Graham Holderness
Writer and critic Graham Holderness has published over 40 books, mostly on Shakespeare, and hundreds of chapters and articles of criticism, theory and theology. He was one of the founders of British cultural materialism, and published the first full-length Marxist study of D.H. Lawrence, D.H. Lawrence: History, Ideology and Fiction (Macmillan, 1982). He is acknowledged as a formative contributor to a number of branches of Shakespeare criticism and theory: criticism of Shakespeare’s history plays; cultural criticism; study of Shakespeare in film and television; textual theory and criticism; and he interplay between Shakespeare criticism and creative writing.
He has published pioneering studies in Arabic adaptations of Shakespeare, culminating in The Arab Shakespeare Trilogy by Sulayman Al Bassam (Methuen Drama, 2014), and research in Christian literature and theology, in journals such as Harvard Theological Review, Journal for the Study of the New Testament, Literature and Theology, and Renaissance and Reformation.
Graham Holderness is also a novelist, poet and dramatist. His novel The Prince of Denmark was published in 2001; his poetry collection Craeft received a Poetry Book Society award in 2002; and his play Wholly Writ was in 2011 performed at Shakespeare’s Globe, and by Royal Shakespeare Company actors in Stratford-upon-Avon.
His more recent work has pioneered methods of critical-creative writing, exemplified by his innovative factual-fictional biography Nine Lives of William Shakespeare (Bloomsbury/Arden Shakespeare, 2011), which pairs critical chapters on biographical themes, with short stories on the same topic, written in styles as diverse as those of Dan Brown and Arthur Conan Doyle, Ernest Hemingway and Jonathan Swift. Extending these methods, and published this year, are Tales from Shakespeare: Creative Collisions (Cambridge University Press, June 2014), which includes a story about Shakespeare’s Richard II being performed on board the ship the Red Dragon during the Third Voyage of the East India Company, and a re-writing of Coriolanus as a James Bond adventure; and Re-writing Jesus: Christ in 20th Century Fiction and Film (Bloomsbury, November 2014), which incorporates a new historical life of Jesus, ‘Ecce Homo’. His latest publication is a historical fantasy novel Black and Deep Desires: William Shakespeare Vampire Hunter (Top Hat Books, 2015).
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