Michael Dobson is director of the Shakespeare Institute at Birmingham University and a series editor of the Arden Performance Editions of Shakespeare’s plays. His essays for the LRB have dealt with many aspects of Shakespeare, from purported portraits to the state of Shakespearean criticism, from editions of the plays to the father-daughter problem in King Lear and in Shakespeare’s lodgings in Silver Street. He has also written about the afterlife of Mary Queen of Scots and Elizabeth I’s favourites.
‘It were a delicate stratagem,’ muses King Lear at one point during his great mad scene:
Once upon a time there was a little girl who, at the age of two, had in some fashion to be told that her father had just cut off the head of the beautiful mother who used to lavish affection on...
‘I will never, come hell or high water, let our distinctive British identity be lost in a federal Europe.’ John Major’s ringing assurance to last year’s Conservative Party...
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