Cyrus Hoy works mainly in the field of Renaissance and seventeenth-century English literature. He is particularly interested in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama and the styles in comedy, tragedy, and tragicomedy that are characteristic of it. He is concerned as well with tracing the prevalence and development of these styles in the Restoration drama of the later seventeenth century. He has done a good deal of work in bibliography and textual criticism, and has edited and annotated a number of dramatic texts of Shakespeare and other dramatists of the period. Bibliographical scrutiny of the linguistic details of seventeenth-century dramatic texts is basic to the studies in attribution that he has conducted—studies dealing with problems involving the authorship of anonymous or collaborative Renaissance English plays. This is an aspect of his larger concern with the qualities (syntactic, idiomatic, metaphoric) of the language of Renaissance English literature, and the capacities of this language for both authorial and generic differentiation.
Taught at the University of Virginia and Vanderbilt University. Author of The Hyacinth Room: An Investigation into the Nature of Comedy, Tragedy, and Tragicomedy; the commentary volumes for the Cambridge edition of Dekker's Dramatic Works; articles on Forster, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, Massinger, Restoration drama, Shaw, S.N. Behrman. Editor of Hamlet (Norton Critical Edition), Beaumont and Fletcher's Knight of the Burning Pestle, The Scornful Lady, The Faithful Shepherdess, Bonduca, The Humorous Lieutenant, The Pilgrim (in volumes 1-5 of the new Cambridge Beaumont and Fletcher); Massinger's The City Madam; and Marianne Moore's letters to Hildegarde Watson. Contributor to the new CBEL, vol. 1. General editor, Regents Renaissance Drama Series; Summer Seminar Director, National Endowment for the Humanities; Folger Shakespeare Library Fellow; Guggenheim Fellow. Courses in Shakespeare and his contemporaries, Spenser, Sidney.
