Valerie Wayne

Valerie Wayne is a Shakespeare scholar who has edited seven books and written many articles in the field of Renaissance Literature. Having received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, she taught at UH Mānoa for over 30 years and is now a Professor Emerita at the university. Her awards include the Regents’ Medal for Excellence in Teaching at UH, a Charlton Hinman long-term fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., and a Bogliasco Foundation Fellowship in Italy. She has been a trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America, served on the editorial board of Shakespeare Quarterly, and is past president of the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women.

Wayne’s edition of Shakespeare’s play Cymbeline has just been published in the Arden Shakespeare series. At HBMF she will discuss it in the context of some larger questions about the different versions of Shakespeare that are out there, from your grandmother’s dusty old copy of the Collected Works to a manga version of Macbeth. How do we know what Shakespeare wrote? When you hold a book “by him” in your hands, who has come between you and Shakespeare? Does it matter which edition you pick up in order to read or stage a play? Since Shakespeare has been dead 400 years, how could his work still be in flux?

Comments on Valerie Wayne’s edition of Cymbeline:

“It's a superb edition - so much learning delivered with such good judgement. Editions are too easy to take for granted, but I hope all your readers will appreciate just how good it is and how much has gone into it!”

--Helen Cooper, Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature, Magdalene College, University of Cambridge
and author of The English Romance in Time“

The Arden Shakespeare series is the premier scholarly edition of Shakespeare's works, including not only critical and textual scholarship of the highest level, but also the most comprehensive coverage of the 400-year old performance history of the plays, as well as all film and video productions. The 37 or so scholars who are the editors of the Arden Shakespeare series are therefore among the pre-eminent authorities for our time on all things Shakespeare. If Ben Jonson was right when he claimed four hundred years ago that ‘Shakespeare was not of an age, but for all time,’ then Cymbeline is also for all time, and so is the work of Valerie Wayne in researching, writing, and publishing her splendid new Arden edition of one of Shakespeare’s final plays.”

--Mark Heberle, Professor of English
University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa

Links:

http://english.hawaii.edu/faculty/valerie-wayne/

http://hawaii.academia.edu/englishhawaiiedufacultyvaleriewayne

http://english.fsu.edu/middleton/valerie-wayne/