Peter Holbrook is the foundation Director of the Queensland Node of CHE. Peter's work contributes to the Meanings Program. His project investigates two related themes in English literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: self control, and the conflict between reason and the passions.
Peter’s research has focused on political, social, and philosophical aspects of English Renaissance literature, and on the influence of Shakespeare on diverse writers and thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including (for example) Friedrich Nietzsche, Thomas Hardy, and Philip Larkin. He is the author of English Renaissance Tragedy: Ideas of Freedom (London: Bloomsbury/Arden Shakespeare, 2015); Shakespeare’s Individualism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); and Literature and Degree in Renaissance England: Nashe, Bourgeois Tragedy, Shakespeare (Newark N.J. and London: University of Delaware Press, 1994); and co-editor, with Paul Edmondson, of Shakespeare’s Creative Legacies: Artists, Writers, Performers, Readers (London: Bloomsbury/Arden Shakespeare, 2016). He is editor of a special issue of The Shakespearean International Yearbook entitled Shakespeare and Montaigne Revisited, and co-editor, with David Bevington, of The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Contact
+61 7 3365 3215
p.holbrook@uq.edu.au
The University of Queensland Staff Profile
Research projects
A Literary and Intellectual History of Self-Government
Selected Publications
As author
Holbrook, P. ‘The Court Masque: Art and Politics’. In Gathering Force: Early Modern British Literature in Transition, 1557–1623, edited by K. Poole and L. Shohet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2018.
'Materialist and Political Criticism'. In The Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare, edited by Bruce Smith, pp. 1774–81. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.
English Renaissance Tragedy: Ideas of Freedom. London: Bloomsbury/Arden Shakespeare, 2015.
'Nietzsche’s Shakespeare'. In Shakespeare and Continental Philosophy, edited by Jennifer Bates and Richard Wilson, pp. 76–93. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014.
'Shakespeare, Montaigne, and Classical Reason'. In Shakespeare and Ethics, edited by John Cox and Patrick Gray, pp. 261–83. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.
'Thomas Hardy'. Scott, Dickens, Eliot, Hardy: Great Shakespeareans, edited by Adrian Poole, pp. 139–83. London: Continuum, 2011.
‘“Endless Mornings on Endless Faces”: Shakespeare and Philip Larkin’. Shakespeare Survey 64 (2011): 328–40.
Shakespeare’s Individualism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Literature and Degree in Renaissance England: Nashe, Bourgeois Tragedy, Shakespeare. Newark: University of Delaware Press / London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1994.
As editor
Shakespeare’s Creative Legacies: Artists, Writers, Performers, Readers. London: Bloomsbury/Arden Shakespeare, 2016.
Shakespeare and Montaigne Revisited: Shakespearean International Yearbook 6. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2006.
The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998 (co-edited with David Bevington).
Selected Presentations
Conference Paper: ‘Difficult Thinking’, ‘Radical Mischief’ conference, Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-upon-Avon, UK, 20–21 July 2018. Invited.
Conference Paper: ‘Literature, Art and the Concept of an Emotion’, Third International Conference of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions ‘The Future of Emotions/Conversations Without Borders’, The University of Western Australia, 14–15 June 2018.
Presentation: ‘Shakespeare’s Afterlife’, Continuing Professional Development seminar ’Shakespeare Unfinished’ for secondary school teachers of English and Drama, The University of Queensland, 23 May 2018.
