Willy MaleyUniversity of Glasgow | UofG · College of Arts
Willy Maley
Doctor of Philosophy
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Introduction
Currently working on Shakespeare's histories and Milton's prose.
Publications
Publications (519)
The article focuses on two Dutch doctors – the Boate brothers, Arnold (1606-1653) and Gerard (1604-1650) – medical graduates of Leiden University who moved to London in 1630 to work as practising physicians. The brothers contributed to diverse forms of knowledge as part of the new science, including agriculture, anatomy, entomology, geography, indu...
Since the first novel launched in 1991 Outlander has ignited global interest in Scottish history, culture and language. The eighth instalment, Written in My Own Heart’s Blood, appeared in June 2014, and the TV adaptation premiered in August that year. Rumour has it that its UK release was delayed lest it influence the Scottish Independence Referend...
Our Fathers Fought Franco is a unique study of four men who joined the International Brigades in 1936, were captured at the battle of Jarama in February 1937, and spent months together in a Spanish prison. Told by their sons and daughters the story is illustrated with unique images and documents from the period.
Willy Maley (ed.), Our Fathers Foug...
This article on collaboration and political theatre offers a detailed account - through interviews, reviews, extracts and personal recollections - of the development and production history of a prison drama entitled No Mean Fighter, winner of a Fringe First Award at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1992.
‘Talking Points: Criticism, Crisis, and Early Modern Studies’, in David J. Baker and Patricia Palmer (eds.), Early Modern Criticism in a Time of Crisis (University of California at Santa Barbara: The EMC Imprint, 2022), https://emctc.tome.press/chapter/talking-points-criticism-crisis-and-early-modern-studies/. This chapter explores the concept of c...
A distinctive strategy of remembrance in Irish historical drama is the depiction of a current crisis through allusion to another traumatic passage in the deep or recent past. In this essay we examine two relatively neglected Irish plays staged twenty years apart which were produced at key moments of reversal and reflection, and which concentrate on...
Willy Maley reflects on what has changed in our understandings of ‘Shakespeare in the North’ since his own hugely influential contributions to debates about Shakespeare’s relations to Englishness, Scottishness, and Britishness, and in response to the socio-political faultlines revealed by who and where we are now.
Scotland’s famine history has been overshadowed by that of Ireland, and in Ireland the Great Hunger, An Gorta Mór, has blotted out earlier episodes in that country. Comparative studies of famine in Ireland and Scotland are complicated by the fact that Scotland, through the Ulster Plantation, was complicit with the British colonial project. Historic...
Divi Britannici (1675) is a major restoration history that deserves to be more widely known. The work’s author, Sir Winston Churchill (1620–1688), is certainly less well-known than his celebrated descendant of the same name. Seldom mentioned in discussions of seventeenth-century historiography, Divi Britannici can be read alongside contemporary his...
This collection provides students and researchers with a new and lively understanding of the role of institutions in the production, reception, and meaning of literature in the period 1700–1900. The period saw a fundamental transition from a patronage system to a marketplace in which institutions played an important mediating role between writers a...
When Scots poetry of the sixteenth century is read within its own tradition, evolving late medieval beginnings with its own cultural–historical features, a body of work becomes visible that is attractive in its variety and its different emphases from English poetry. These differences interrogate received critical narratives of sixteenth-century poe...
Volume 4 of The Oxford History of Poetry in English aims to feature a history of the birth moment of modern ‘English’ poetry in greater detail than previous studies. To accomplish its aim, Sixteenth-Century British Poetry examines the literary transitions, institutional contexts, artistic practices, and literary genres within which poets compose th...
This essay takes as its starting-point a little-known uncollected poem of Spark’s entitled ‘Anniversary’, published in autumn 1948 in a pioneering ‘free verse’ poetry quarterly, Variegation, launched in Los Angeles in 1946, the first journal to publish Kerouac and Ginsberg. This verse can instructively be placed among Spark’s other poems of the per...
