Dr Michael Davies (University of Liverpool), ‘Something and Nothing: Shakespeare’s King Lear’

About the speaker:

Michael Davies is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Liverpool. His research lies in the Renaissance and Restoration periods. Having worked extensively on theology and narrative in the writings of John Bunyan, he is now exploring literature and religion in the seventeenth century more broadly, with an emphasis on early modern Protestant poetics and polemics. His current research projects concern Calvinism in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, particularly Shakespeare, as well as the relationship between literature and religion, and politics in the Restoration, centring on the issue of ‘liberty of conscience’. He is also interested in literature of the English Revolution, and of eighteenth-century authors of the Dissenting or Calvinist traditions – such as Daniel Defoe and William Cowper – as well as in John Bunyan’s ‘afterlife’ in the twentieth century.

Michael’s publications include: Graceful Reading: Theology and Narrative in the Works of John Bunyan (Oxford University Press, 2002); ‘Falstaff’s Lateness: Calvinism and the Protestant Hero in Henry IV’ (2005); ‘The Transubstantial Bard: Shakespeare and Catholicism’ (2005); Hamlet: Character Studies (Continuum, 2008); ‘Bunyan’s Bawdy: Sex and Sexual Wordplay in the Writings of John Bunyan’ (2008); Literature and Authenticity, 1780-1900 (co-editor; Ashgate, 2011); ‘Enter the Book: Reading the Bible on the Early Modern Stage’ (2012).