All is (Not) True: "Cymbeline"'s Much Ado About Nothing, Noting, (K)not Knowing, and Counterfeiting

Margery Bailey Professor in English & Dramatic Literature, and Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Stanford University

Patricia Parker received her M.A. in English at the University of Toronto, before leaving in 1968 to teach for three years in Tanzania, during the period when President Julius Nyerere was translating Shakespeare into Kiswahili. After returning to complete her Ph.D. at Yale, in Comparative Literature, in 1975 she joined the faculty in English and Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto, where she received tenure and was promoted to Full Professor. First invited to Stanford as a Visiting Professor in 1986, she joined the Departments of English and Comparative Literature at Stanford in 1988. She has also taught as a Visiting Professor at UC Berkeley and as a part of the core faculty at the School of Criticism and Theory.

She is the author of three books: Inescapable Romance, a study of romance from Ariosto to Wallace Stevens; Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property; and Shakespeare from the Margins; and co-editor of five collections of essays on criticism, theory, and cultural studies, including Shakespeare and the Question of Theory and Women, Race and Writing in the Early Modern Period. She has lectured widely, in France, Germany, Spain, Australia, New Zealand, the Czech Republic, and other parts of the world, as well as at Harvard, Yale, Berkeley, Chicago, Oxford, Cambridge, the Sorbonne, and other universities, as Gauss Seminar lecturer at Princeton, and as the Shakespeare's Birthday lecturer at the Folger Shakespeare Library; and has served on the Advisory Board of the English Institute. In 2003-4, she organized an international conference and public festival at Stanford devoted to “Shakespeare in Asia” (details and photos at http://sia.stanford.edu) and worked with students to create performance-based programs in the community.

In addition to completing three book projects, on Shakespeare, race, religion and gender in the early modern period, she is currently editing Norton Critical editions of Much Ado About Nothing and Twelfth Night and a new Arden edition of A Midsummer Night's Dream; and serving as General Editor of a major international Shakespeare Encyclopedia.