This blog is about how the Irish backgrounds of John Lennon and Paul McCartney inspired them to write political protest songs in the wake of Bloody Sunday on 30 January 1972. https://www.willymaley.scot/2022/01/30/the-beatles-and-bloody-sunday/
This article looks at links between Robert Burns and Spain and socialism, homing in on a famous Burns Night celebration held by members of the International Brigades on the eve of the Battle of Jarama in January 1937.
This article explores the connections between Charles Dickens and the district of Possilpark in Glasgow. Dickens visited Possil House, the home of Archibald Alison, historian of the French Revolution, in December 1847. This is a ghost story, a story of hard times. It’s a tale of two cities, one inhabited by the privileged, another by the poor. It’s...
This blog tells the story of my 45-year on-off love affair with prog rock band Genesis: https://www.willymaley.scot/2021/10/29/last-suppers-ready-or-i-know-what-i-like-about-genesis/
Written by a team of leading international scholars, The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and War illuminates the ways Shakespeare's works provide a rich and imaginative resource for thinking about the topic of war. Contributors explore the multiplicity of conflicting perspectives his dramas offer: war depicted from chivalric, masculine, national...
Willy Maley, ‘Some Notes on James McCune Smith (1813-1865), a complex character whose name is often invoked but whose work is not often discussed or appreciated’.
A brief summary of what follows:
His neglect by literary scholars – parents and family – early education – acceptance in Glasgow – achievement of medical degrees and practical experienc...
The Irish writer George Moore, painted by Manet, praised by Joyce, tackled Shakespeare in a one-act play entitled The Making of an Immortal, published in a limited edition in 1927. The play was taken to America by H. G. Wells after Henry Tonks, Slade Professor of Art, hosted a reading at his London home. Set around the staging of Richard II in 1599...
Where does Shakespeare belong? This collection explores what happens to an international icon in a local context. To do so, it asks two related questions: where is the ‘North’ in Shakespeare, and where is Shakespeare in the ‘North’? Answering these questions involves thinking about how Shakespeare and his contemporaries understood the ‘North’. But...
Willy Maley, ‘You’re Only Young Twice – James Bridie, Irish-Scottish Studies & the University of Glasgow on Film’, Glasgow Doors Open Days Digital Festival 2020, 17 September 2020.
On the eve of World War Two, the playwright Osborne Henry Mavor, aka James Bridie (1888-1951), a Glasgow-born, Glasgow Academy educated, University of Glasgow alumnus, w...
‘Daddy Made Me A Communist’ is a brief reflection on Stuart Christie's memoir Granny Made Me An Anarchist.
This chapter examines the latticework of links between Shakespeare and Spenser, telling a tale of two writers. One goes to London to become poet and playwright, the other to Dublin with dreams of a dramatic career, where he finds his theatre of worldlings is a theatre of war. If Spenser’s influence on Shakespeare, especially early Shakespeare, is s...
Willy Maley, ‘Searching for the Seventeenth Century: Early English Books Online (EEBO)’,
Collections Lab Showcase, Lecture Theatre, Kelvin Hall, University of Glasgow, 10 January
2020. This is a 5-minute presentation for a colloquium on collections.
Willy Maley, ‘“[T]here presented him selfe a [...] clownishe younge man”: Rethinking
Spenser’s Youth’, review of Jean R. Brink, The Early Spenser, 1554-80: ‘Minde on honour
fixed’ (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019), Spenser Review 50, 2 (2020).
https://www.english.cam.ac.uk/spenseronline/review/volume-50/502/jean-r-brink-the-earlyspens...
Willy Maley, Review of Katarzyna Lecky, Pocket Maps and Public Poetry in the English Renaissance, Spenser Review 50, 1 (Winter 2020):
http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/spenseronline/review/volume-50/501/reviews/katarzyna-lecky-pocket-maps-and-public-poetry-in-the-english-renaissance
Speech given at the launch of a new exhibition at Glasgow Art Club entitled 'This is Glasgow' on 22 November 2019 on the representation of the city in art, photography and literature.
