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[Expositions 10.2 (2016) i–ii]  Expositions (online) ISSN: 1747–5376 
 

Editor’s Preface 

JOHN-PAUL SPIRO 
Villanova University 
 
 
This is a special issue of Expositions: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities. We have chosen 

to devote an entire issue to a series of interviews with Shakespeare scholars that I conducted at the 

University of Oxford in the summer of 2016. We hope you find them as interesting and as 

enlightening as I did. 

We always intended for Expositions to be more than a standard academic journal. We have our 

commitment to interdisciplinary work and to liberal education (particularly Catholic education) 

itself. We also strive to provide content including – but going far beyond – the standard articles 

and book reviews. We often feature in-depth interviews with major scholars, as well as roundtable 

conversations on a single texts and topics, symposia on concerns in higher education, and 

reflections on the current and future states of various fields and disciplines. The interviews in this 

issue combine all of the above. The scholars all address their own field of Shakespeare studies, but 

they are also alert to the ways that other disciplines (particularly history and philosophy) affect 

their work. They also consider higher education itself, notably the ways it will be affected in the 

United Kingdom after the recent vote to leave the European Union.  

Why talk to four people who study the same subject at the same university? As you will see in the 

interviews, Oxford has become the best place in the world to study Shakespeare. This is a relatively 

new phenomenon. Shakespeare studies is generally more popular in the United States than in the 

United Kingdom, and for many years the major Shakespeare scholars in the United States could 

be found at the University of California at Berkeley, Harvard University, and a few other major 

research universities. At Berkeley, the “New Historicism” of Stephen Greenblatt and his associates 

dominated the field. In the United Kingdom, the “Cultural Materialism” approach to Shakespeare 

had its center at the University of Sussex, while other important scholars could be found at the 

University of Liverpool and scattered elsewhere. 

Then, over the past ten years or so, several Shakespeare scholars were brought to the University 

of Oxford: Tiffany Stern, Simon Palfrey, Jonathan Bate, Bart van Es, Emma Smith, Laurie 



Editor’s Preface  ii 
 

Maguire, Colin Burrow, Lorna Hutson, among others. As I learned in my conversations with the 

first four, this seems to have been entirely unplanned, and the nature of Oxford itself is such that 

these scholars do not necessarily see themselves as members of the same Faculty and do not think 

of themselves as part of a “movement” or “school.” They do sometimes collaborate, as in Tiffany 

Stern’s and Simon Palfrey’s seminal book Shakespeare in Parts (2007), and overall many of them 

share an interest in the original dramatic conditions of Shakespeare’s plays in performance as well 

as an interest in the intellectual currents of Shakespeare’s time. Much of their work is still 

essentially historicist but less explicitly ideological than their predecessors; they write about 

players and printing houses, less so about power and discourses of marginality. This is not to say 

that their work is disengaged; another common theme in their work is its humanity and ethical 

concern. They read Shakespeare (and his contemporaries) with great attentiveness to his capacity 

to move audiences and remain meaningful through the centuries. A common thread in 

contemporary Shakespeare is an “ethics of recognition,” wherein we acknowledge the power of 

his plays to reveal humanity, particular facets of humanity that have been hitherto ignored, and 

even to step beyond an ethics that depends upon recognition to confer humanity.  

Much of the recent work on Shakespeare is both unapologetic and public. Shakespeare remains 

the most canonical of writers, and for a time it became common to criticize Shakespeare for not 

having our politics (whatever those politics may be), not being as enlightened or progressive as we 

are, or to embed his work in “discourses of power” and “social energies.” One can still find this 

attitude – in newspapers and blogs as well as academic journals – and Shakespeare’s inclusion in 

university and high school curricula remains controversial. At the same time, Shakespeare is the 

most performed playwright in the English-speaking world (by far), and many Shakespeare scholars 

write with the awareness that their work will be studied not just by students and scholars but by 

theater professionals and common readers. One of the scholars interviewed in this issue, Sir 

Jonathan Bate, has written extensively for the general public (as well as for the theater) and he 

speaks about how and why he embraced that role.   

It was a happenstance of timing that the interviews were conducted in the aftermath of the Brexit 

vote, and the consensus view among all the interviewees was that the vote to leave the European 

Union would be terrible for the United Kingdom in general and for Oxford in particular. We now 

can see the Brexit vote in the greater context of political upheaval in 2016, but these interviews 



 

can stand as a document of how some people responded at the moment. Perhaps the most eloquent 

point in the interviews came when Bart van Es said of Brexit, “I’m not sure I can talk 

dispassionately about that.” He then remained silent for a while, as if to suggest through his silence 

that if one cannot speak dispassionately, perhaps one should wait until one can speak 

dispassionately.  


