Shakespeare Institute academic Dr Robert Stagg has been shortlisted for the prestigious University English Book Prize, which recognises an "outstanding first monograph" of literary criticism by a UK-based academic.
His first book Shakespeare's Blank Verse: An Alternative History was published by Oxford University Press in October 2022, and is a study both of Shakespeare's versification and of its place in the history of early modern blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter, a staple verse form of English literature). Dr Stagg's book ranges from the continental precursors of English blank verse in the early sixteenth century through the drama and poetry of Shakespeare's contemporaries to the editing of Shakespeare's blank verse in the eighteenth century and beyond.
Dr Stagg joined the Shakespeare Institute as a Leverhulme Early-Career Research Fellow in 2020.