This article explores the gender politics of a neglected one-act play by Teresa Deevy, first staged at the Abbey in 1931, that revolves around the young female protagonist's recollection of a convent production of Shakespeare's Coriolanus in which the title role was taken by a young woman. This role model offers inspiration for a character confined...
Willy Maley, ‘My Life in Libraries’, Scottish Book Trust Blog (13 March 2019).
The centenary of the Easter Rising in 2016 and the 150th anniversary of James Connolly’s birth in 2018 afford an ideal opportunity to reappraise this unique figure. Rightly renowned for his polemical journalism and political theory, Connolly is less celebrated for his creative writing. His 1916 play, Under Which Flag?, long considered lost, resurfa...
This article looks at the ways in which Muriel Spark's biographies of other writers shaped her own writing and affected how she responded to life-writing as memoirist and as biographical subject.
In the wake of Black History Month and in the light of an ongoing examination of Scotland’s colonial past, This short article reflects on Muriel Spark’s formative experiences in Africa and the importance of her time there for her life and work.
Contemporary Irish takes on Shakespeare can be direct, even confrontational, or they can be sidelong and shifty. Male Irish playwrights can be bold and jealous in their responses. Marina Carr is different. She is doubly removed from Shakespeare, by her nationality as well as her gender. Perhaps as a result of this double removal, a mixture of admir...
Early modern Ireland is one of the most dynamic literary and political spaces in Renaissance Europe. It is the site of vibrant writing in English, Irish, and Latin and of translation from Latin, Spanish, and Italian into English and Irish. While it has received extensive critical attention from historicists, cultural materialists, feminists, and ne...
This article explores Muriel Spark’s childhood fascination with writing, her imaginative depictions of childhood, and her little-known work as a children’s writer with three enchanting stories to her name.
Willy Maley, ‘Dr Spark, I presume? The return of Muriel Spark’s forgotten drama’, Scottish Book Trust Blog (14 August 2018).
In the seventeenth century, John Kerrigan reminds us, “models of empire did not always turn on monarchy”. In this essay, I trace a vision of “Neptune’s empire” shared by royalists and republicans, binding English national interest to British overseas expansion. I take as my text a poem entitled “Neptune to the Common-wealth of England”, prefixed to...
This essay makes a strong call to reconsider women’s writing in the context of nation, state and empire. It situates the mid-seventeenth-century prophetic writings of Lady Eleanor Davies within the four-nation, three-kingdom archipelagic context from which they emerged and upon which they critically reflect. Through her family and marital connectio...
Willy Maley, ‘Muriel Spark on Love’, Scottish Book Trust blog (12 February 2018).
Archipelagic Studies has opened up English Renaissance literature to fresh contexts. Such studies to date focus largely on the seventeenth century and beyond. The rise of the new British history has thus had a decisive impact on the historiography of the “English Civil War” and “English Revolution.” Marx's claim that the English republic was shipwr...
Willy Maley, ‘Muriel Spark Burns Bright on Burns Night’, Scottish Book Trust blog (23 January 2018).
Willy Maley, ‘The Crème de la Crème: Old Favourites, New- Fangled Works, and Other Fictions’, Studies in Scottish Literature 43, 2 (2018): 179-184.
‘Far Distant, Far Distant: Orwell, My Father & Catalonia’, http://freedomtv.scot/watch-2/opinion/far-distant-far-distant-orwell-my-father-catalonia/, published online October 2017.
Richard Stanyhurst (Stanihurst) (1547–1618), Irish historian and Catholic controversialist, was born in Dublin. His father, James Stanyhurst, was speaker of the Irish parliament and recorder of Dublin, and his grandfather Nicholas had been mayor of Dublin. He was schooled first at Kilkenny, then in England at University College, Oxford (1563–68), a...
