English Department People

Richard Dutton, Humanities Distinguished Professor and Chair

Richard Dutton was born in Northwich, Cheshire (England), and was educated there at Sir John Deane's Grammar School. 1971-4 he was tutor at the British campus (Wroxton College, in Banbury) of the Fairleigh Dickinson University of New Jersey, USA, where he met his wife, Maura Heaphy. They have two daughters, Kate (b. 1982) and Claire (b.1985). He moved to Lancaster University in 1974, becoming Professor of English there in 1992; most of his teaching there was of Shakespeare, Renaissance literature and contemporary (post-1945) literature. He was head of the department 1991-94 and 2002-3. In 1999-2000 he had study leave, awarded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board, to complete an edition of Ben Jonson's play, Epicene, or The Silent Woman (Revels Plays, Manchester U.P., 2003). His monographs are: Ben Jonson: to the First Folio (Cambridge UP, 1983), An Introduction to Literary Criticism (Longman, 1984), Modern Tragicomedy and the British Tradition (Harvester, 1986), Mastering the Revels: the Regulations and Censorship of English Renaissance Drama (Macmillan, 1991), Ben Jonson: Authority: Criticism (Macmillan, 1996), Licensing, Censorship and Authorship in Early Modern England (Palgrave, 2000), and Ben Jonson, Volpone and the Gunpowder Plot (2008). He was general editor of the Macmillan Literary Lives series, which contains his own William Shakespeare: A Literary Life (1989), and he has edited several collections of critical essays: The New Historicism and Renaissance Drama [with Richard Wilson] (Longman, 1992), A Midsummer Night's Dream, New Casebook (Macmillan, 1996)and four volumes of Companions to the Works of Shakespeare [with Jean Howard] (Blackwell, 2003). His scholarly editions also include Jacobean Civic Pageants (Keele U.P., 1995) and 'Women Beware Women' and Other Plays by Thomas Middleton (Oxford U.P., 1999). He has edited Volpone for the new Cambridge Edition of Ben Jonson (forthcoming), and is one of the general editors of the Revels Plays series, and writing a book on the play for Cambridge University Press. In 2003 he moved to Ohio State University, where he is currently Vice Chair of the English Department. In 2008/9 he has leave on an NEH fellowship to write a book on Shakespeare's texts and their adaptation for performance at the courts of Elizabeth I and James I.

The College of Humanities and The Ohio State University takes your privacy seriously. Please read our Privacy Policy for more information. This Web site, all content and related materials are ©2003-2009 by the The Department of English, the College of Humanities and The Ohio State University. If you have difficulty accessing any portion of this site due to incompatibility with adaptive technology, or if you need the information in an alternative format, please contact the department at .