Richard Wilson (scholar)

Professor Richard Wilson
Occupation	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]

Education and employment

Richard Wilson studied at York University (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:

• Lecturer in English Literature, 1978
• Reader in Renaissance Studies, 1993
• Professor of Renaissance Studies, 1994
• Director of the Lancaster Shakespeare Programme

Taught at Cardiff University 2005–2012

• Professor of English Literature
• Convenor of the Medieval and Early Modern Research Initiative (MEMORI)

Taught at Kingston University 2012–

• Sir Peter Hall Professor of Shakespeare Studies
• Convenor of the Kingston Shakespeare Seminar (KiSS)

Visiting Fellowships and Professorships

• Visiting Fellow, Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, 1991-2
• Visiting Professor, University of Paris III (Sorbonne Nouvelle), 2001-2
• 2006 Fellow, Shakespeare's Globe, London^[3][4]
• Distinguished Visiting Professor, University of Paris IV (Paris-Sorbonne), 2011–12

Special Lectures

• 2001 British Academy Shakespeare Lecture: 'A World Elsewhere: Shakespeare's Sense of an Exit'^[5]

• 2004 Rutherford Lecture at the University of Kent: 'Shakespeare in Hate: Performing the Virgin Queen'

• 2005 Stachniewski Lecture at Manchester University: 'Making Men of Monsters: Shakespeare in the company of strangers'^[6]

• 2006 Shakespeare's Globe Fellowship Lecture: 'Fools of Time: Shakespeare and the Martyrs' ^[3]

• 2012 Shakespeare Institute Lecture, Stratford: 'Monstrous To Our Human Reason: Minding the gap in "The Winter's Tale"' (8 March) ^[7]

• 2012 Agder Academy Lecture, Kristiansand: 'Denmark's a Prison: "Hamlet" and Christian IV' [Årbok for 2012 – AGDER VITENSKAPSAKADEMI]

• 2013 Inaugural Lecture at Kingston University: 'Sermons in Stones: Shakespeare's Dangerous Thresholds' (30 October)

• 2014 Shakespeare Birthday Lecture at the University of Hull: 'Moonlight Sonata: Larkin and the Shakespeare Prize' (30 April)

International Conferences

Richard Wilson has organised a series of international conferences:

• 'Religion, Region, Patronage and Performance' at Lancaster University and Hoghton Tower, Lancashire, 1999^[8]
• 'The New Shakespeare: A writer and his readers: The Return of the Author in Shakespeare Studies' at Lancaster Castle, 2004^[8]
• 'Shakespeare, Violence & Terror' at Shakespeare's Globe, 2006^[9]
• 'Shakespeare and Derrida' at Cardiff University, 2007^[10]
• 'Shakespeare and Wales' at Cardiff University, 2010^[11]
• 'Garrick and Shakespeare' at Garrick's Temple and the Rose Theatre, Kingston, 2014
• 'Jan Kott Our Contemporary' at the Rose Theatre, Kingston, 2015

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.

Publications

Richard Wilson's publications include Will Power, Secret Shakespeare, Shakespeare in French Theory and Free Will. Influenced by French and German contemporary thought, he reads Shakespearean drama in terms of its strategic undecidability. It is his research into the conditions of this undecidability that led him to his proposition, in Secret Shakespeare, that Shakespeare's is a theatre of "resistance to the resistance."^[15] Ultimately, what this theatre of shadows stages is "the instability of the opposition between authorized and unauthorized violence" and "the recognition of the reversibility of monsters and martyrs, terrorists and torturers, or artists and assassins."^[16] Thus in Shakespeare in French Theory he argues that while for Anglo-Saxon culture Shakespeare is a man of the monarchy, in France he has always been the man of the mob.^[17]

Wilson is also known for research on Shakespeare's Catholic background and possible Lancashire connections. In Secret Shakespeare he argued that 'though Shakespeare was born into a Catholic world, he reacted against it',^[15] but that his plays all start from the 'Bloody Question' of a test of loyalty or love.

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 argues that the dramatist found artistic freedom by adopting an 'abject position' towards authority, and by staging 'the power of weakness'.

Associated with the British Cultural Materialist school of criticism, according to Will Power (1993) his work aims to combine 'high theory and low archives'. Wilson was described by the critic A.D. Nuttall as 'Perhaps the most brilliant of the Shakespearean Historicists'.^[18]

Richard Wilson has published over sixty chapters or articles in academic journals, and is on the editorial board of the journal Shakespeare.^[19]

Books

• Shakespeare: Julius Caesar: A Critical Study (1992) ISBN 978-0-14-077265-4
• Will Power: Essays on Shakespearean Authority (1993) ISBN 978-0-8143-2492-9
• Secret Shakespeare: Studies in Theatre, Religion and Resistance (2004) ISBN 978-0-7190-7025-9
• Shakespeare in French Theory: King of Shadows (2006) ISBN 978-0-415-42165-2
• Free Will: Art and Power on Shakespeare's Stage (2013) ISBN 978-0-7190-9178-0

Edited volumes

• New Historicism and Renaissance Drama (with Richard Dutton) (1992) ISBN 978-0-582-04554-5
• Christopher Marlowe (1999) ISBN 978-0-582-04554-5
• New Casebook: Julius Caesar (2001) ISBN 978-0-333-75467-2
• Region, Religion and Patronage (with Richard Dutton and Alison Findlay) (2004) ISBN 978-0-7190-6369-5
• Theatre and Religion (with Richard Dutton and Alison Findlay) (2004) ISBN 978-0-7190-6363-3
• Shakespeare's Book: Essays in Reading, Writing and Reception (with Richard Meek and Jane Rickard) (2008) ISBN 978-0-7190-7905-4
• Shakespeare and Continental Philosophy (with Jennifer Ann Bates) (2014) ISBN 978 0 7486 9495 2

Newspaper articles

• Times Literary Supplement, 19 December 1997 – 'Shakespeare and the Jesuits'^[20]
• The Independent, 28 April 2005 – 'Shakespeare understood that every foreigner brings gifts'^[6]

Main influences

• New Historicism
• F.R. Leavis
• Jacques Derrida
• Michel Foucault

Books reviewed

• Stuart Sillars, "Review: Claire Asquith (2004), Shadowplay. Richard Wilson (2004), Secret Shakespeare", Nordic Journal of English Studies 4(2), (December 2005).^[21]
• The Free Library – Review of Shakespeare in French Theory by Christopher Pye (January 2009)^[22]
• The Observer – Joint review of Richard Wilson's Secret Shakespeare and Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World (October 2004)^[23]
• Peter Holland, 'Mystery Man', New York Review of Books, 16 December 2004, 34–8
• Anne Barton, 'The One and Only', The New York Review of Books, 11 May 2006^[24]

References

External links

• Cardiff Shakespeare

Authority control VIAF: 69020074 ISNI: 0000 0001 0912 3910 BNF: cb124237811 (data)