Gordon McMullan is Professor of English and Director of the London Shakespeare Centre at King’s College London. He is a general textual editor of The Norton Shakespeare, 3rd edition, and a general editor of Arden Early Modern Drama. His publications include the Arden Shakespeare edition of Henry VIII (2000) Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing (2007) and, most recently, a collaborative monograph, Antipodal Shakespeare: Remembering and Forgetting in Britain, Australia and New Zealand, 1916-2016, with Philip Mead and others (2018). He has edited several collections of essays, most recently Creativity in Later Life: Beyond Late Style, co-edited with David Amigoni (London: Routledge, 2019). He established the long-running MA Shakespeare Studies, offered jointly with Shakespeare’s Globe, in 2000. Between 2011 and 2016 he created and directed Shakespeare400, a consortium of London cultural organisations celebrating the Shakespeare Quatercentenary.
Theatre and Performance Publications
Books
Antipodal Shakespeare: Remembering and Forgetting in Britain, Australia and New Zealand, 1916-2016, with Philip Mead, and with Ailsa Grant Ferguson, Kate Flaherty and Mark Houlahan; afterword by Catherine Moriarty (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2018)
Shakespeare in Ten Acts, edited with Zoë Wilcox (London: British Library, 2016) (shortlisted for the Society for Theatre Research Book Award 2016)
William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, ‘Norton Critical Editions’ (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2016)
General textual editor, with Suzanne Gossett, The Norton Shakespeare, 3E, general editor Stephen J. Greenblatt, volume editors Jean E. Howard, Katharine Eisaman Maus and Walter Cohen (New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 2015)
Women Making Shakespeare: Text, Reception, Performance, ‘Essays in Honour of Ann Thompson’, edited with Lena Cowen Orlin and Virginia Mason Vaughan (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2014)
‘The Tempest and the uses of late Shakespeare in the cultures of performance: Prospero, Gielgud, Rylance’, in Paul Yachnin and Patricia Badir (eds), Shakespeare and the Cultures of Performance (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 145-68
Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing: Authorship in the Proximity of Death (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007)
William Shakespeare, 1 Henry IV, ‘Norton Critical Edition’ (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003)
William Shakespeare and John Fletcher, Henry VIII (All Is True), ‘Arden Shakespeare’ (London: Thomson Learning, 2000)
The Politics of Unease in the Plays of John Fletcher (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994)
Performance and Artistic Collaborations
Gordon is a recipient of the Sam Wanamaker Award, Shakespeare’s Globe, 2016 [awarded ‘to recognise, encourage and celebrate work which has increased our understanding and enjoyment of Shakespeare and which has a similar quality to the pioneering work of the Globe’s founder, Sam Wanamaker CBE’].
Gordon was a member of the local organising committee, 2016 World Shakespeare Congress, a dual site international conference (c. 800 delegates) in Stratford-upon-Avon and London, co-hosted with Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Shakespeare Institute, Royal Shakespeare Company and Shakespeare’s Globe. He created and organised Shakespeare400, a London-based consortium of twenty-four major cultural organisations marking the Shakespeare Quatercentenary by together creating a season of over two hundred performances, exhibitions and other creative and cultural events across 2016. See https://shakespeare400.kcl.ac.uk/
He was the co-organiser, with Pascale Aebischer, ‘Early Modern Jarman’, a Jarman 2014 event, King’s College London, 1 February 2014. He also served as dramaturg/literary advisor for various productions: RSC, Globe, Old Vic, 1988-2010.
Gordon is currently Principal Investigator on an AHRC Standard Grant project ‘Shakespeare in the Royal Collections’ (with CI Kate Retford, Birkbeck, and two postdocs, Sally Barnden and Kirsten Tambling), a three-year grant investigating the Shakespeare-related holdings in the Royal
Collections. This will lead to a conference and exhibition in 2021.