British Academy Literature Week

Monday 19 October 2009

THE BRITISH ACADEMY
10 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1Y 5AH

17TH CENTURY POETRY & DRAMA

5.00pm
THE AUTHORS OF KING EDWARD III

Sir Brian Vickers in conversation with Laurie Maguire

Ever since Edward Capell reprinted it in 1760 as ‘thought to be writ by Shakespeare’, the anonymously published play, The Reign of King Edward III (1596), has hovered on the edge of Shakespeare’s canon. He has been judged to be its sole author; its co-author; or to have had no part in its creation. By combining traditional literary analytical methods with some recently developed software programs designed to detect plagiarism, Brian Vickers can now define the extent of Shakespeare’s contribution and for the first time reveal the identity of his co-author.

6.30pm
DONNE, BY HAND

The 2009 Chatterton Lecture by Tom Lockwood
Commentator: Peter Beal

‘Why not do Donne – an edition and Life – for the Clarendon Press?’ With this letter of 1906 from W.A. Raleigh, newly installed in the new chair in English Literature at Oxford, to H.J.C. Grierson, the first Professor of English at Aberdeen, began a new phase in the afterlife of John Donne’s poetry. The edition that Grierson produced, The Poems of John Donne (1912), decisively reshaped Donne as a manuscript poet for the twentieth century; and this lecture explores the later lives of Donne’s poetry through the making and the influence of Grierson’s edition, itself vitally part of a manuscript culture. Many early readers – like Ben Jonson – feared that ‘Donne himself, for not being understood, would perish’; this lecture argues instead that subsequent understandings of Donne and his works, in manuscript and print, and by different audiences, are necessary elements of the poet we read today.

SIR BRIAN VICKERS, FBA is a Distinguished Senior Fellow of the School of Advanced Study, London University. He has published extensively on Greek tragedy, classical rhetoric and its influence, Shakespeare, Francis Bacon, and early modern science and is the General Editor of The Complete Works of John Ford. His recent authorship studies include: ‘Counterfeiting’ Shakespeare. Evidence, Authorship, and John Ford’s Funerall Elegye (2002); Shakespeare, Co-Author. A Historical Study of Five Collaborative Plays (2002); and Shakespeare, A Lover’s Complaint, and John Davies of Hereford (2007).

DR TOM LOCKWOOD has been a Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Birmingham since 2005, and before that held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship. His research recovers in manuscript the texts and contexts of early modern literary writing, and places early modern writers in the larger context of their reception by subsequent readers. He is the author of Ben Jonson in the Romantic Age (2005) and was the winner, in 2003, of The Review of English Studies Essay Prize; his current projects include a book, Shakespeare and His Text.

PROFESSOR LAURIE MAGUIRE is Professor of English Literature at Magdalen College, Oxford. She specialises in Shakespeare but her dramatic interests are wide: from ancient Greece to contemporary theatre. In the Renaissance her particular passions are Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Heywood, and the period’s most prolific playwright, “Anon”. She has been a judge on the Laurence Olivier Theatre panel, and reviews theatre for the TLS. Her new book, Helen of Troy: From Homer to Hollywood appeared earlier this year.

DR PETER BEAL FBA, FSA, was formerly English Manuscript Expert and a Director at Sotheby’s, London. He is currently Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of English Studies, University of London, where he is compiling an online database (CELM) expanding his published Index of English Literary Manuscripts 1450-1700 (4 vols, 1980-93). His various books and articles include the series English Manuscript Studies co-founded and coedited by him.

Organised in association with the
Institute of English Studies, University of London