Professor Richard Wilson | |
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| Occupation(s) | Early modern scholar and anniversary professor at Kingston University |
Professor Richard Wilson (born 1950) [1] is the Sir Peter Hall Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Kingston University, London. [2]
Professor Richard Wilson | |
|---|---|
| | |
| Occupation(s) | Early modern scholar and anniversary professor at Kingston University |
Professor Richard Wilson (born 1950) [1] is the Sir Peter Hall Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Kingston University, London. [2]
Richard Wilson studied at the University of York (1970–5) with Philip Brockbank, C.A. Patrides and F.R. Leavis, who influenced his close reading in historical contexts. He wrote his PhD thesis under the supervision of Jacques Berthoud on Shakespeare and Renaissance perspective theory.
Taught at University of Lancaster 1978–2005:
Taught at Cardiff University 2005–2012
Taught at Kingston University 2012–
Visiting Fellowships and Professorships
Special Lectures
International Conferences
Richard Wilson has organised a series of international conferences:
Academic Advisor
Since 1999 he has been a Trustee of Shakespeare North. [12] He is Academic Advisor on its project to rebuild the Elizabethan playhouse at Prescot (Knowsley) near Liverpool. [13]
He was an academic advisor for the BBC series In Search of Shakespeare (2001). [14] He appears in the series, interviewed by Michael Wood.
Richard Wilson is based at the Rose Theatre, Kingston-upon-Thames, which was created by the director Sir Peter Hall to be a 'teaching theatre' where actors and academics worked together. The theatre is modelled on the Elizabethan Rose playhouse on Bankside.
Richard Wilson's publications include Will Power, Secret Shakespeare, Shakespeare in French Theory, Free Will and Worldly Shakespeare. Influenced by continental philosophy, as well as Anglo-American criticism, he reads Shakespearean drama in terms of its agonistic conflict. It is his research into the conditions of this conflict that led him to his proposition, in Secret Shakespeare, that 'the bloody question' of loyalty during Europe's wars of religion was hardwired into Shakespeare's dramatic imagination, and that in play after play the same scenario is repeated, when some sovereign or seducer, like King Lear, demands to know who 'doth love us', and a resister such as Cordelia responds: 'I cannot heave / My heart into my mouth'. In this way, Shakespeare makes a drama out of 'being dumb' [Sonnet 83]. [15]
Wilson is known for his archival research on Shakespeare's Catholic background and possible Lancashire connections. But in Secret Shakespeare (2004) he argued that 'though Shakespeare was born into a Catholic world, he reacted against it' and 'resisted the resistance'. [15] Like the painter Caravaggio, what Shakespeare performs, the book concluded, was not some hidden secret, but secrecy itself.
Shakespeare's 'theatre of shadows' stages 'the instability of the opposition between authorised and unauthorised violence' and 'the recognition of the reversibility of monsters and martyrs, terrorists and torturers, or artists and assassins', in this interpretation. [16] Thus, in Shakespeare in French Theory (2006) Wilson explains that while for English culture Shakespeare is a man of the monarchy, in France he has always been the man of the mob. [17]
Wilson's 2013 book Free Will: Art and Power on Shakespeare's Stage is a comprehensive rereading of the plays in terms of Shakespeare's patronage relations. It maintains that the dramatist found artistic freedom by adopting an 'abject position' towards authority, and by staging 'the power of weakness' in the 'investiture crisis' of the age of absolutism.
With Worldly Shakespeare: The Theatre of Our Good Will (2016) Wilson extends this agonistic approach to questions of globalisation, and proposes that Shakespeare created a drama without catharsis, in which the imperative to 'offend but with good will' prefigures the globalised communities of our own 'time of Facebook and fatwa, internet and intifada'. Robert Stagg described this book in the Times Literary Supplement as 'dazzling'.
