David McInnis
David McInnis is Associate Professor of Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama at the University of Melbourne. He is author of Shakespeare and Lost Plays (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and Mind-Travelling and Voyage Drama in Early Modern England (Palgrave, 2013), and editor of Dekker’s Old Fortunatus for the Revels Plays series (Manchester UP, 2020). With Roslyn L. Knutson and Matthew Steggle, he is founder and co-editor of the Lost Plays Database. He has also edited a number of books, including Lost Plays in Shakespeare’s England (Palgrave, 2014; co-edited with Steggle) and a sequel volume, Loss and the Literary Culture of Shakespeare’s Time (Palgrave 2020; co-edited with Knutson and Steggle); Travel and Drama in Early Modern England: The Journeying Play (Cambridge UP, 2018; co-edited with Claire Jowitt); and Tamburlaine: A Critical Reader (Arden Early Modern Drama Guides, 2020).
The basic facts of William Shakespeare’s life – his baptism, early marriage, three children, shareholder status in his playing company, acquisition of a coat of arms, purchase of New Place in Stratford, and his death in 1616 – are well known. Is there anything new to say?
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In an early episode of the cult Canadian television series Slings & Arrows (2003), the director of the ‘Burbage Festival’ finds himself addressing a corporate audience, forced to teach management strategy through Shakespeare: ‘Do any of you seriously believe that you’re going to sell more plastics products to the construction industry by studying, say, the crisis management techniques ... (read more)
Ben Jonson famously derided Shakespeare’s grasp of ‘small Latin and less Greek’, and vocal sceptics in our own time refuse to believe that a grammar-school education was sufficient to enable the man from Stratford to write the plays attributed to ‘Shakespeare’ (of course it was). Rather than create another study documenting Shakespeare’s narrative and dramatic debts to the classics, Jo ... (read more)
In 2017, Oskar Eustis directed the Public Theater production of Julius Caesar – a play that pivots on the assassination of a political leader – in Central Park with a lead actor who bore an unmistakable likeness to the forty-fifth president of the United States. The conservative backlash was swift and powerful: key sponsors Delta Air Lines and the Bank of America withdrew funding for the produ ... (read more)
The search for Shakespeare’s library (the books ostensibly owned by Shakespeare but dispersed without a trace after his death) is driven largely by the hope that marginalia, notes, and drafts might provide unfettered access to authorial intention. Inevitably, the missing library turns out to be central to a number of the anti-Stratfordian cases, including Diana Price’s convoluted and ill-infor ... (read more)
In 1916, the 300th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death coincided with the first anniversary of the Gallipoli landings, thus providing the impetus for this absorbing study of memory and forgetting, and what the authors call a specifically ‘antipodal’ dynamic of asymmetrical commemorations across the northern and southern hemispheres. The Shakespeare Tercentenary, they note, ‘lies at the cusp ... (read more)
There have been more than 600 publications on Hamlet in the last five years alone. Uniquely amongst Shakespeare’s plays, Hamlet even has an entire journal devoted to it: Hamlet Studies. Offering something new in these circumstances takes courage. Drawing inspiration from Margreta de Grazia’s liberation of Hamlet from the anachronistic concerns of Romantic and post-Romantic critics (2007), Rhod ... (read more)
Does William Shakespeare still matter? The question was posed frequently throughout 2016, the quatercentenary of his death. Those sceptical of Shakespeare’s enduring relevance faced the challenge of explaining the seemingly endless proliferation of films and adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays in an age ostensibly dislocated from early modern sensibilities and politics. R.S. White’s timely bo ... (read more)
Shakespeare's King Lear exists in two significantly different versions, the quarto (Q) published in 1608 and the folio (F) of 1623. Scholars typically believe that the play was altered for performances after its first printing. Possibly this took place around 1610, when the King's Men were interested enough in the legendary history of Britain to perform Cymbeline. The folio text was the seeming pr ... (read more)