The main aim of this website is to create an accurate list of my publications so that anyone interested in my work can locate them. I also provide an up-to-date CV that is more accurate and complete than those available elsewhere. The bio-bibliographical sections will remain constant, but under Databases and Work in Progress I plan to add new material as my research advances.
I have always tried to play a part in the design of my books, especially the dust jackets, and I have been fortunate in working with receptive publishers, as the illustrations at the top of this page show. In 1974, when planning with Routledge and Kegan Paul the six volumes of Shakespeare, the Critical Heritage, I persuaded them to take a different image of Shakespeare for each volume, the changes in his appearance (all deriving from Droeshout’s engraving in the First Folio) matching the changes in his reception over those two hundred years. It gives me great pleasure that this series of dust jackets is collectively visible for the first time here, and that the volumes have been reprinted by Routledge. On their right are some of the six volumes so far published of its successor, Shakespeare, the Critical Tradition, dealing with individual plays. Long dormant, it has been re-launched by Bloomsbury, publisher of the Arden Shakespeare. I am co-editor, with Professor Joseph D. Candido (University of Arkansas), who edited King John in 1996. Several new volumes have been commissioned, and when earlier volumes are reprinted they will include revised introductions extending the survey of modern criticism to the present day.
Having spent twelve years working on The Oxford Francis Bacon, first as Chair of the Editorial Board, then as Director, I recently stepped down. Of the planned 16 volumes, eight have been published and eight are in preparation. I continue as Editor-in-Chief of The Collected Works of John Ford (Oxford University Press), of which three volumes have appeared. Vol. I (2011), co-authored with Gilles Monsarrat and Rob Watt, contains Ford’s poetry and prose works. I edited his six co-authored plays in Vols. II and III (2017), of which II is a monograph on the problems of identifying co-authorship, and III contains the plays edited by Christopher Adams, Nigel Bawcutt, Marcus Dahl, Eleanor Lowe, Brian Vickers, Martin Wiggins, and Rowland Wymer. Vol IV, the first of two devoted to Ford’s sole-authored plays, was submitted to the publisher in June 2021. It contains ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, ed. Katsuhiko Nogami, with an introduction by Brian Vickers; Lovers’ Melancholy, ed. Tom Cain; The Broken Heart, ed. Lisa Hopkins; and The Queen, ed. Eleanor Howe and Martin Wiggins. Vol. V is in preparation.
I have recently signed a contract with Boydell and Brewer for a new edition of The Works of Thomas Kyd in two volumes. The Editorial Board consists of myself, †David Bevington, Martin Wiggins, Darren Freebury-Jones, Martin Dimmock, Eugene Giddens, Ian Burrows, Lucy Rayfield, Domenico Lovascio, Daniel Starza Smith, and Rebekah Owens.
Two books are in progress: Recovering Thomas Kyd: a Canon Restored (Princeton University Press), and Saving Shakespeare’s Text. The Crisis in Authorship Studies.
5 July 2021