The Writers of Wales Database

HISCOCK, ANDREW

Email: a.hiscock@bangor.ac.uk

Andrew is the Professor of English and Director of the Graduate School for the College of Arts and Humanities at Bangor University. He has lived and worked in Wales since 1992, and lives with his family in Conwy. Andrew teaches early modern literature, most particularly the development of dramatic writing, sixteenth-century lyric poetry and women’s writing. He also has research interests in Medieval drama and Canadian literature. Whilst focusing on the dramatic literature of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, Andrew has published widely across genres and authors from the late fifteenth century to the late seventeenth century.

His doctoral research was a comparative literary project exploring political representation in the drama of Shakespeare and Racine. Andrew is currently completing a monograph which focuses upon the development of cultural debate surrounding the status and function of memory in the period 1520-1620. The project includes studies of such diverse writers as Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Katherine Parr, John Foxe, Edmund Spenser, Thomas Nashe, Mary Sidney, William Shakespeare, Francis Bacon, Ben Jonson and John Donne. A second monograph is also in progress, which re-evaluates the wide-ranging textual output of Walter Ralegh, most especially in terms of retrospection and the discourse of history.

Andrew is co-editor of both the Continuum Renaissance Drama series and the English Association’s academic journal English. He has also been Book Reviews Editor, Renaissance Studies and Guest Editor of the Modern Humanities Research Association Yearbook of English Studies. In 2007 he was Visiting Socrates Academic at University of Pescara, Italy, and in 2008 he was Visiting Socrates Academic at Scuole Civiche in Milan. Andrew has published extensively in monographs, and also in various journals including English and Women’s Writing.

Selected Publications:
Problems of Authority and the State in Seventeenth Century Drama: Shakespeare and Racine Considered (University of Bristol, 1991)
Authority and Desire: Crises of Interpretation in Shakespeare and Racine (Lang, 1996)
The Uses of this World: Thinking Space in Shakespeare, Marlowe, Cary and Jonson (University of Wales Press, 2004)
Fast fettered in… Ancient Memory: Ralegh and the Arts of Remembering (Blackwells Literature Compass, 2007)
Reading Memory in Early Modern Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2011)


Contributed to:
Dangerous Diversity: the Changing Faces of Wales from the Renaissance to the Present Day (co-editor) (University of Wales Press, 1998)
The Anatomy of Tudor Literature (contributor) (Ashgate, 2001)
Fantasies of Troy: Classical Tales and the Social Imaginary in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (contributor) (Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies/University of Toronto Press, 2004)
Mighty Europe: the Writing of an Early Modern Continent (editor) (Lang, 2007)
Teaching Shakespeare and Early Modern Dramatists (co-editor) (Palgrave, 2007)
English Literature in Context (contributor) (Cambridge University Press, 2007)
Writing the Other: Humanism versus Barbarism in Tudor England (contributor) (Cambridge Scholars, 2008)
Yearbook of English Studies 2008 (editor) (MHRA, 2008)
Le Mythe et la Plume: L’ecriture et les femmes en Grande Bretagne (1540-1640) (contributor) (Presses Universitaires de Valenciennes, 2008)
The Shakespeare Handbook (co-editor) (Continuum, 2009)
Women Beware Women: A Critical Guide (editor) (Continuum, 2010)




Dangerous Diversity: the Changing Faces of Wales from the Renaissance to the Present Day (co-editor) (University of Wales Press, 1998)

This collection of essays examines the wide diversity of the Welsh nation’s heritage, highlighting in differing ways certain unexplored avenues of Welsh cultural experience. The contributions range from the historical to the literary and linguistic.

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The Uses of this World: Thinking Space in Shakespeare, Marlowe, Cary and Jonson (University of Wales Press, 2004)

The Uses of this World examines how early modern theatre texts dramatize the ways in which cultural space is produced. It demonstrates that the theatre engaged fully with the fundamental change in the social and philosophical organization of space which took place in this period. Andrew Hiscock argues that Renaissance drama interrogates models of social organization and spatial boundaries defined by property relations, economic hierarchies, historical custom and kinship ties, and stresses that space is not a neutral, fixed and passive container, but emerges instead as a socially constructed process. Plays considered include Hamlet, The Jew of Malta, Antony and Cleopatra, Tragedie of Mariam (Elizabeth Cary), Volpone and The Alchemist.

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Teaching Shakespeare and Early Modern Dramatists (co-editor) (Palgrave, 2007)

Paying full attention to the whole range of Shakespearean drama but also looking closely at his two most significant predecessors, his closest rival, his only known collaborator, and other writers who influenced and carried forward the genres in which he worked, this volume shows both the ways in which Shakespearean drama is typical of its period and of the ways in which it is distinctive. This collection offers practical suggestions for the integration of non-Shakespearean drama into the teaching of Shakespeare.

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