Richard Wilson

With Worldly Shakespeare: The Theatre of Our Good Will (2016) Wilson extends this agonistic approach to questions of globalisation, and proposes that Shakespeare created a drama without catharsis, in which the imperative to 'offend but with good will' prefigures the globalised communities of our own 'time of Facebook and fatwa, internet and intifada'. Robert Stagg described this book in the Times Literary Supplement as 'dazzling' in its power to cut through cliches 'like a shark with otters'.

Wilson's 2013 book Free Will: Art and Power on Shakespeare's Stage is a comprehensive rereading of the plays in terms of Shakespeare's patronage relations. It maintains that the dramatist found artistic freedom by adopting an 'abject position' towards authority, and by staging 'the power of weakness' in the 'investiture crisis' of the age of absolutism.

Shakespeare's 'theatre of shadows' stages 'the instability of the opposition between authorised and unauthorised violence' and 'the recognition of the reversibility of monsters and martyrs, terrorists and torturers, or artists and assassins', in this interpretation. Thus, in Shakespeare in French Theory (2006) Wilson explains that while for Anglo-Saxon culture Shakespeare is a man of the monarchy, in France he has always been the man of the mob.

Wilson is known for his archival research on Shakespeare's Catholic background and possible Lancashire connections. But in Secret Shakespeare (2004) he argued that 'though Shakespeare was born into a Catholic world, he reacted against it' and 'resisted the resistance'. Like the painter Caravaggio, what Shakespeare performs, the book concluded, was not some hidden secret, but secrecy itself.

He was an academic advisor for the BBC series In Search of Shakespeare (2001). He appears in the series, interviewed by Michael Wood.

Since 1999 he has been a Trustee of Shakespeare North. He is Academic Advisor on its project to rebuild the Elizabethan playhouse at Prescot (Knowsley) near Liverpool.

Associated since the 1980s with the British Cultural Materialist school of criticism, according to Will Power (1993) Wilson's work aims to combine 'high theory and low archives'. He was described by the critic A.D. Nuttall as 'Perhaps the most brilliant of the Shakespearean Historicists'.

Taught at University of Lancaster 1978–2005:

Richard Wilson studied at York University (1970–5) with Philip Brockbank, C.A. Patrides and F.R. Leavis, who influenced his close reading in historical contexts. He wrote his PhD thesis under the supervision of Jacques Berthoud on Shakespeare and Renaissance perspective theory.

Professor Richard Wilson (born 1950) is the Sir Peter Hall Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Kingston University, London.