The Seeds of Time

A fictional exploration of the uses of Shakespeare in the Great Exhibition of 1851, the Festival of Britain of 1951, and the 2012 London Olympics, in the form of an imitation of H.G.Wells's story The Time Machine.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

Some Further Account of the Life &c. of Mr. William Shakespear, with Corrections Made to the First and Second Editions, and with the Supplementation of New Matter Acquir'd from Diligent Researches in the Publick Records, and from Conversations Mr

This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedited version of an article published in Critical Survey. The definitive publisher-authenticated version [Holderness, G. (2009) ' Some Further Account of the Life &c. of Mr. William Shakespear, with Corrections Made to the First and Second Editions, and with the Supplementation of New Matter Acquir'd from Diligent Researches in the Publick Records, and from Conversations Mr....' Critical Survey 21 (3) pp.112-118] is available online at: http://www.berghahnbooks.comThe article presents additions and corrections to the life of playwright William Shakespeare originally written by Nicholas Rowe, purportedly contributed by Thomas Betterton after searching public records and interviewing people in Shakespeare's hometown of Stratford-upon-Avon. The editor, in a footnote, states that he believes the manuscript to be a manifest forgery for containing information which the author could not have known.Peer reviewe

Arab Shakespeare: Sulayman Al-Bassam’s The Al-Hamlet Summit

Peer reviewe

'The single and peculiar life’: Hamlet's Heart and the Early Modern Subject

Copyright Cambridge University PressPeer reviewe

A survey of blockholders and corporate control

The author surveys the empirical literature on large-percentage shareholders in public corporations, focusing on four key issues: the prevalence of blockholders; the motivation for block ownership; the effect of blockholders on executive compensation, leverage, the incidence of takeovers, and a wide range of corporate decisions; and the effect of blockholders on firm value. A central finding of this study is that there is little reason for policymakers or small investors to fear large-percentage shareholders in general, especially when the blockholders are active in firm management.Stockholders ; Corporate governance

'An Arabian in my room' : Shakespeare and the Canon

The literary canon commonly thought of as ancient, accepted and agreed, and consistent between high and popular cultures. This article demonstrates the falsity of these assumptions, and argues that the canon is always provisional, contingent, iterable and overdetermined by multiple consequences of cultural struggle. Using definitions of canonicity from Harold Bloom, Frank Kermode and Pierre Bourdieu, the article shows how the canon is produced, consumed and reproduced. Picking up on Harold Bloom’s use of a poem by Wallace Stevens, the article explores the impact of Arabic adaptations of Shakespeare on canon-formation and canonicity.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

Review Article: Shakespeare and Perception

This article reads some familiar speeches from key Shakespeare plays in the light of modern theories of perception, asking the Shakespeare texts for advice on such matters as “inattentional blindness,” “the distribution of the sensible,” visual perception and imagination, the “extended mind,” and “embodied cognition”. Holderness triangulates Shakespeare’s dramatic poetry with contemporary psychological and philosophical theories, and early modern works of philosophy and medicine, and asks whether these convergences are endorsements of Shakespeare’s universal wisdom, or genuinely new ways of seeing Shakespeare and the world.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

'Thirty year ago': the complex legacy of Political Shakespeare

This paper was delivered in the plenary session of the Shakespeare Association of America’s annual meeting in St Louis, April 2014, alongside papers from Ania Loomba and Jonathan Dollimore. The purpose of the panel was to commemorate and celebrate two important critical texts whose anniversaries fell at that time: Jonathan Dollimore’s Radical Tragedy, published in 1984, and Political Shakespeare (1985), edited by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, which went into its second edition in 1994. This paper discusses the impact and influence of Political Shakespeare, to which I was a contributor.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

Animated icons: Narrative and Liturgy in The Passion of the Christ

“This is a pre-copy-editing, author produced PDF of an article accepted for publication in Literature and Theology following peer review. The definitive publisher-authenticated version [Holderness, G. (2005) 'Animated icons: Narrative and Liturgy in The Passion of the Christ'. Literature and Theology 19 (4) pp.384-401] is available online at: http://litthe.oxfordjournals.org/archive/index.dtl "Only slightly less surprising than Mel Gibson’s decision to make a Christian film about the Passion of Christ, using Aramaic and Latin dialogue with vernacular sub-titles, was the phenomenon of the film’s extraordinary success. The Passion of the Christ broke box office records, topped league tables, established itself with striking rapidity as one of the most popular religious films ever made, and even gave mainstream popular cinema a run for its money . Recent releases on video and DVD have sustained this popularity. But admiration of the film is by no means universal. There has been a huge gap between the film’s hospitable acceptance by popular audiences, and the critical reception it met in newspapers and magazines (see North 2004). A UK national daily contained two league tables in one edition: the Film Critic’s ‘Top Ten Choices’, and the ‘Top Ten Box Office Hits’. In terms of contents both lists were identical, expect for one variation. The Passion of the Christ topped the box office table, but failed to feature at all in the list of the film critic.Peer reviewe

Constraints on Large-Block Shareholders

Corporate managers who own a majority of the common stock in their company or who represent another firm owning such an interest appear to be less constrained than managers of diffusely held firms, yet their power to harm minority shareholders must be circumscribed by some organizational or legal arrangements. Empirical investigations reveal that boards of directors in majority-owned firms are little different from firms with diffuse stock ownership. Another source of constraints on a majority shareholders -- capital market activity -- also appears to be no different from firms with diffuse ownership. Finally, there is little evidence that new organizational mechanisms have evolved to constrain managers who own large blocks of stock. The frequency and associated wealth effects of reorganizations of majority shareholder firms, however, indicate that the law constrains managerial majority shareholders, both in their day-to-day management and when they redeem the ownership interest of minority shareholders.