Professor John Jowett

John Jowett

Shakespeare Institute
Emeritus Professor of Shakespeare Studies

Contact details

Email
j.d.jowett@bham.ac.uk
Address
The Shakespeare Institute
Mason Croft
Church Street
Stratford-upon-Avon
CV37 6HP
UK

My research focuses mainly on Shakespeare and early modern drama, with particular reference to editing and all areas of textual study.

Qualifications

  • BA (Hons), and MA (Distinction), Newcastle-upon-Tyne
  • PhD (Liverpool)

Biography

Born in Lancashire, I took my BA and MA at Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and my PhD at Liverpool University. My doctoral thesis was an edition of Henry Chettle’s Tragedy of Hoffman. As I was completing, I took up a position with Oxford University Press as an academic editor of the landmark 1986-7 Oxford edition of Shakespeare's Complete Works. I then spent five years lecturing at the University of Waikato in Hamilton, New Zealand. Afterwards, I taught for a year in the Department of English Literature at Glasgow University, before being appointed to the Shakespeare Institute in 1993.Though I retired in 2021 I remain active as a researcher.

Research

I am a textual editor and specialist in all areas of textual study relating to Shakespeare and the early modern period, with special emphasis on the drama.

Major completed collaborative projects include the online and print New Oxford Shakespeare Critical Reference and Modern Critical editions of Shakespeare’s complete works. I was one of the General Editors, with particular responsibility for the original-spelling Critical Reference edition. I edited some of the most textually challenging texts, including Hamlet and King Lear.

Previous to this, I was an Associate General Editor and major contributor to Thomas Middleton’s Collected Works. I have edited Richard III and Timon of Athens for the Oxford Wold’s Classics series, and Sir Thomas More for the Arden Shakespeare. I have also prepared a mini-website for the Folger Shakespeare Library on Sir Edward Dering’s 1623 manuscript adaptation of Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays.

I am a General Editor of the ongoing Arden Early Modern Drama, a parallel series to the Arden Shakespeare that publishes non-Shakespearian drama of the early modern period. I have recently completed an edition of Ben Jonson’s Volpone for the series. As an associate member of the Editorial Committee of the Malone Society, I have overseen a number of their editions. I serve on the Advisory Board of several journals including Shakespeare Survey.

I am the author of Shakespeare and Text, and have published numerous articles on textual studies in leading scholarly journals and essay collections. Current and recent projects include an ecocritical essay on Timon of Athens, a study of the Shakespeare Second Folio, and a collection of essays on Measure for Measure.

Other activities

I have been a visiting lecturer at various universities in Britain, Europe, America, Australia, and New Zealand.

Publications

Editions

  • Ben Jonson, Volpone, Or, The Fox, ed. John Jowett, Arden Early Modern Drama (Bloomsbury, 2024)
  • William Shakespeare, Complete Works, Modern Critical and Critical Reference Editions, New Oxford Shakespeare, gen. ed. Gary Taylor, John Jowett, Terri Bourus, and Gabriel Egan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016-17; Oxford Scholarly Editions Onilne)
  • Sir Thomas More, ed. John Jowett, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 2011)
  • Thomas Middleton, Collected Works, General Editor Gary Taylor, Associate General Editors John Jowett and others, print and electronic editions; Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture: A Companion to the Collected Works, with Taylor et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)
  • Timon of Athens, ed. John Jowett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)
  • The Tragedy of King Richard III, ed. John Jowett (Oxford: Clarendon, 2000)
  • The Oxford Shakespeare: S.W. Wells and Gary Taylor, with John Jowett and William Montgomery, William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987

Other books

  • Shakespeare and Text (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007; revised edition 2017)
  • Gary Taylor and John Jowett, Shakespeare Reshaped, 1606-1623 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993; reprinted 1997)

Selected articles

  • ‘Timon and Melancholia’, Cahiers Élisabéthains 109 (2022), 64-74
  • ‘Jonson’s University Show’, Ben Jonson Journal 29 (2022), 21-45
  • ‘The Early Printed Texts of Shakespeare’, in The Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Textual Studies, ed. Lukas Erne (Methuen, 2020), 71-93
  • ‘The Origins of Richard Duke of York’, in Early Shakespeare, ed. Rory Loughnane and Andrew J. Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 235-60
  • ‘Whose Hamlet Mocks the Warm Clown?’, Publications of The Bibliographical Society of America 113 (2019), 341-70
  • ‘Exit Manuscripts: The Archive of Theatre and the Archive of Print’, Shakespeare Survey 70 (2017), 117-26
  • ‘Printing, Publishing, Texts’, section introductory essay, Cambridge World Shakespeare Encyclopedia, print and electronic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 323-35
  • ‘Full Pricks and Great P’s’: Spellings, Punctuation, Accidentals’, in Shakespeare and Textual Studies, ed. Margaret Jane Kidnie and Sonia Massai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 317-31
  • ‘Disintegration, 1924’, in Shakespeare 10 (2014), 171-87
  • ‘A Collaboration: Shakespeare and Hand C in Sir Thomas More’, in Shakespeare Survey 65 (2012), 255-68