Associated since the 1980s with the British Cultural Materialist school of criticism, according to Will Power (1993) Wilson's work aims to combine 'high theory and low archives'. He was described by the critic A.D. Nuttall as 'Perhaps the most brilliant of the Shakespearean Historicists'. [18]
Richard Wilson has published over a hundred chapters or articles in academic journals, and is on the editorial boards of the journals Shakespeare and Marlowe Studies [19]
Christopher Marlowe, also known as Kit Marlowe, was an English playwright, poet, and translator of the Elizabethan era. Marlowe is among the most famous of the Elizabethan playwrights. Based upon the "many imitations" of his play Tamburlaine, modern scholars consider him to have been the foremost dramatist in London in the years just before his mysterious early death. Some scholars also believe that he greatly influenced William Shakespeare, who was baptised in the same year as Marlowe and later succeeded him as the preeminent Elizabethan playwright. Marlowe was the first to achieve critical reputation for his use of blank verse, which became the standard for the era. His plays are distinguished by their overreaching protagonists. Themes found within Marlowe's literary works have been noted as humanistic with realistic emotions, which some scholars find difficult to reconcile with Marlowe's "anti-intellectualism" and his catering to the prurient tastes of his Elizabethan audiences for generous displays of extreme physical violence, cruelty, and bloodshed.
William Shakespeare was an English playwright, poet, and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon". His extant works, including collaborations, consist of some 39 plays, 154 sonnets, three long narrative poems, and a few other verses, some of uncertain authorship. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare remains arguably the most influential writer in the English language, and his works continue to be studied and reinterpreted.
English Renaissance theatre, also known as Renaissance English theatre and Elizabethan theatre, refers to the theatre of England between 1558 and 1642.
Jacques Derrida was an Algerian-born French philosopher. He developed the philosophy of deconstruction, which he utilized in a number of his texts, and which was developed through close readings of the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology. He is one of the major figures associated with post-structuralism and postmodern philosophy although he distanced himself from post-structuralism and disowned the word "postmodernity".
David Garrick was an English actor, playwright, theatre manager and producer who influenced nearly all aspects of European theatrical practice throughout the 18th century, and was a pupil and friend of Samuel Johnson. He appeared in several amateur theatricals, and with his appearance in the title role of Shakespeare's Richard III, audiences and managers began to take notice.
Hélène Cixous is a French writer, playwright and literary critic. During her academic career, she was primarily associated with the Centre universitaire de Vincennes, which she co-founded in 1969 and where she created the first centre of women's studies at a European university. Known for her experimental writing style and great versatility as a writer and thinker, she has written more than seventy books dealing with multiple genres: theatre, literary and feminist theory, art criticism, autobiography and poetic fiction.
Stephen Jay Greenblatt is an American literary historian and author. He has served as the John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University since 2000. Greenblatt is the general editor of The Norton Shakespeare (2015) and the general editor and a contributor to The Norton Anthology of English Literature.
Terence Francis Eagleton is an English literary theorist, critic, and public intellectual. He is currently Distinguished Professor of English Literature at Lancaster University.
Stanley Louis Cavell was an American philosopher. He was the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University. He worked in the fields of ethics, aesthetics, and ordinary language philosophy. As an interpreter, he produced influential works on Wittgenstein, Austin, Emerson, Thoreau, and Heidegger. His work is characterized by its conversational tone and frequent literary references.
Ron Geaves is a British scholar of religious studies who was professor of the comparative study of religion at Liverpool Hope University in England, retiring in December 2013. He was formerly Programme Leader and Chair in religious studies at the University of Chester in England (2001-2007) and Head of Department at the University of Chichester (1999-2001). He was chair of the Muslims in Britain Research Network (2007-2010) and instrumental in the creation of BRAIS, remaining on their advisory board.
Sir Edmund Plowden was a distinguished English lawyer, legal scholar and theorist during the late Tudor period.
