Dennis Kennedy (author)

• 1. Introduction

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  Dennis Kennedy was born on the 1st of November 1940 in Cincinnati, Ohio, and by any measure his life has traced one of the more unusual arcs in twentieth-century scholarship. He is the Samuel Beckett Professor of Drama and Theatre, Emeritus, at Trinity College Dublin. He holds dual citizenship in the United States and Ireland. He has directed Shakespeare in Beijing and Brecht in Dublin. He has edited the reference works that other scholars reach for first. And he began writing short stories only in 2013, well past most people's notion of a literary debut. What shaped a man who moved from a communications post on a naval vessel in the Pacific to the chair once associated with Samuel Beckett? And how did his particular angle of vision change the way the English-speaking world thinks about Shakespeare?

• 2. From Cincinnati to the Pacific

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  Kennedy studied literature, philosophy, and history at the University of San Francisco, where he became president of the College Players. After graduating, he trained at the US Naval Officer Candidate School in Newport, Rhode Island. He was then assigned as communications officer aboard the USS Graffias, operating in Japan and the Pacific during the early stages of the American War in Vietnam. His next posting was shore duty in Pearl Harbor, and while stationed in Honolulu he worked professionally as an actor. It is a biographical detail easy to overlook: the man who would later argue that what an audience sees on stage matters as much as what it hears was, at that point, learning performance from inside it.

  After his military service he pursued graduate work at Oxford and the University of California, Santa Barbara, receiving his PhD in 1972. For the decade that followed he taught literature and theatre at Grand Valley State in western Michigan. Under the initiative of Michael Birtwistle, he helped found an alternative theatre in Grand Rapids called Stage 3, where he acted, directed, and wrote. He also started the Michigan New Plays Festival there. In 1973 he held a Senior Fulbright Lectureship at the University of Karachi in Pakistan, and in 1976-77 he was playwright-in-residence at the University of Oregon. Two separate years of research in London and Oxford were funded by fellowships from the US National Endowment for the Humanities.

• 3. Shakespeare Beyond English

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  Looking at Shakespeare, Kennedy's book on design and the visual in twentieth-century production, made the case that the meaning of a performance depends as much on what an audience sees as on what it hears. The argument sounds obvious now; at the time it cut against a tradition in Shakespeare scholarship that treated the words in English as the primary site of meaning. Foreign Shakespeare, which Kennedy edited, went further, insisting on the significance of Shakespeare performed in Europe and outside English entirely. That volume marked what Kennedy himself described as a turning point in Shakespeare studies.

  By the time Shakespeare in Asia appeared, some fifteen years after Foreign Shakespeare, the shift away from an Anglo-centred approach to England's national poet had been broadly noted in both scholarship and production. Kennedy had spent much of those intervening years lecturing worldwide on Shakespeare, theatre, and the relationship of art to politics, advising theatres in London, Canada, and the United States on the plays of Harley Granville Barker and G. B. Shaw. In 2021 he gave the opening address to the World Shakespeare Congress in Singapore, a gathering that, in its very location, illustrated the shift his work had helped to articulate.

• 4. Granville Barker and the Theatre's Past

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  Granville Barker and the Dream of Theatre, Kennedy's study of England's foundational director, drew praise from John Gielgud and Peter Hall among others. Barker had been a central but increasingly neglected figure in the reform of British staging; Kennedy's book re-evaluated what that work had actually meant. Kennedy had been advising theatres on Barker's plays since his Pittsburgh years, and that practical engagement fed the scholarship.

  His edition of plays by Harley Granville Barker appeared from Cambridge University Press in 1987 and 1990. The essays and program notes he wrote for the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, the Globe Theatre in London, the Shaw Festival in Canada, and the City Theatre in Pittsburgh between 1985 and 2020 represent a parallel track of applied criticism, one that put his thinking directly in front of audiences on the night of a performance rather than only in university libraries.

• 5. The Beckett Chair and Dublin

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  In 1994 Kennedy was appointed the inaugural holder of the Samuel Beckett Chair of Drama and Theatre at Trinity College Dublin. He founded the film studies program there and established training programs for actors and filmmakers in collaboration with the Abbey Theatre, Ireland's national theatre, and the Irish Film Institute. Those collaborative arrangements gave the Chair an outward-facing dimension that classroom teaching alone could not have provided.

  His edition of The Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance, and its subsequent condensations in the Oxford Companion series, became the standard reference works in the field. The Spectator and the Spectacle, his book on audiences, extended the scope of his thinking well beyond conventional theatre studies to include audiences for sport, television game shows, museums, gambling, and religious ritual. In the theatre during his Dublin years he directed new plays and also mounted productions of Shakespeare's As You Like It in Beijing in 2005 and Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle in Dublin in 2006.

• 6. Late Work and New Directions

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  Kennedy began writing short stories in 2013; they appeared in a number of literary magazines. Fossil Light: A Novel in Films was published in 2023 by Blackrock Press Dublin. The title form, a novel structured around films, reflects a career spent thinking about the relationship between live performance and the visual image.

  Creating Jesus, his most recent book, examines the gospel of Mark as both literary and historical document. Kennedy described it as the consolidation of a lifelong interest in the history of Christianity and its place in contemporary culture. Published in 2024 by Wipf and Stock, it appeared under the subtitle The Earliest Record of Yeshua of Nazareth, a framing that situates the inquiry in historical rather than devotional terms. Kennedy has been married to Annie Tyrrell since 1970. They live between Dublin and southwest France. Their daughter Miranda is an author and journalist in Washington; twins Jessica and Megan are dancers and co-artistic directors of Junk Ensemble, a dance-theatre troupe in Dublin.

• 7. Honours and Reach

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  Kennedy won the Freedley Award for theatre history twice. He also received the Chancellor's Distinguished Research Award at Pittsburgh, the Pennsylvania Arts Council Award for playwriting, and three major awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities. He was elected to both the Academia Europaea and the Royal Irish Academy, where he chaired the committee on languages, literature, and culture for a number of years and organised an international series of lectures and conferences on human rights and the humanities.

  He has held fellowships and visiting appointments from Berlin and Salzburg to Singapore and Beijing, including distinguished visiting professorships at the universities of Victoria and McMaster in Canada and at Wisconsin and California Santa Barbara in the United States. Kennedy continues to lecture and present acting workshops around the globe. His essay 'Shakespeare's Refugees,' published in Shakespeare Survey in 2024, is among his most recent contributions to the field he has spent five decades reshaping.