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To mark Europe Day, the University of Adelaide’s EU Centre for Global Affairs and the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (Europe 1100-1800) present:

The Death of Shakespeare

Main image: William Shakespeare (c.1564-1616) by William Blake (1757-1827). (c) Manchester Art Gallery

This year the world celebrates 400 years of William Shakespeare’s legacy. At the time of his death on 23 April 1616 Shakespeare was far from a celebrity.

Beyond the country town of Stratford where he had been born and now was buried, his death appears to have occasioned little interest or attention. Why did the final exit of the man now acclaimed as the world’s most famous writer not attract more resounding applause? How was Shakespeare’s reputation established in the years after his death? How did his words spread, beyond Britain, through Europe, globally?

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Emeritus Professor Ian Donaldson, FBA FRSE FAHA Emeritus Professor Ian Donaldson has had an outstanding academic and professional career and is one of Australia’s most energetic and effective champions of the importance and value of the Humanities. Currently an Honorary Professorial Fellow in the School of Culture and Communication at The University of Melbourne, he has previously been Fellow and Lecturer of Wadham College, Oxford (1962-9), a Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge (1995-2005), and has chaired the English Faculties of both these Universities. He was also Regius Professor of Rhetoric and English literature, Edinburgh University, perhaps the most distinguished and certainly the oldest Chair of English Language and Literature in the world. Resigning his Oxford fellowship to return to Australia in 1969, he was Professor of English at the ANU and also Head of Department (1969-91).

In the last three years Professor Donaldson has produced two related publications, the culmination of a life-time of scholarly work: his authoritative biography, Ben Jonson: A Life (Oxford: OUP, 2011), and his General Editorship of the Cambridge Edition of The Works of Ben Jonson (Cambridge: CUP, 2012). The Cambridge Works has been praised in the London Review of Books as ‘[a] formidable enterprise’ while the Times Literary Supplement has described it as an ‘outstanding edition’ and an ‘invaluable scholarly resource’. The biography, Ben Jonson: A Life, has also been published to critical acclaim.

Professor Ian Gadd is Professor of English Literature at Bath Spa University and President of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP), the largest scholarly society in the world devoted to the study of the history of the book. His research focuses on the printing and publishing of books in England in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He was the Charlton Hinman Fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC, in 2011.