Professor René Weis

Email: r.weis@ucl.ac.uk
Phone: 020 7679 3147
Internal Phone: 33147
René Weis will be on Leverhulme Research Leave from October 2010 to 2013

Education and Experience

René Weis was educated at the University of Edinburgh, the Università per stranieri di Perugia, and at UCL, where he has worked since 1980. His main area of research is Shakespeare, which he teaches extensively both at undergraduate level and on the Shakespeare MA. Among his other interests are the classical background of English literature, particularly Homer, Sophocles, Virgil, and Ovid; and modern drama from Ibsen and Chekhov to Miller, Williams, Pinter, and Mamet. Over the years he has supervised doctoral students on a diverse range of topics, including Shakespeare and Brecht, work and play on the Shakespearian Stage, Shakespearian maternities, and the Arts Council and modern British theatre. Current projects under his supervision include one on medicine and Shakespeare and another on queenship in the period. Weis is keen to supervise further research on any aspect of Shakespeare, and particularly in the areas of editing, bibliography, biography, topography, local history, translations, and the relevance of the sectarian divides in Shakespeare’s England to his works. René Weis has acted as external examiner at King’s College London (English), and served a four-year term as Vice-Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at UCL. He has held a number of departmental posts over the years, and has served on senior UCL appointments committees.

René Weis is the University of London Trustee of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. He is the Chair of UCL’s prestigious college-wide Lunchtime Lecture Series. For the past eight years he has also chaired the Maccabaeans Lecture at UCL, speakers including Dan Jacobson, Marina Warner, Miri Rubin, John Took, and Sander Gilman. He serves on the Fonds National de la Recherche in Luxembourg, adjudicating and monitoring research funding in the Arts and Humanities and Social Sciences.

René Weis has been awarded a 3-year Major Research Fellowship by the Leverhulme Trust for a book on the genesis of Verdi’s opera La Traviata. The project is to research the life and times of a nineteenth-century Parisian prostitute, Marie Duplessis, and to explore how her story came to inspire two great works of literature and music, La Dame aux Camélias by Alexandre Dumas fils and La Traviata by Giuseppe Verdi. Proust claimed that La Traviata turned La Dame aux Camélias into art, while the novel transformed a real life fallen woman into a literary Mary Magdalene. Marie Duplessis remains as iconic today as she was in the Paris of the 1840s when she enjoyed the company of Dumas and Liszt alongside that of the upper echelons of the European aristocracy. A particular strand of this project explores the cafés, theatres, opera houses, and sub-cultures of the Paris of Balzac, Baudelaire, Gautier, Hugo, Lamartine, and Sue, the life support of a world in which demi-mondes rubbed shoulders with poets, painters, publishers, and millionaire politicians.

Research

René Weis’s primary research area is the life and work of Shakespeare. He is currently revising his 1993 Longman edition of the Parallel Text King Lear, which the Year’s Work in English Studies for 1993 singled out as the most important contribution of the year to editing Shakespeare. The new edition (October 2009) takes account of the latest textual research on the question of revision. In a new 18,000-word preface called ‘The Integral King Lear’, which engages the 1993 Introduction, René Weis looks again at the multiple variants between 1608 Quarto and 1623 Folio Lear and argues that they tell a story of convergence rather than disjunction. His main research project for the last four years has consisted of preparing an edition of Romeo and Juliet for the Arden Shakespeare Third Series. The play’s textual history dovetails palaeographically with that of King Lear with regard to foul papers, that is the role played in the genesis of edited texts by manuscripts derived from Shakespeare’s own longhand, in which Weis has an editor’s specialist’s interests. His next project beyond Romeo and Juliet will be a biographical and historical study of the stories feeding into Verdi’s opera La Traviata, building on Weis’s interest in opera and his expertise as a writer of biographies (Criminal Justice, Shakespeare Revealed) and historical narratives (The Yellow Cross). He has been awarded a Major Research Fellowship by the Leverhulme Trust (36 months) for this project.

René Weis’s research as a Shakespeare editor, biographer and historian, connects to three of the English Department’s core research areas: Editing (Romeo and Juliet, Henry IV Part 2, King Lear, John Webster), Life Stories (the biographies Shakespeare Unbound, Criminal Justice, and Traviata), and The City (1920s London in Criminal Justice and 1840s Paris in Traviata).

Selected Publications

Books

Shakespeare Unbound: Decoding a Hidden Life (Henry Holt & Co., 2007)

Shakespeare Revealed: A Biography (John Murray, 2007)

Criminal Justice: The True Story of Edith Thompson (1988; revised edn. Penguin, 2001)

(Since her execution at Holloway prison in 1923, Edith Thompson has been a legendary figure. Grave doubts were expressed at the time about the extent to which she was responsible for her husband's murder in Ilford by her handsome young lover Frederick Bywaters. The Home Office files on the case were marked not to be opened for 100 years. The case against her rested largely on the evidence provided by 70 letters which she wrote to Bywaters. The truth is that these letters offer a unique insight into the workings of an overwrought romantic imagination, ultimately unable to free itself from the constraints of a suburban marriage and respectability. Through this correspondence and a painstaking reconstruction of the period, the author argues that Edith Thompson was innocent.)

The Yellow Cross: The Story of the Last Cathars, 1290-1329 (Viking, 2000)

The Yellow Cross was published in paperback by Penguin (2001) and by Knopf in New York (Vintage paperback). It has been translated into seven languages, including French (Fayard, with a preface by Emmanuel Leroy Ladurie), German (Luebbe and Bastei), Dutch (Het Spectrum), Italian (Mondadori), Greek (Enalios), Portuguese (Aletheia), and Spanish (Debate).

(In the thirteenth century, a group of heretics in southwest France, the Cathars, became a serious threat to the Catholic church. In several waves of repression, thousands of Cathars were killed. Yet so ardent was their faith that, early in the next century, the Cathars rose one last time. Using the breathtakingly detailed and uniquely extant documentation from this period, and drawing on his intimate knowledge of the last Cathars' tracks and hiding places, many of which survive to this day, René Weis tells the full story of this gripping historical episode.)

Editions

Shakespeare, King Lear: A Parallel Text Edition (revised edn. Longman, 2009)

Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 2 (Clarendon Press, 1997)

John Webster, 'The Duchess of Malfi' and Other Plays (Oxford World’s Classics, 1996)

Shakespeare, King Lear: A Parallel Text Edition (Longman, 1993)