Claude FRETZ
Associate Professor
Department of English
E-Mail: fretz@mail.sysu.edu.cn
Sun Yat-sen University
School of Foreign Languages
135 West Xingang Road
Guangzhou 510275, China
Claude Fretz is Associate Professor of Shakespeare studies and early modern English literature at Sun Yat-sen University. His PhD is from the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham. His research has attracted funding in China, the UK, Germany, and Luxembourg.
His primary research interest and area of publication lies with the dramatic works of Shakespeare in their Elizabethan and Jacobean contexts, and with their classical, medieval, and early modern sources and influences. He is also interested in Shakespeare's global afterlives (especially adaptations), Restoration theatre, and interdisciplinary explorations of cultures of dreaming and sleeping.
Claude Fretz is the author of Dreams, Sleep, and Shakespeare’s Genres (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), a monograph which explores how Shakespeare uses images of dreams and sleep to define his dramatic worlds. Surveying Shakespeare’s comedies, tragedies, histories, and late plays, the book argues that Shakespeare systematically exploits early modern physiological, religious, and political understandings of dreams and sleep in order to reshape conventions of dramatic genre and to experiment with dream-inspired plots. In addition, he is co-editor of Performing Restoration Shakespeare (Cambridge University Press, 2023), a book which arises from an AHRC-funded research project and investigates how Restoration adaptations of Shakespeare used to be performed and how they can be performed for audiences today. He is also co-editor of Narrating Dreams: Solution and Dissolution (Wenshan Review of Literature and Language, 2024), a special issue which illuminates the social and political roles of dream narratives and invite us to investigate the telling and retelling of dreams as a practice that lends to, and borrows from, different social, spatial, environmental, gendered, and racialised imaginaries.
Claude has published numerous journal articles and book chapters on Shakespeare, on early modern literature, on representations of dreams and sleep in the Renaissance, on modern theatre practice, and on Restoration drama. His work has appeared in journals including Shakespeare, Critical Survey, Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies, Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture 1660-1700, Cahiers Elisabéthains: A Journal of English Renaissance Studies, Etudes Epistémè, Shakespeare Jahrbuch, and others.
He is a regular speaker and participant at international academic conferences. He has also given invited talks and public lectures in the UK, the USA, Germany, Luxembourg, Singapore, Malaysia, and Hong Kong, and has been interviewed by science magazines as well as mainstream national newspapers. In addition, he has advised and collaborated with theatre companies in the UK, the USA, Germany, and China, including the world-famous Royal Shakespeare Company and the Folger Shakespeare Theatre. He is a member of the British Shakespeare Association, the European Shakespeare Research Association, the Renaissance Society of America, and the Network of Cultural Dream Studies.
Academic Qualifications
2016 PhD, University of Birmingham (UK)
2012 MA English: Shakespeare in History (Distinction), University College London (UK)
2011 BA (hons) English (First Class), Royal Holloway, University of London (UK)
Research Interests
Shakespeare and early modern drama
Shakespeare’s sources and influences
Renaissance literature
Shakespeare’s global afterlives
Restoration theatre
Cultures of dreaming and sleeping
Animal symbolism in the Renaissance
Teaching
UNDERGRADUATE COURSES:
‘Plays and Performance’; ‘Introduction to Prose Literature’; ‘Renaissance Poetry’
POSTGRADUATE COURSES:
‘Shakespeare: Comedy, Tragedy, History, Romance’
Selected Publications
BOOKS
Fretz, Claude. Dreams, Sleep, and Shakespeare’s Genres. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.
Eubanks Winkler, Amanda. Fretz, Claude. Schoch, Richard. Performing Restoration Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023.
RESEARCH ARTICLES AND CHAPTERS
Fretz, Claude, and Rose Hsiu-li Juan. ‘Narrating Dreams’. The Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture (ISSN: 2077-1290), 17:2 (2024), 1—7. Full text available at https://www.airitilibrary.com/Publication/Information?publicationID=15631796&type=%E6%9C%9F%E5%88%8A&tabName=2&issueYear=2024&issueID=N202407090009&publisherID=3076.
Arbaayah Ali Termizi, Claude Fretz*, Xenia Georgopoulou, and Dong Qingchen. ‘Localising Text and Performance: Avenues for Exploring Shakespeare and Cultural-Creative Adaptation’. Journal of Language and Communication (ISSN: 2637-0875), 11:1 (2024), 1—15. Full text available at https://sites.google.com/upm.edu.my/jlc-fbmk/regular-issues/vol-11-no-1-march-2024.
