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Analyzes the aesthetics of stigma in Shakespeare's plays, focusing on the figural systems he inherits from earlier English drama and those he invents. Argues that in Richard II, 1 and 2 Henry IV, and Henry V, Shakespeare "gestures toward the modern medical model of stigma as a sign of poor health in the past and a painful death in the future"; that in Troilus and Cressida he attempts "to out-maneuver the primitive origins of stigma in the Greco-Roman tradition"; and that in Tempest Caliban represents his skeptical response to stigma.

Discusses the trumpet calls in Richard III which correspond with the arrival of royalty on stage, arguing that these musical cues raise expectations about royal behavior "before directly challenging these expectations in the spectacle of kingship that meets before the audience's gaze."

"Demonstrates . . . the singularity of non-English characters actually speaking a different tongue in Shakespeare's plays, and the way in which [Henry V] draws attention to such speech." Discusses how scenes involving French speech in the play "are used to illustrate how foreign language operates dramaturgically to privilege the physicality of speech, thereby emphasising the bodily reality of the character/actor."

Discusses parallels between Shakespeare's Richard III and Adolph Hitler, focusing on his "liquidation of Ernst Roehm, commander of the SA (Sturmabteilung) in June 1934."

Analyzes how Shakespeare's use of commonplaces in Rape of Lucrece compete with the heraldic discourse in the poem and how such competition between the aristocratic and civic humanism challenges current notions of early modern authorship.

Traces the history of graphic novel adaptations of Shakespeare from early comic books to twenty-first century graphic novels. Also abstracted in Dissertation Abstracts International 72 (2011): not paginated.

Arguing that Rape of Lucrece is "one of Shakespeare's most sustained reflections on the ways individuals" experience subjective time, analyzes how in the poem "the experience of rape and the experience of time are mutually constitutive."

In challenging dominant modern critical assumptions about Shylock as Jew, explores the influence of Henry Irving's production (1879) on these assumptions, argues that much of early modern evidence of Shylock's Jewishness (for example, the stage Jew stereotype and the prejudice elicited by Roderigo Lopez affair) "has very little archival or historical basis," and concludes that Shylock's "Jewishness is contingent rather than essential--the Jew as semantic rather than as Semitic, property."

Discusses the use of provocation defenses to reduce murder charges to manslaughter in the case of sexual infidelity as well as the attempts of reformers to "reign in provocation defences . . . where provocation has been replaced by a loss of control defence that, most controversially, specifically excludes sexual infidelity as a trigger for loss of control." "Reflects on this reform and its reception, glossing Shakespeare's scathing critique of warrants for murder in Titus Andronicus." English summary, 407.

"Read[s] the place of Shakespeare's Sonnets in [Ernie] O'Malley's memoirs" while "emphasiz[ing] the extent to which books (considered as physical objects) function as closet objects, as charged modes of concealment."