles University, 2023), pp. 10-20.

‘Richard III and Regicide: Thomas Wincoll’s Plantagenets Tragicall Story (1649).’ English Literary Renaissance, 49, issue 3 (2019), 360-89. 

‘Reading Dramatic Character Through Dramatis Personae in Early Modern Printed Drama.’ Studies in Philology, 115, issue 2 (2018), 312-42.

‘“This silence of the Stage”: The Play of Format and Paratext in the Beaumont and Fletcher Folio.’ Review of English Studies, 68, issue 1 (2017), 507-23.

‘Sir Aston Cokain’s Unknown Book.’ Notes and Queries, 64, issue 3 (2017), 436-37.

‘Plotting Paratexts in Shirley’s The Politician.’ In James Shirley and Early Modern Theatre: New Critical Perspectives, ed. by Barbara Ravelhofer (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), pp. 139-52. 

‘Shakespeare’s sonnets in Contemporary Czech Translation / Shakespearovy sonety v soucasnem ceskem prekladu.’ UC Berkeley Comparative Literature Undergraduate Journal. University of California, Berkeley, 2, issue 1 (2012). https://ucbcluj.org/ (14 pp.)

 

Reviews and non-peer-reviewed publications

‘Kieran Williams: Václav Havel (Critical Lives).’ Journal of European Studies, 4, issue 3 (2017), 309-10.

‘From the Margins to the Centre.’ Cambridge Quarterly, 45, issue 4 (2016), 376-81.

‘Václav Havel: Life Is a Struggle for Expression.’ Grasp: Culture and Aesthetics Quarterly. 4 (2011), 28-29.

‘Václav Havel’s Leaving and Shakespeare’s King Lear: A Twin Study of Human Fall.’ Grasp: Culture and Aesthetics Quarterly. 12 (2009), p. 41.