Picture of Gabriel Egan G a b r i e l   E g a n  .  com

about me . . .

I AM Professor of Shakespeare Studies and Director of the Centre for Textual Studies at De Montfort University and one of the four General Editors (with Gary Taylor, John Jowett, and Terri Bourus) of the New Oxford Shakespeare, of which the Modern Critical Edition appeared in October 2016 and the Critical Reference Edition and Authorship Companion in early 2017. The remaining two volumes are the Complete Alternative Versions (General Editors Taylor, Bourus, and Egan) that will appear in 2024. I co-edit the academic journal Theatre Notebook for the Society for Theatre Research.

Right now I am editing Shakespeare's The Two Gentlemen of Verona for the New Variorum Shakespeare series (New York: Modern Language Association, 2025) and Sir Thomas More for the New Oxford Shakespeare Complete Alternative Versions edition (Oxford University Press, 2024).

I WAS Co-Investigator on the £252,557 AHRC-funded research project Transforming Middlemarch that ran from January 2022 to March 2023 to produce an open-access online scholarly digital genetic edition of Andrew Davies's 1994 BBC Television adaptation of George Eliot's novel.

I WAS Principal Investigator on the £312,012 AHRC-funded research project "Shakespeare's Early Editions (SEE)" that ran from October 2016 to July 2018 to explore the differences between the quarto and Folio versions of his plays to see if they can be quantified and explained in terms of textual corruption and authorial and non-authorial revision.

My latest sole-authored book is a monograph called Shakespeare and Ecocritical Theory for the Arden Shakespeare series (London: Bloomsbury, 2015).

My previous books include is The Struggle for Shakespeare's Text: Twentieth Century Editorial Theory and Practice (Cambridge University Press, 2010), the Edinburgh Critical Guide to Shakespeare (2007),  Green Shakespeare (2006), Shakespeare and Marx (2004; reprinted in Turkish as Shakespeare ve Marx 2006), and an edition of Richard Brome and Thomas Heywood's The Witches of Lancashire (2002).  These are available from bookshops or (by those links) directly from their publishers.

WAN is a page about the Word Adjacency Network method of authorship attribution, with a freely downloadable Python script for applying it.

NYWES is Not The Year's Work in English Studies, a self-published annual review of scholarship of "Shakespeare: Editions and Textual Studies".

CTS This is the website of the Centre for Textual Studies at De Montfort University, of which I am the Director.

ShaLT From 2011 to 2013 I was Principal Investigator (with Prof Andrew Gurr as Co-Investigator) on the £416,293 AHRC-funded project "Shakespearean London Theatres (ShaLT)".

what? where? is a cheat-sheet showing the conventions for advanced searching on 7 large electronic databases for early modern literary research

NSDD is the non-Shakespearian Drama Database, a collaborative project to collate and distribute without charge basic information about all the professional drama written for the London stage 1567-1642.

SHAXICAN is a collaborative project to test Donald Foster's theories--allegedly embodied in his never-revealed SHAXICON database--about Shakespeare's rare-word usage being influenced by the vocabulary of the acting parts he took in his own plays. Now that Foster has been revealed as a charlatan, this project is moribund.

publications lists my research outputs (including my PhD thesis on the original staging of The Winter's Tale and Cymbeline) and, where possible, gives full-text copies of them.

teaching holds some snippets for undergraduate, post-graduate, and research students.

virtual printing press is a project to build a replica of the Smithsonian's Benjamin Franklin wooden handpress.

music contains pictures of and recordings by Cold Structure and The Idol Rich / House of Cards, and a previously unpublished interview with the synthesizer group Depeche Mode conducted on 26 August 1981 that recently came to light with the rediscovery of the cassette tape it was recorded on.

What are the Digital Humanities?