'King Lear' by William Shakespeare

Critical Edition, with full sources, notes and commentary, of William Shakespeare, King Lear.

Cosmic effects on the intimate screen: J. B. Priestley, Ralph Richardson and 'Johnson over Jordan' (1965)

This article considers ideas about the suitability of experimental, non-naturalist, narrative forms in theatre and television, through the example of a 1965 BBC2 adaptation of J. B. Priestley's 1939 play Johnson over Jordan. Using both textual analysis of the programme and research into the BBC production documentation, this essay explains how the circumstances and conditions of 1960s television adaptation and the star casting of Sir Ralph Richardson transformed Priestley's stage play. The TV adaptation achieved cosmic effects on an intimate scale, through inference and the imaginative integration of the studio space with dubbed sound.

Further clarifying the competition–performance relation: reply to D. W. Johnson et al. (2012)

In their commentary, D. W. Johnson, Johnson, and Roseth (2012) provided some laudatory statements about our article, but they also expressed a number of concerns. The concerns focus on the following issues: types and definitions of competition, our choice of control group, the nature of performance-approach and performance-avoidance goals, the comprehensiveness of the opposing processes model, and performance-approach goals and constructive competition. We respond to each of these issues in turn and conclude with a statement regarding working to build an integrative model of the competition–performance relation (and beyond).

Poetry on Pre-Raphaelite principles: science, nature and knowledge in William Michael Rossetti’s 'Fancies at Leisure' and 'Mrs. Holmes Grey'

This article demonstrates how early Pre-Raphaelite poetry worked according to the principle that art should be modelled on science theorised by the Pre-Raphaelites in their early essays. As the main theorists (rather than practitioners) of Pre-Raphaelite art, F. G. Stephens and William Michael Rossetti defined the Pre-Raphaelite project in terms of observation, investigation, experiment, the “adherence to fact” and the “search after truth”. In the hands of the early Pre-Raphaelite poets, and particularly Rossetti himself, poetry too becomes a mode of scientific enquiry into the natural world, the nature of observation, human psychology and medical practice.