Key people: Professor Ewan Fernie

Ewan Fernie is Chair, Professor and Fellow of the Shakespeare Institute.  Erica Whyman said his latest book, Shakespeare for Freedom: Why the Plays Matter, "should inspire scholars and theatre-makers alike to treat him once again as a liberating spirit, an existential provocateur and a playwright for our times." 

Fernie is co-convenor, with Abigail Rokison-Woodall, of the pioneering MA in Shakespeare and Creativity.  His collaborative civic liturgy for St George's Day was performed in major cathedrals across the country.  The novel he co-wrote with Simon Palfrey, Macbeth, Macbeth, was described by Slavoj Žižek as "a miracle, an instant classic."  Fernie is currently working, with Katharine Craik, on a new play for the RSC based on Shakespeare's Pericles, and on the Birmingham-based Shakespearean, activist and heterodox preacher he considers a lost prophet of incomplete modernity, George Dawson (1821-76).