English Department Faculty

Publications:

Julius Caesar (2012).
Julius Caesar is a key link between Shakespeare's histories and his tragedies. Unlike the Caesar drawn by Plutarch in a source text, Shakespeare's Caesar is surprisingly modern: vulnerable and imperfect, a powerful man who does not always know himself. The open-ended structure of the play insists that revealing events will continue after the play ends, making the significance of the history we have just witnessed impossible to determine in the play itself.

John D. Cox's introduction discusses issues of genre, characterization, and rhetoric, while also providing a detailed history of criticism of the play. Appendices provide excerpts from important related works by Lucretius, Plutarch, and Montaigne.

A collaboration between Broadview Press and the Internet Shakespeare Editions project at the University of Victoria, the editions developed for this series have been comprehensively annotated and draw on the authoritative texts newly edited for the ISE. This innovative series allows readers to access extensive and reliable online resources linked to the print edition.

Seeming Knowledge: Shakespeare and Skeptical Faith (2007).
"Seeming Knowledge is impressive not only for its vast, in-depth coverage of Shakespeare's works, but also for its compelling argumentation. John Cox is extremely well-read in early Tudor and Elizabethan theater and also in the works of Erasmus, More, Montaigne, Descartes, Pascal and others. His application of these works to Shakespeare is subtle and original. His book is in fact a powerful invitation to rethink our usual understanding of skepticism in the Renaissance and in Shakespeare. By being skeptical of skepticism, Cox profoundly redefines our view of Shakespeare's relation to faith and religion. This work is a major contribution to the field." --Dr. Jean-Christophe Mayer

with Eric Rasmussen, editors, Shakespeare's King Henry VI, Part 3 (2001)
This is a completely new edition of Shakespeare's early history play. Professor Cox wrote the introduction, the notes, the appendices, and the index. The Arden Shakespeare is the foremost scholarly edition of Shakespeare. The first series was published early in the twentieth century; the second, in the mid-twentieth. This is the first series for the twenty-first century.

The Devil and the Sacred in English Drama, 1350-1642 (2000)
A complete survey of plays that include staged devils from the beginning of drama in English to the closing of the theaters by parliament in 1642. The book argues that the pattern for staging devils was established in pre-Reformation drama and remained virtually unchanged by the Reformation. Important vestiges of that pattern continued to appear in commercial plays (including two by Shakespeare) until the effective end of the tradition in the mid-seventeenth century.

with David Scott Kastan, A New History of Early English Drama (1997)
This is a collection of twenty-five completely new essays that the editors requested from as many scholars of early drama. The book was planned by eleven former students of David M. Bevington at the University of Chicago, and it is dedicated to him. The book won the Book of the Year Award for 1997 from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, and one essay, by Peter W. M. Blayney, won a separate award from Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London. The foreword is by Stephen J. Greenblatt.

Shakespeare and the Dramaturgy of Power (1989)
This is a study of Shakespeare's plays against the background of medieval religious drama. The argument is that the radical social and political dimensions of Shakespeare are often, anticipated by his prececessors on the English stage, who therefore offer a more credible explanation for the plays' outlook than those typically offered by New Historicism and Cultural Materialism. In short, the book argues that postmodern critics of Shakespeare are often right but for the wrong reasons.