Prof. Raphael Lyne
Biography
I am a Professor of Renaissance Literature and a Fellow and Director of Studies at Murray Edwards College.
At the moment I am collaborating with colleagues in Psychology and History Faculties, in Cambridge and Durham, on an interdisciplinary research project about the subjective experience of vivid memory. The project website is here.
In addition to my college web page (here) and the publications list below, you can find out a bit more about my other interests in my dormant blog, 'What Literature Knows About Your Brain', which is here. I was Chair of the Faculty Board of English between October 2021 and September 2024.
Research Interests
Sixteenth and seventeenth-century literature; cognitive approaches to literature / cognitive literary theory; classical influences on English Literature 1500-1700; Shakespeare; memory, especially the subjective experience of remembering; theory and practice of imitation; the relationships between texts and their sources; genre; poetry.
Areas of Graduate Supervision
Supervises MPhils and PhDs in the fields mentioned above under 'Research Interests'. Contributes to teaching and/or supervision for MPhil in English Studies.
Connect with Raphael
Publications
'Doubting Dreams in Shakespeare', forthcoming in The Review of English Studies, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgag043
'Reformation Memory-Work in Late Shakespeare', forthcoming in Shakespeare Survey, 79 (2026).
'Thinking "We" in Brome's Antipodes', Early Theatre, 29 (2026), 109-29 https://doi.org/10.12745/et.29.1.6835
'Old Men Remembering in Shakespeare's Second Tetralogy', Shakespeare (2026), 10.1080/17450918.2026.2635399
'Purity and Disgust in Herrick and Bruegel', Studies in Philology, 122 (2025), 199-226, https://doi.org/10.1353/sip.2025.a955441
'Signal and Noise in Skelton', Textual Practice 2024, https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2024.2347245
‘Spenser’s Wings’, in Rachel Stenner and Abigail Shinn (eds), Edmund Spenser and Animal Life (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), 259-87
'Shakespeare’s Animals: Is There Anything It Is Like To Be Adonis?', Essays in Criticism, 72 (2022), 303-31.
'Shakespeare and the Wandering Mind', Journal of the British Academy, 8 (2020), 1-27.
'Ben Jonson and the Limits of Distributed Cognition', in Distributed Cognition in Medieval and Renaissance Culture, ed. Miranda Anderson and Michael Wheeler (Edinburgh, 2019).
'Sonnets and the First Person Plural', Cambridge Quarterly, 2019.
'Reading for Evidence of Faith in Herbert's Poems', Review of English Studies, 2019, here.
[with Mattia Gallotti] 'The Individual "We" Narrator', British Journal of Aesthetics, 59 (2019), 179-95.
'Shakespeare and the Macaronic Book' in Text, Food and the Early Modern Reader: Eating Words, ed. Jason Scott-Warren and Andrew Zurcher. Routledge, 2018.
'Relevance Across History' in Reading Beyond the Code: Literature and Relevance Theory, ed. Terence Cave and Deirdre Wilson. Oxford University Press, 2018.
The Complete Poems of Shakespeare, ed. with Cathy Shrank. Routledge, 2017.
'Shakespearean Vital Signs' in Movement in Renaissance Literature: Exploring Kinesic Intelligence, ed. Kathryn Banks and Timothy Chesters.Palgrave, 2017.
Memory and Intertextuality in Renaissance Literature, Cambridge University Press, 2016
[with Emma Firestone] ‘Purity and Disgust in Shakespeare’s Problem Plays’, in Purity and Danger Now: New Perspectives, ed. Robbie Duschinsky, Simone Schnall, and Daniel H. Weiss. Routledge, 2016.
‘Shakespeare, Perception and Theory of Mind’ in Reading Literature Cognitively, edited by Terence Cave, a special issue of Paragraph, 37 (2014).
'Thinking in Stanzas: Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece' in The Work of Form: Poetics and Materiality in Early Modern Culture, ed. Elizabeth Scott-Baumann and Ben Burton, Cambridge University Press, 2014.
'The Shakespearean Grasp', Cambridge Quarterly, 2013.
'Recognition in Cymbeline', in Late Shakespeare 1608-1613, ed. Rory Loughnane and Andrew Power, Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Shakespeare, Rhetoric and Cognition, Cambridge University Press, 2011.
'Dryden and the Complete Career', in Classical Literary Careers and their Reception, ed. Philip Hardie and Helen Moore, Cambridge University Press, 2010.
‘The Sonnets’, special issue of Shakespeare (2009), co-edited with Cathy Shrank
'Neoclassicisms’, in Tragedy in Transition, ed. Sarah Annes Brown and Catherine Silverstone, Blackwell, 2007
Shakespeare's Late Work (Oxford Shakespeare Topics series), Oxford University Press, 2007, 192
'Shakespeare, Plautus, and the Discovery of New Comic Space', in Shakespeare and the Classics, ed. Charles Martindale and Anthony Brian Taylor, Cambridge University Press, 2004, 122-38
"Grille's Moral Dialogue: Spenser and Plutarch", Spenser Studies, 2004
"Writing Back to Ovid in the 1560s and 1570s", Translation and Literature, 2004
"Love and Exile After Ovid", The Cambridge Companion to Ovid, ed. Philip Hardie, CUP, 2002
"Ovid in English Translation", The Cambridge Companion to Ovid, ed. Philip Hardie, CUP, 2002
Ovid's Changing Worlds: English Metamorphoses 1567-1632, Oxford University Press, 2001