Lois Potter
Lois Potter received her BA from Bryn Mawr College. After going to Cambridge in 1961 on a Marshall scholarship, and receiving her PhD from there, she remained in the UK for 30 years, teaching at the Universities of Aberdeen and Leicester. She returned to the US in 1991 as Ned B. Allen Professor of English at the University of Delaware, from which she retired in 2008. She has also been a visiting professor at Paris III/Sorbonne Nouvelle and Tsuda College, Tokyo, and has had fellowships at both the Folger and Huntington libraries. She now lives in London, where she has done some teaching for King’s College and for Shakespeare’s Globe.
Her greatest interests are in Renaissance literature and theatrical performance. At Leicester University, she was active in faculty-student theatre and wrote several musical documentaries; she has also been a frequent reviewer of plays for, among others, the Times Literary Supplement and Shakespeare Quarterly. Though her first book was A Preface to Milton, and she has edited two collections of essays on Robin Hood, her major publications have been on drama. She edited two volumes of the Revels History of Drama in English, and the monograph Secret Rites and Secret Writing: Royalist Literature, 1641-1660, arose out of work for volume IV of that series.
Two of her books have focused on stage and film versions of Shakespeare: Twelfth Night (in Macmillan’s Text and Performance series) and Othello (in the University of Manchester’s Shakespeare in Performance series). She has edited two collaborative plays: The Two Noble Kinsmen, by Fletcher and Shakespeare, for the Arden Shakespeare, and Pericles, by Shakespeare and Wilkins, for the 3rd edition of the Norton Complete Works of Shakespeare. Her best known work is probably The Life of William Shakespeare (in Wiley-Blackwell’s Critical Biography series).
For the Oxford Marston she is editing another collaborative play, Eastward Ho!.