Name J. Wilson Education University of Cambridge | Role Professor | |
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Died January 15, 1969, Balerno, United Kingdom Books What happens in Hamlet, The fortunes of Falstaff, The manuscript of Shakes, Martin Marprelate and Shak, Leslie Stephen and Matth Similar People Arthur Quiller‑Couch, A L Rowse, Harold Bloom, Alan Durband, David Bevington | ||
John Dover Wilson CH (13 July 1881 – 15 January 1969) was a professor and scholar of Renaissance drama, focusing particularly on the work of William Shakespeare. Born at Mortlake (then in Surrey, now in Greater London), he attended Lancing College, Sussex, Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge and taught at King's College London before becoming Regius Professor of English literature at the University of Edinburgh.
Wilson was primarily known for two lifelong projects. He was the chief editor, with the assistance of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, of the New Shakespeare, a series of editions of the complete plays published by Cambridge University Press. Of those editions, the one of Hamlet was his particular focus, and he published a number of other books on the play, supporting the textual scholarship of his edition as well as offering an interpretation. His What Happens in Hamlet, first published in 1935, is among the more influential books ever written on the play, being reprinted several times including a revised second edition in 1959.
Wilson's textual work was characterized by considerable boldness and confidence in his own judgement. His work on the complicated matter of the transmission of Shakespeare's texts—none of Shakespeare's manuscripts survive and no published edition of any play was supervised directly by the playwright, so all of the texts are mediated by compositors and printers—was highly respected, though some of his theories have since been eclipsed by new scholarship. However, when the textual principles he painstakingly established did not support the reading that seemed right to him, he would depart widely from them, earning him a reputation for both brilliance and capriciousness; Stanley Edgar Hyman refers to the "valuable (sometime weird)" New Shakespeare. In his interpretations that juxtaposition was heightened without the support of his arduous textual work. These interpretations included a reading of the famous bedroom scene between Hamlet and his mother that remains influential (if frequently questioned) to this day, but also peculiar ideas about covert Lutheranism and almost completely unsourced speculation about Shakespeare's relationship with his son-in-law. The influential Shakespearean W. W. Greg, Wilson's nemesis, once referred to Wilson's ideas as "the careerings of a not too captive balloon in a high wind."
In 1969 he completed a posthumously-published memoir, Milestones on the Dover Road.