J. Dover Wilson

John Dover Wilson (July 13, 1881-January 15, 1969) was a professor and scholar of Renaissance drama, focusing particularly on the work of William Shakespeare. He attended Cambridge University and taught at King's College, London before becoming Regius Professor of English literature at the University of Edinburgh.

Wilson was primarily known for two lifelong projects. He was the chief editor, with the assistance of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, of the New Shakespeare, a series of editions of the complete plays published by Cambridge University Press. Of those editions, the one of Hamlet was his particular focus, and he published a number of other books on the play, supporting the textual scholarship of his edition as well as offering an interpretation. His What Happens in Hamlet, first published in 1935, was reprinted several times including a revised second edition in 1959.

Wilson's textual work was characterized by considerable boldness and confidence in his own judgment. His work on the complicated matter of the transmission of Shakespeare's texts—none of Shakespeare's manuscripts survive and no published edition of any play was supervised directly by the playwright, so all of the texts are mediated by compositors and printers—was highly respected, though many of his theories have since been eclipsed by new scholarship. However, when the textual principles he painstakingly established did not support the reading that seemed right to him, he would depart widely from them, earning him a reputation for both brilliance and capriciousness. In his interpretations that juxtaposition was heightened without the support of his arduous textual work. These interpretations included a reading of the famous bedroom scene between Hamlet and his mother that remains influential to this day, but also peculiar ideas about covert Lutheranism and almost completely unsourced speculation about Shakespeare's relationship with his son-in-law. His arch-nemesis, the influential Shakespearean W. W. Greg, once referred to Wilson's ideas as "the careerings of a not too captive balloon in a high wind."

Major works

• The New Shakespeare. Cambridge University Press, 1921-1969.
• Life in Shakespeare's England: A Book of Elizabethan Prose. Cambridge UP, 1911.
• The Elizabethan Shakespeare. Milford, 1929.
• The Essential Shakespeare: A Biographical Adventure. Cambridge UP, 1932.
• The Fortunes of Falstaff. Cambridge UP, 1944.
• What Happens in Hamlet. 2nd edition. Cambridge UP, 1959.
• Shakespeare's Happy Comedies. Faber and Faber, 1962.