David Roberts

Professor of English, National Teaching Fellow and University Orator

School of English

Email:: david.roberts@bcu.ac.uk

I qualified BA from the University of Bristol and DPhil from Oxford, where I was supervised by the great Shakespeare scholar, Emrys Jones. After teaching at both Bristol and Oxford, I moved to Japan, where I taught at the Universities of Kyoto and Osaka, as well as for the British Council.

I was Head of English at BCU for nearly ten years, combining the role with various Associate Dean responsibilities. During a five-and-a-half year stint as Faculty Dean and Pro-Vice-Chancellor I oversaw numerous projects including the new Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, the expansion of the multi-award winning School of Jewellery, and the strategy that produced a Faculty average GPA above 3 (internationally excellent) in REF2021. In 2018 I stepped down from management to devote more time to teaching and writing. As University Orator I have written and delivered 130 honorary degree citations.

So far I’ve published seventeen books, including five for Oxford University Press and three for Cambridge University Press. The latest is a new edition of Colley Cibber’s Apology for CUP, which one reviewer kindly judged ‘sets a new standard for scholarship in the field’. My work has appeared in leading journals including Shakespeare Quarterly, ELH, New Theatre Quarterly and the Review of English Studies. My essay on Shakespeare, Beethoven and Wagner features in the Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Music, and I have essays forthcoming in the Oxford Handbook of Restoration Literature and the Palgrave Handbook of Theatre Censorship. I’ve also published three textbooks and two novels (currently working on a third). Recently I devised a card game, Shakespertise™, for use in schools and colleges.

Beyond academe I’m keen to support the arts. I’ve served two terms as a trustee of the Birmingham Rep (including a period as interim chair) and sit on the board of Mid Wales Opera. For six years I was a trustee of the Birmingham Hippodrome, for whom I wrote an anniversary book, Hippodrome 120.

Current Activity

Areas of Expertise

Qualifications

Memberships

Teaching

Research

Postgraduate Supervision

Publications

Publications: Scholarly Books (earliest first)

The Ladies: Female Patronage of Restoration Drama, 1660-1700. Oxford English Monographs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).

Ed., Daniel Defoe, Colonel Jack. Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). Corrected scholarly edition based on Samuel Holt Monk’s Oxford English Texts edition with new critical introduction, notes, bibliography.

Ed. Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year. Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). Corrected scholarly edition based on Louis Landa’s Oxford English Texts edition with new critical introduction, notes, medical note, bibliography.

Ed. Lord Chesterfield, Letters. Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). New scholarly edition with critical introduction, notes, bibliography. Reprinted twice; the first fully annotated edition.

Thomas Betterton: The Greatest Actor of the Restoration Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Finalist for the George Freedley Memorial Award of the Theatre Library Association of America, 2011; long-listed for the 2011 Sheridan Morley and Society for Theatre Research Book Prizes.

Updated version of my 1990 edition of A Journal of the Plague Year, issued by OUP in September 2010 (new introduction, notes, bibliography, medical note and topographical index).

Ed., Pinacotheca Bettertonaeana: The Library of a Seventeenth-Century Actor. 210 pp edition of an early eighteenth-century book catalogue with an 8000 word introduction (London: The Society for Theatre Research, 2013).

Restoration Plays and Players. 90,000 word study commissioned by Cambridge University Press (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2014).

George Farquhar: A Migrant Life Reversed. 95,000 word experimental biography, the first book commissioned for Methuen Drama’s new Cultural Histories of Theatre and Performance series (Methuen, 2018).

Ed., William Congreve, The Way of the World. New Mermaids series (Methuen, 2020); edited text with 10,000-word introduction and notes.

Ed., An Apology for the Life of Mr Colley Cibber (Cambridge University Press, 2022); modernized text, substantial introduction and notes.

Work in Progress

An annotated edition of Charles Gildon’s The Life of Mr Thomas Betterton. Studies of Restoration Drama at the Royal Shakespeare Company, the actor Henry Harris, and punctuation in late seventeenth-century dramatic texts.

Publications: Textbooks

The Student’s Guide to Writing Essays (Kogan Page, 1997 Undergraduate textbook, now published by Taylor and Francis. Reprinted five times.

Careers Using English (Kogan Page, 1998). ISBN 0-7494-2407-9. Undergraduate textbook co-authored with Margaret Clewett, now published by Taylor and Francis.

Games for English Literature (Libri, 2016). Textbook for Undergraduate and ‘A’ level, co-authored with Izabela Hopkins.

Publications: Electronic

Ed. Lord Chesterfield, Letters. Oxford English Letters series (Oxford University Press with InteLex, 2000). Electronic reissue of my earlier World’s Classics edition, with updated bibliography.

‘Writing Disasters: Defoe and Plague Writing,’ Oxford University Press blogspace (April 2012); by invitation

‘Daniel Defoe, Londoner,’ Oxford University Press blogspace (April 2013); by invitation

‘Games and the Teaching of Literature’, Higher Education Academy website, November 2015, by invitation: https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/sites/default/files/david_roberts_final_1.pdf

Refereed Journal Articles

‘Old Hamlet and the Archbishop: a new allusion in Hamlet?’ Notes and Queries NS 43 no.2 (June 1996).

