Michael Dobson

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.

Letter

Fault-Finders

18 November 1993

Just for Brian Vickers’s own benefit (Letters, 24 February) let me hereby go on record as stating that Appropriating Shakespeare, so far from confining its attentions to books less notable than itself, is as epic in its punitive ambitions as The Dunciad – a work, indeed, with which its whole mind-set (if not its entertainment value) constantly invites comparison.As I understand it, Vickers thinks...
Letter

Dwarf-Basher

8 June 1995

Although Peter Martin clearly finds both the personal character of Edmond Malone and the gentlemen’s-club social milieu he inhabited considerably more sympathique than I do, his response to my review of his conscientious and valuable biography in other respects greatly exaggerates our differences (Letters, 6 July). So far from cherishing an animus against ‘sound scholarly work, using primary sources...
Letter
I am puzzled as to why Derek Hughes (Letters, 5 June)should be so indignantly determined to misconstrue my comments about the style and emphasis of Janet Todd’s eminently scholarly biography of Aphra Behn as allegations of ignorance. I thought I had made it clear that my reservations are, if anything, of exactly the opposite tendency, to the effect that Todd spends too much time conscientiously counting...
Letter
‘I was born where the sound of the waves is the sound of tears,’ wrote Radclyffe Hall. And Jean McNicol (LRB, 30 October) observes that ‘this loses something when you discover that her place of birth was Bournemouth.’ Speaking, admittedly, as someone else whose place of birth was Bournemouth, I’d say it gained rather a lot, and I’d be sorry to see the LRB endorsing the facile cinematic...
Letter

Gobsmacked

16 July 1998

I was sorry that my account of a whole batch of recent books on Shakespeare and wonder (LRB, 16 July) couldn’t fit in more than a paragraph or so and a few general remarks about Peter Platt’s Reason Diminished, so I’m quite pleased that its author has compensated for this by reviewing the book much more fully himself (Letters, 20 August). While I’m not surprised that Platt found so much more...

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...

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Identity Parade

Linda Colley, 25 February 1993

‘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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