About the author

Michael Cordner is Ken Dixon Professor of Drama and Head of Theatre in the Department of Theatre, Film and Television (TFTV) at the University of York.

His main research and teaching interests lie in English drama 1580-1720, theatre, film and television comedy, and the development of the theatre in the UK since the Second World War.

He has a powerful preoccupation – as an editor and general editor, as a sceptical observer of key aspects of mainstream editorial practice in handling dramatic texts, and as a director – with the differing nature of playscripts from different periods, and what they do and do not prescribe about the performances which may be derived from them.

He is the founding General Editor of Oxford University Press’s Oxford English Drama series, which ranges from the 1580s to the early twentieth century. His own editions include: George Farquhar, The Beaux’ Stratagem; Sir George Etherege, Plays; Sir John Vanbrugh, Four Comedies; Four Restoration Marriage Plays; and Richard Brinsley Sheridan, ‘The School for Scandal’ and Other Plays.

He founded and designed the Writing and Performance (Drama/Film/Television) BA and MA, introduced in 2000 within the Department of English and Related Literature at York. Their swift success and popularity with students led to their becoming the foundation for the Theatre: Writing, Directing and Performance BA and MA programmes in TFTV when it in turn was established in 2007.

His current research aims to link historical and textual exploration with practical experiment. He regularly directs plays from the early modern repertoire – most recently, James Shirley’s Hyde Park, John Marston’s The Malcontent, and Thomas Middleton’s A Mad World, My Masters - using student casts and production teams from the Department of Theatre, Film and Television. Two articles by him, which weave together this production experience with a revisionist account of the two plays under scrutiny – ‘A Mad World, My Masters’: From Script to Performance and ‘The Malcontent’ and the ‘Hamlet’ Aftermath – will be published in the spring and summer 2013 issues of Shakespeare Bulletin; while a reconsideration by him of the contrasting philosophies of Peter Hall and John Barton on the demands of Shakespearean theatre and the nature of the apt training to prepare actors to handle it – (Mis)advising Shakespeare’s Actors – will appear in the 2013 volume of Shakespeare Survey.

He has planned the present website to take further the dialogue between performance exploration and traditional analytical and historical approaches to the study of early modern theatre, combining, as it does, innovative scholarly contributions with the mapping and analysis of the rehearsal and production process by which a major Jacobean work is brought back to the stage, and the challenges confronted and discoveries made during that process.

http://www.york.ac.uk/tftv/staff/cordner/