Fretz, Claude, Amanda Eubanks Winkler, and Richard Schoch. ‘Introduction: New Shakespeare for a New Era’. In Performing Restoration Shakespeare, ed. Amanda Eubanks Winkler, Claude Fretz, and Richard Schoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), 1—14. Full text available at https://hal.science/hal-04124633v1.
Fretz, Claude. ‘Shakespearean Boars and Dolphins: Representing Character through Animal Dreams in Richard III and Antony and Cleopatra’. Critical Survey (ISSN 1752-2293), 35:1 (2023), 44—63. Full text available at https://hal.science/hal-04124625v1. [A&HCI]
Fretz, Claude. ‘Dreaming of Serpents and Asses: Shakespeare’s Ovidian Animal Dreams in A Midsummer Night’s Dream’. Shakespeare (ISSN 1745-0918), 19:3 (2023), 328—354. Full text available at https://hal.science/hal-03708673v1. [A&HCI]
Fretz, Claude. ‘Performing Restoration Shakespeare “Then” and “Now”: A Case Study of Davenant’s Macbeth’. Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies (ISSN 1729-6897), 48:1 (2022), 27—56. Full text available at http://www.concentric-literature.url.tw/issues/Music/2-Fretz.pdf or https://hal-hprints.archives-ouvertes.fr/hprints-03624610 [A&HCI]
Fretz, Claude. ‘”The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen”: Multisensory Dreams in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili’. Traum–Wissen–Erzählen (ISSN 2567-7993), vol. 9 (2021): Träumen mit allen Sinnen, ed. Stephanie Catani and Sophia Mehrbrey (Leiden: Brill; Paderborn: Fink), 157—177. Full text available at https://hal-hprints.archives-ouvertes.fr/hprints-03437612
Fretz, Claude. ‘”Not wond’ring at the present, nor the past”: Dreaming through Time and Space in Shakespeare’. Traum–Wissen–Erzählen (ISSN 2567-7993), vol. 8 (2021): Zeiterfahrung im Traum, ed. Christian Quintes and Laura Vordermayer (Leiden: Brill; Paderborn: Fink), 95—113. Full text available at https://hal-hprints.archives-ouvertes.fr/hprints-03437608
Fretz, Claude. ‘“marvellous and surprizing conduct”: The “Masque of Devils” and Dramatic Genre in Thomas Shadwell’s The Tempest’. Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660-1700 (ISSN 0162-9905), 43:2 (2019), 3—28. Full text available at https://hal-hprints.archives-ouvertes.fr/hprints-03437606
Fretz, Claude. ‘The Imagination in Early Modern English Literature’. Cahiers Elisabéthains: A Journal of English Renaissance Studies, 95:1 (2018), 126–9. [A&HCI]
Fretz, Claude. ‘“Full of ugly sights, of ghastly dreams”: Dreams and Tragedy in Shakespeare’s Richard III’. Cahiers Elisabéthains: A Journal of English Renaissance Studies (ISSN 2054-4715), 92:1 (2017), 32–49. Full text available at: https://hal-hprints.archives-ouvertes.fr/hprints-03437610 [A&HCI]
Fretz, Claude. ‘“Either his notion weakens, or his discernings | Are lethargied”: Sleeplessness and Waking Dreams as Tragedy in Julius Caesar and King Lear’. Etudes Epistémè (ISSN 1634-0450), 30 (2016). Full text available at https://journals.openedition.org/episteme/1383 [ESCI]
Fretz Claude. ‘Shakespeare the Illusionist: Magic, Dreams, and the Supernatural on Film’. Shakespeare Jahrbuch (ISSN: 1430-2527), 156 (2020), 294–5.
OTHER WRITINGS
Fretz, Claude, Amanda Eubanks Winkler, and Richard Schoch. Programme notes for Robert Richmond’s Macbeth at the Folger Theatre, Washington D.C. (4-23 September 2018).
Fretz, Claude. ‘How Restoration playwrights reshaped Shakespeare’s plays to fit changing political norms and theatrical tastes’. Shakespeare & Beyond (5 June 2018). https://shakespeareandbeyond.folger.edu/2018/06/05/how-restoration-playwrights-reshaped-shakespeare-plays/
‘Interview with Claude Fretz: Shakespeare in the Age of Restoration and the Role of Dreams in Shakespeare’s Plays’. Published in English and German on 23 April 2018 (to coincide with the anniversary of Shakespeare’s birthday) on science.lu, the FNR’s (National Research Fund of Luxembourg) website for news about science and research aimed at the general public. http://science.lu/fr/content/shakespeare-age-restoration-how-change-political-relations-affected-handling-playwrights
Fretz, Claude. ‘Performing Restoration Shakespeare: Dr Claude Fretz explains how Shakespeare’s plays found new life on the Restoration stage’. Shakespeare’s Globe Blog (30 June 2017).