Bardolatry is excessive admiration of William Shakespeare. Shakespeare has been known as "the Bard" since the eighteenth century. One who idolizes Shakespeare is known as a bardolator. The term bardolatry, derived from Shakespeare's sobriquet "the Bard of Avon" and the Greek word latria "worship", was coined by George Bernard Shaw in the preface to his collection Three Plays for Puritans published in 1901. Shaw professed to dislike Shakespeare as a thinker and philosopher because Shaw believed that Shakespeare did not engage with social problems as Shaw did in his own plays.
In Shakespearean scholarship, the Henriad refers to a group of William Shakespeare's history plays depicting the rise of the English kings. It is sometimes used to refer to a group of four plays, but some sources and scholars use the term to refer to eight plays. In the 19th century, Algernon Charles Swinburne used the term to refer to three plays, but that use is not current.
Bryan Reynolds, Claire Trevor Professor, Distinguished Professor, and Chancellor's Professor at the University of California-Irvine, is an American critical theorist, performance theorist, and Shakespeare scholar who developed the combined sociopolitical theory, performance aesthetics, and research methodology known as transversal poetics. He is also a playwright, director, performer, and cofounder of the Transversal Theater Company, an Amsterdam-based collective of American and European artists, which has produced a number of his works. Reynolds received his bachelor's degree in English Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, and his master's and doctoral degrees in English and American Literature and Language at Harvard University. He has been a Professor of Drama at the University of California, Irvine since 1998. He has held visiting professorships at the University of London-Drama, the University of Amsterdam-Theater Studies, Utrecht University-Theater Studies, University of Cologne-American Studies, Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt am Main-American Studies, University College Utrecht-Arts and Humanities, the University of California, San Diego-Theatre, Literature, Cognitive Science, the American University of Beirut-English, University of Tsukuba-Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Nairobi-Department of Literature, Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt-Communications, University of Lorraine-Arts, Sciences, & Business Management, INSEEC Business School -Marketing, Paris, Bordeaux, Lyon, École supérieure des sciences commerciales d'Angers; and he has taught at Deleuze Camp at Schloss Wahn, University of Cologne, Germany, and the Grotowski Institute in Wrocław, Poland, among other academic and performing arts institutions. Reynolds is also a regular contributor to Freeskier Magazine, where he publishes articles from his ongoing research on extreme sports.
Femi Euba is a Nigerian actor, writer, and dramatist, who has published numerous works of drama, theory, and fiction. His work as a theatre practitioner encompasses acting, playwriting, and directing. Among the topics of his plays is Yoruba culture.
The religious views of William Shakespeare are the subject of an ongoing scholarly debate dating back more than 150 years. The general assumption about William Shakespeare's religious affiliation is that he was a conforming member of the established Church of England. However, many scholars have speculated about his personal religious beliefs, based on analysis of the historical record and of his published work, with claims that Shakespeare's family may have had Catholic sympathies and that he himself was a secret Catholic.
Garrick's Temple to Shakespeare is a small garden folly erected in 1756 on the north bank of the River Thames at Hampton in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames. Grade I listed, it was built by the actor David Garrick to honour the playwright William Shakespeare, whose plays Garrick performed to great acclaim throughout his career. During his lifetime Garrick used it to house his extensive collection of Shakespearean relics and for entertaining his family and guests. It passed through a succession of owners until coming into public ownership in the 1930s, but it had fallen into serious disrepair by the end of the 20th century. After a campaign supported by distinguished actors and donations from the National Lottery's "good causes" fund, it was restored in the late 1990s and reopened to the public as a museum and memorial to the life and career of Garrick. It is reputedly the world's only shrine to Shakespeare.
David Hawkes is a Professor of English Literature at Arizona State University, Tempe, in the U.S. state of Arizona. He is the author of seven books and the editor of four.
Regina Schwartz is a scholar of English literature and elements of Jewish and Christian religion. A Professor of English and Religion at Northwestern University, she has been known historically for her research and teaching on 17th-century literature, on the Hebrew Bible, and on the interface of literature with the subjects of philosophy, law, and religion.
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