‘The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie: An Afternoon at the Bunraku Theatre’, Studies in Theatre Production vol.15 no.1 (March 1997)

‘Towards a Study of Theatre Journalism’, Studies in Theatre Production vol.15 no.4 (December 1997)

‘Shakespeare’s Fellows: Names and Collocations’, Cahiers Elisabethains vol.56 no.1 (January 1999)

‘Donne, Geography, and the Hymn to God my God in My Sicknesse’, Notes and Queries no.46 (June 1999)

‘Making the Words Count: Towards an Analytical Database of Theatre Reviews’, New Theatre Quarterly XV no.4 (November 1999)

‘Ravishing Strides: signs of the peripatetic on the early modern stage’, New Theatre Quarterly vol XVII no.1 (February 2001)

‘Henry VIII and The True Chronicle History of King Leir’, Notes and Queries vol.48 no.3 (September 2001)

‘Two Shakespearian Allusions and the Date of Marvell’s A Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Faun’, Notes and Queries NS 49, no.3 (September 2002)

‘Shakespeare, Theater Criticism and the Acting Tradition’, Shakespeare Quarterly vol 53 no.3 (Fall 2002)

‘As Rude as You Like – Honest: Theatre Criticism and the Law’, New Theatre Quarterly vol XIX part 3 (September 2003)

‘Sir Fopling in the Mall: Parks in The Man of Mode’, Notes and Queries NS 50 no. 3 (September 2003)

‘Caesar’s Gift; playing the park in the late seventeenth century’, ELH vol 71 no.2 (Summer 2004).

‘Sleeping Beauties: Shakespeare, Sleep and the Stage’, Cambridge Quarterly 35 no. 3 (September 2006)

‘Thomas Betterton, Private Tutor’; Notes and Queries NS 54, no.1 (March 2007)

‘Thomas Betterton, bookseller’s apprentice’; The Review of English Studies vol 58 no.236 (November 2007)

‘The 1695 Actors’ Rebellion: new light on old patentees’; Notes and Queries (December 2007)

‘”Almost impossible in Praise”: Dedicatory Criticism in English Dramatic Texts, 1660-1710’; commissioned essay for special issue (no.15) of 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era (October 2008)

‘”I think no ill one:” A recently discovered letter from Thomas Betterton sheds new light on the Chandos Portrait,’ The Times Literary Supplement, 14 August 2009 (3000 word essay forming the edition’s main Commentary feature and the subject of subsequent correspondence)

‘Social Status and the actor: the case of Thomas Betterton,’ Studies in Theatre and Performance vol. 30 no. 2(Summer 2010), 173-85

‘Ranked Among the Best: Cultural Agency in Restoration Translations of French Drama, 1660-1714,’ Modern Language Review vol.108 no.3 (July 2013

‘Chocolate Covered Broccoli? Games and the Literature Student’ (co-authored with Izabela Hopkins), Changing English vol 22 no 2 (May 2015)

‘Shakespeare and the Jewellers’, Cambridge Quarterly, 45 (2) June 2016, 157-74.

‘First Night in Bristol: Reflections on a 250th Anniversary’, New Theatre Quarterly, vol 32 no.3 (August 2016)

‘Annotating Place in Defoe, Modern Language Review, 114 no.3July 2019

‘Beethoven and Shakespeare: Ghosts and Heroes’, The Cambridge Quarterly vol.48 no.2, June 2019, pp.95-112

‘The Path to Woolf Works and the Language of Design: an Interview with Ravi Deepres’, New Theatre Quarterly, August 2019

‘Colley Cibber and Winchester College’ (with Suzanne Foster), Notes and Queries, September 2020

Numerous articles in Japanese academic journals, 1988-1993, as per contractual requirement there.

Invited Chapters in Scholarly Books

‘Thomas Killigrew, Theatre Manager,’ in Philip Major, ed., Thomas Killigrew: Revisionary Essays (Ashgate, 2013), pp.63-90

‘Writing the Ethical Life: Theatrical Biography and the Case of Thomas Betterton,’ in Theatre History and Historiography: Ethics, Evidence and Truth, ed. Claire Cochrane and Jo Robinson (Palgrave, 2016), pp.33-47

‘Shakespeare and Terrorism’, in Jonathan Harris, ed., Terrorism and Art (forthcoming from Routledge in 2020)

‘Living with Ghosts: Shakespeare, Beethoven and Wagner’, in Christopher Wilson and Mervyn Cooke, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare in Music (Oxford University Press, 2022)

‘Restoration Comedy and London’, in Jeremy Tambling, ed., The Palgrave Encyclopaedia of Urban Literature (Palgrave, 2022)

‘Daniel Defoe and London’, in Jeremy Tambling, ed., The Palgrave Encyclopaedia of Urban Literature (Palgrave, 2022)

‘Censorship and Restoration Theatre: the Case of Charles Killigrew’, in Graham Saunders and Anne Etienne, eds., The Palgrave Handbook of Theatre Censorship (forthcoming, 2023)

‘True Comedy? Etherege, Shadwell and Wycherley’, in Steven N. Zwicker and Matthew S. Augustine, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Restoration Literature (forthcoming, 2023).

Publications: Scholarly Reviews

Substantial body of 600-1200 word reviews, 1989 to present, for Shakespeare Quarterly, Renaissance Quarterly, Notes and Queries, Studies in Theatre Production, Studies in English Literature, Theatre Notebook, Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research, and The Scriblerian.

Invited Entries in Reference Works

‘Thomas Betterton,’ ‘John Crowne,’ and ‘Congreve’s The Way of the World’ for The Literary Encyclopaedia (online publication)

‘Hamlet on the English Stage, 1603-1709,’ for Peter W. Marx, ed., Hamletbuch (Metzler Verlag, 2014)

‘Theatre Criticism, 1660-1800,’ in Gary Day and Jack Lynch, eds., The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Eighteenth-Century Literature (Wiley-Blackwell, 2015); 3000 word essay

‘Jeremy Collier,’ ibid; 2500 word essay.

Teaching aides

Shakespertise™; a card game for students and bard buffs (please contact me to buy a set)