Dr Robert Smallwood BA, MA, PhD

Shakespeare Institute
Honorary Fellow

Contact details

Robert Smallwood is a retired Fellow of the Shakespeare Institute whose principal research (and publication) interest is in Shakespeare in performance.

Biography

Robert Smallwood is the former Deputy Director and Head of Education at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, from which he retired in 2001. In his role as Head of Education, Dr Smallwood for many years directed courses in Stratford (on the repertoire of the Royal Shakespeare Company and under the joint auspices of the Shakespeare Institute and the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust) for up to forty universities a year from more than a dozen countries. Prior to his roles at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Dr Smallwood had a long-established career at the Shakespeare Institute, starting in 1964 as a Research Assistant and, having gained both an MA and a PhD here, becoming a Fellow in 1966 and continuing at the Institute until his move to the Birthplace Trust in 1989.

More recently he has held Visiting Professorships at the Universities of Tuebingen and Dijon.

Teaching

In retirement Robert Smallwood is still a regular lecturer to visiting university groups in Stratford.

Research

A continuing interest in Shakespeare in performance.

Other activities

Ornithology.

Publications

Robert Smallwood is the editor of King John in the New Penguin Shakespeare and (with Stanley Wells) of Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday in the Revels Plays. He has written on Shakespeare and his contemporaries for most of the major Shakespeare journals and has lectured on Shakespeare at universities around Europe and the United States. He was until recently General Editor of the Revels Plays Companion Library and of the Arden ‘Shakespeare at Stratford’ series (in which his own book on As You Like It was published in 2002), and editor of the Players of Shakespeare series (Cambridge University Press), of which the sixth volume was published in 2004. He spent over ten years writing annual review articles on British Shakespeare productions for Shakespeare Quarterly and for Shakespeare Survey.