Frederick P Kiefer

Interests

Research

Shakespeare and the drama of his contemporaries.Elizabethan visual culture.

Teaching

Shakespeare and the drama of his contemporaries.Elizabethan visual culture.

Courses

Scholarly Contributions

Books

• Kiefer, F. P. (2025).

  Italy's Renaissance In Buildings and Gardens:  A Personal Journey

  . London and New York: Anthem Press.
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  This is a series of brief essays about the most innovative buildings and gardens of the Italian Renaissance, roughly 1400-1600.
• Kiefer, F. P. (2024). Italy's Renaissance in Buildings and Gardens: A Personal Journey. London and New Yo0rk: Anthem Press.
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  The Renaissance in Italy based on scholarship and on five trips to the country.
• Kiefer, F. P. (2015). English Drama from “Everyman” to 1660: Performance and Print.. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.
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  The stage history and printing history of every surviving English play from 1500 to 1660. Eight hundred entries. 945 pages. Despite delays, I have been willing to proceed with this press for 2 reasons: 1. the typography of the publisher's books is first-rate; 2. the press allowed me to publish a book of 950 pages without cuts. That's very unusual these days.
• Kiefer, F., Medieval, R. M., Association, R., & others, . (2009). Masculinities and femininities in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Brepols.
• Kiefer, F. (2003). Shakespeare's Visual Theatre: Staging the Personified Characters. Cambridge University Press.
• Kiefer, F. (1996). Writing on the Renaissance Stage: Written Words, Printed Pages, Metaphoric Books. Newark, DE, London: University of Delaware Press; Associated University Presses.
• Kiefer, F. (1983). Fortune and Elizabethan Tragedy. Huntington Library Press.

Chapters

• Kiefer, F. (2022). Onstage Cataclysm: The Play-within-the-Play in Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy. In Playing with Reality: Denying, Manipulating, Converting, and Enhancing What Is There(pp 43-50). Taylor and Francis. doi:10.4324/9781003256601-6
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  Art’s manipulation of reality informs Frederick Kiefer’s essay. In Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy Hieronimo avenges the death of his son by staging a play wherein courtiers responsible for the murder are cast as characters in a revenge drama. Their stage deaths turn out to be real. This idea of reality manipulated by theatre is then applied to Lyndon Johnson’s use of the fictive Tonkin Gulf incident to justify a military buildup in Vietnam and to the “Weapons of Mass Destruction” perpetrated by the Bush administration as an excuse to attack Iraq.
• Kiefer, F. P. (2020). "The Mad Ophelia". In Critical Insights: Feminism, edited by Robert C. Evans(pp 3-25). Amenia, New York: Salem Press/Grey House Publishing.
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  "The Mad Ophelia" treats the three different texts of Hamlet, each of which gives different information about the character. I reconstruct the appearance of the character in Shakespeare's first performance of the play. Specifically, I argue that the traditional view of Ophelia, attired entirely in white, has been a mistake. It is just as likely that she was dressed in black. The original stage direction indicates that Ophelia enters playing a lute. I discovered that personifications of Melancholy customarily play lutes.
• Kiefer, F. P. (2016). Shakespearean Comedy and the Discourses of Print. In The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Comedy. Oxford University Press.
• Kiefer, F. P. (2019). "Collaborating with Shakespeare". In How and Why We Teach Shakespeare, edited by Sidney Homan(pp 138-45). London: Routledge.
• Kiefer, F. P. (2018). "Shakespearean Comedy and the Discourses of Print". In The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Comedy, edited by Heather Hirschfeld(pp 395-410). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Kiefer, F. P. (2012). Architecture. In The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare, edited by Arthur Kinney(pp 680-701). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Journals/Publications

• Kiefer, F. P. (2019). John Lyly and the Most Misread Speech in Shakespeare. Connotations, 28, 26-42.
• Kiefer, F. P. (2018). "Hamlet's 'What a Piece of Work is a Man". Notes and Queries, 65(1), 74-75.
• Kiefer, F. P. (2017). "Accidental Judgments" and "Casual Slaughters" in Hamlet: Horatio's Eyewitness Account. Shakespeare Studies, 45, 184-202.
• Kiefer, F. P. (2015). “Lost and Found: William Boyle’s Jugurth.”. Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England..
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  This article was supposed to have been published in late 2014. But in December I received a newly copyedited version of the article and the news that it would be published in 2015.
• Kiefer, F. (1987). The dance of the madmen in the Duchess of Malfi.. The journal of medieval and Renaissance studies, 17(Issue 2), 211-33.

Presentations

• Kiefer, F. P. (2016, March). Topicality: The Drama Adapts to a New Political World, an invited lecture. Renaissance Society of America, annual meeting. Boston: Renaissance Society of America.
• Kiefer, F. P. (2016, October). Why Hamlet and Horatio Cannot Agree. An invited presentation, part of the Scholar Series for the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. The English Department of Arizona State University: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.

Reviews

• Kiefer, F. P. (2017. Review of "A Mirror for Magistrates" in Context: Literature, History, and Politis in Early Modern England(pp electronic). Modern Philology.
• Kiefer, F. P. (2014. Sarah Wall-Randell, The Immaterial Book: Reading and Romance in Early Modern England.(pp 1459-60).