Professor Russell Jackson MA (Oxon), MA, PhD (Birmingham)

MA (Oxon), MA, PhD (Birmingham)

Russell is a native of Southport, Lancashire. After reading English at Wadham College, Oxford, where his tutors included Ian Donaldson and Terry Eagleton, Russell studied for the degrees of MA and PhD at the Shakespeare Institute, the University of Birmingham’s Stratford-based centre for graduate studies in Shakespeare and his contemporaries. He subsequently held posts at the Rose Bruford College of Speech and Drama and in the Drama Department of the University College of North Wales, Bangor. From 1978 to 2004 he was a Fellow (and latterly, Director) of the Shakespeare Institute, before joining the Department of Drama and theatre Arts as Allardyce Nicoll chair in 2004.

Modules at undergraduate and postgraduate level on theatrical and dramatic history; study options on aspects of Shakespeare in performance and on the representation of theatres on film.

I no longer supervise research dissertations.

I have published on a wide range of topics - from Victorian fairy painting to Noël Coward.  Critical editions of plays by Henry Arthur Jones (CUP) and Oscar Wilde (New Mermaids Drama Series) in the early 1980s were followed by an anthology of documents of the Victorian theatre in 1989.  In 1999 the Society for Theatre Research published my translation of articles by the German novelist Theodor Fontane, under the title Shakespeare in London, 1851-58. With Jonathan Bate I edited The Oxford Illustrated History of Shakespeare on Stage (2nd edition, 2001) and I collaborated with Robert Smallwood on two volumes in the ‘Players of Shakespeare’ series for Cambridge University Press. I also edited the Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film, (2000 - 2^nd edition 2007), and a volume (XVI: Gielgud, Ashcroft, Olivier, Dench) in the ‘Great Shakespeareans’ series(Bloomsbury/Arden Shakespeare.

From 1994 to 2004 I reviewed Stratford productions for Shakespeare Quarterly, and my book on stagings of Romeo and Juliet appeared in the series ‘Shakespeare at Stratford,’ under the New Arden imprint (2003). Other publications include:  Shakespeare Films in the Making: Vision, Production and Reception (Cambridge University Press, 2007), Theatres on Film: how the Cinema Imagines the Stage, (Manchester University Press,2013), Shakespeare and the English-speaking Cinema in the ‘Oxford Shakespeare Topics’ series (Oxford University Press, 2014), and Shakespeare in Theatre: Trevor Nunn ( Bloomsbury/Arden , 2018). I am currently working on a study of Noël Coward’s work as a playwright, drawing on the extensive archive material in the Cadbury Research Library.

Since the mid-1980s I have worked as text adviser with Kenneth Branagh on stage and radio productions, and on all his Shakespeare films, and also on films by Oliver Parker (Othello, An Ideal Husband) and John Madden (Shakespeare in Love). Theatre work has included collaboration with Michael Grandage, with whom I worked as text adviser on productions at the Crucible theatre, Sheffield and the Donmar Warehouse in London. Productions at the Donmar have included Othello (2008), the 2009 Donmar West End season (Twelfth Night with Derek Jacobi and Hamlet with Jude Law, which also played on Broadway), King Lear, with Derek Jacobi and Richard II at the Donmar (both 2011) and the Michael Grandage Company’s productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Henry V, both at the Noel Coward Theatre in 2013.  In July 2013 I was text consultant for Macbeth, directed by Kenneth Branagh and Rob Ashford in the Manchester International Festival: the production was revived and restaged for performances at the Park Avenue Armory in New York in May-June 2014. Recent work includes the Kenneth Branagh Company’s productions of The Winter’s Tale (2015-16) and Romeo and Juliet (2016) at the Garrick Theatre in London’s West End, and Kenneth Branagh’s production of Hamlet at RADA with Tom Hiddleston (2017)