About

Christopher Crosbie is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at North Carolina State University. His academic specialization focuses on Shakespeare and other dramatists of the English Renaissance, with a particular interest in how philosophy is expressed on the popular stage of that period. His research explores the ways classical philosophy influences early modern drama, examining themes such as revenge tragedy, ethics, and the reception of classical thought. Crosbie has published extensively on Shakespeare and his contemporaries, contributing articles to reputable journals and edited collections. His first book, 'Revenge Tragedy and Classical Philosophy on the Early Modern Stage,' was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2019, and he is currently working on a new book project titled 'Shakespeare and the Communitarian Ethics of Intention,' which investigates the ethical implications of unknowable intentions in Shakespearean drama and how the Renaissance stage reconfigured Aristotelian concepts to foster social toleration. Crosbie is also actively involved in teaching courses on Shakespeare, Renaissance drama, and related philosophical topics, and he has received numerous awards for his teaching and scholarly contributions.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Philosophy
• Epistemology
• Social psychology
• Art
• Aesthetics
• Psychoanalysis
• Psychology
• Literature

Selected publications

• Performance review: <i>The Comedy of Errors</i> by Simon Godwin The Comedy of Errors, directed by Simon Godwin for Shakespeare Theatre Company, Washington, DC, USA, 15 September 2024, orchestra centre.

  Cahiers Élisabéthains A Journal of English Renaissance Studies · 2025-03-20

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Macbeth by William Shakespeare (review)

  Comparative drama · 2024-09-01 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Closet Scenes of Shakespeare’s <i>Hamlet</i> and Marston’s <i>Antonio’s Revenge</i>

  The Explicator · 2024-11-22

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Frontmatter

  Edinburgh University Press eBooks · 2023

  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science

  Edinburgh Critical Studies in Shakespeare and Philosophy takes seriously the speculative and worldmaking properties of Shakespeare's art. Maintaining a broad view of 'philosophy' that accommodates first-order questions of metaphysics, ethics, politics and aesthetics, the series also expands our understanding of philosophy to include the unique kinds of theoretical work carried out by performance and poetry itself.

  DOI

• Aristotelian Time, Ethics, and the Art of Persuasion in Shakespeare’s Henry V

  Literature · 2023 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Aesthetics
  • Epistemology

  In his response to the Dauphin, his threats before Harfleur’s walls, and his St. Crispin’s Day oration, Henry V deploys what we might call proleptic histories of the present as a means of rhetorical persuasion. Henry invites his audiences, that is, to imagine themselves in the future, understanding the present as part of their own history. Henry’s invocation of an imagined future that understands the present as a theoretical past betrays a surprising indebtedness to Aristotle’s notion of time as “a measure of change with respect to the before and after.” Drawing on Aristotle’s theory that time depends upon a perceiving mind and that those unconscious of change mistakenly “join up the latter ‘now’ to the former and make it one,” this essay argues that Henry succeeds in altering his auditors’ behavior, and thus generating the history he desires, by merging their shared, lived present with his own fictive temporalities. A mode of persuasion famous in its ethical ambivalence, Henry’s rhetoric reveals how the very ontological assumptions governing perceptions of time may be manipulated, for good or ill, amid audiences who fail to critically envisage their own counterbalancing, imaginative histories.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• <i>Dynamis</i> (Dynamism, Capacity) and <i>Energeia</i> (Actuality)

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023-01-19

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Aristotle’s sense of the movement out of dynamis (potential, capacity) and into energia (actuality) was itself ethically neutral, designed to account for a wide range of types of becoming. Yet it also provided a way of conceptualizing the translation of interior states of being into embodied action. Aristotle’s dynamis-energia continuum, along with his taxonomy of voluntary and involuntary behavior, provided the foundational ethical terms by which early moderns negotiated legal cases, theological disputes, and, just as crucially, the regular dilemmas presented by daily social life. Within this context, the Shakespearean stage became a signal space for working out the era’s complicated ways of understanding the move from dynamis to energia as it pertains to intentional ethical action. This chapter focuses on Julius Caesar and Richard II, two plays that take as their central concern the uncertain intentions of potentially rogue agents and the fashioning of multiple forms of community that occurs in response to such ambiguous interior states. By attending closely to the shifts from dynamis to energia within communities as well as individuals – and to variant resonances of these concepts largely lost to modern audiences – Shakespearean drama freshly reimagines classical ethical ideals as a means for fostering communal tranquility within post-Reformation English culture.

  PublisherDOI

• “Strange Serious Wantoning”: Early Modern Chess Manuals and the Ethics of Virtuous Subterfuge

  Boydell and Brewer eBooks · 2022-12-31

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• : <i>Entertaining the Idea: Shakespeare, Performance, and Philosophy</i>

  Renaissance Quarterly · 2022-12-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Entertaining the Idea: Shakespeare, Performance, and Philosophy. Lowell Gallagher, James Kearney, and Julia Reinhard Lupton, eds. UCLA Clark Memorial Library Series. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021. x + 240 pp. $65. - Volume 75 Issue 4

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• “Strange Serious Wantoning”:

  2022-09-22

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• “Strange Serious Wantoning”: Early Modern Chess Manuals and the Ethics of Virtuous Subterfuge

  2022-11-29 · 1 citations

  otherOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This essay examines English Renaissance chess manuals in order to understand why chess, a game that encourages subterfuge and stratagem, was nonetheless figured as the paradigmatic example of a virtuous pastime. Particular attention is given to da Odenara Damiano’s The Pleasaunt and Wittie Playe of the Cheasts (1564), Arthur Saul’s The Famous Game of Chess Play (1614), and Greco’s The Royall Game of Chess Play (1656).

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Michael Witmore

  891 shared

• Kevin Curran

  891 shared

• Paul Yachnin

  University of California, Irvine

  891 shared

• Ewan Fernie

  891 shared

• Julia Reinhard Lupton

  Society for Renaissance Studies

  891 shared

• Thomas Anderson

  Nova Southeastern University

  891 shared

• Simon Palfrey

  University of California, Santa Barbara

  891 shared

• Madhavi Menon

  891 shared

Awards & honors

• Martin Stevens Award for Best New Essay in Early Drama Studi…
• J. Leeds Barroll Dissertation Prize from the Shakespeare Ass…
• Delta Faculty Fellow , North Carolina State University, 2024…
• Delta Express Instructional Tools Grant , North Carolina Sta…
• Folger Shakespeare Library Short-term Fellowship, 2009-2010