Margreta de Grazia

Margreta de Grazia was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2021.

Margreta de Grazia is Emerita Professor of English and the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania.  The focus of her work is on Shakespeare and the manifold editorial and critical processes that have secured his cultural supremacy. Her first book Shakespeare Verbatim (Oxford, 1991) traces the emergence of Shakespeare as a modern author from late eighteenth-century imperatives. Her second book, Hamlet without Hamlet (Cambridge, 2007) argues that the modern tradition of psychologizing Hamlet has effaced both the play’s and the protagonist’s preoccupation with land and entitlement.  Four Shakespearean Period Pieces (Chicago, 2021) calls for the reappraisal of four key concepts that have served to situate Shakespeare in history: chronology, periodization, secularization, and anachronism.  Her most recent book, Shakespeare Without a Life (forthcoming, Oxford, 2022) asks what difference a biography makes to the study of Shakespeare by looking at the two centuries in which his works circulated without one.

She is also co-editor and contributor to a number of essay collections, including with Stanley Wells two volumes of the New Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare.  She is the recipient of a number of awards, including from the Guggenheim Foundation.  She currently lives in London.