Barnabe Rich (1542–1617), best known for providing source material for Shakespeare's plays, is one of those minor Renaissance writers who turned his hand to a variety of trades: army captain, political polemicist, Protestant propagandist, planter pamphleteer, religious controversialist, romance writer, military theorist and practitioner, cultural c...
This chapter explores John Milton's Observations upon the Articles of Peace with the Irish Rebels (1649), a 25,000-word treatise that is a touchstone text for a turning point in British and Irish history, a telling account of the tensions between colonialism and republicanism, and a tipping point in Milton's thinking around Archipelagic interdepend...
How Muriel Spark viewed sports commentary as a form of storytelling.
Willy Maley, ‘Muriel Spark, Sports Commentary, and the Spoken Word’, Scottish Book Trust Blog, 7 August 2017.
Spenser in the Moment. Paul J. Hecht and J. B. Lethbridge, eds. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2015. xviii + 254 pp. $75. - Volume 70 Issue 1 - Willy Maley
Willy Maley, ‘Hearing Voices: Muriel Spark on the Radio’, Scottish Book Trust blog (Monday 12 December 2016).
Willy Maley, ‘Spark on Screen: The Book-to-screen Adaptations of Muriel Spark’, Scottish Book Trust (17 October 2016).
It is a commonplace to speak of the dramatic qualities of the Easter Rising; the staging of rebellions inevitably attracts theatrical comparisons. In the case of 1916, the dramatic aspect has arguably been overplayed. Either the focus is on amateur dramatics and improvization, with the Rising itself as a piece of theatre, which plays down the histo...
Edmund Spenser's poetry remains an indispensable touchstone of English literary history. Yet for modern readers his deliberate use of archaic language and his allegorical mode of writing can become barriers to understanding his poetry. This volume of thirty-seven essays, written by distinguished scholars, offers a rich introduction to the literary,...
It is forty years since the publication of Muriel Spark’s 14th novel, The Takeover (1976), which appeared like a jewel-encrusted dagger in the wake of the strange stiletto-like stories that preceded it: The Driver’s Seat (1970), Not To Disturb (1971), The Hothouse by the East River (1973), and The Abbess of Crewe (1974). The Takeover features one o...
Willy Maley, Review of Robert E. Hosmer Jr. (ed.), Hidden Possibilities: Essays in Honor of Muriel Spark (Notre Dame, Indiana: Notre Dame University Press, 2014)’, Religion & Literature 48, 2 (2016): 233-235, ISSN: 0888-3769, EISSN: 2328-6911.
Willy Maley, Review of Bob Cooney, Proud Journey: A Spanish Civil War Memoir, with Introduction by Meirian Jump (London: Marx Memorial Library & Workers’ School and Manifesto Press, 2015), and Mark J. Gillespie, When the Gorbals Fought Franco: The Story of J. J. Lynch, International Brigade Volunteer. Irishman. Glaswegian, 2nd edition (n.p.: 2016),...
Willy Maley, ‘Imagining Circles’: Review essay on The Shakespeare Circle: An Alternative Biography, ed. Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015)’, Spenser Review 46, 1 (Spring-Summer 2016),
http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/spenseronline/review/volume-46/461/the-shakespeare-circle-an-alternative-biography
Review of David Edwards (ed.), Campaign Journals of the Elizabethan Irish Wars (Dublin: Irish Manuscripts Commission, 2014), Spenser Review 45.3 (Winter 2016):
http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/spenseronline/review/45/453/campaign-journals-of-the-elizabethan-irish-wars
Review of John Kerrigan, Shakespeare’s Binding Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), Spenser Review 46.2.10 (Fall 2016), http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/spenseronline/review/item/46.2.10/
Willy Maley, ‘Where no man has gone before’: review of Lynda Mugglestone, Samuel Johnson and the Journey into Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015)’, Times Higher Education 2,222 (24-30 September 2015), p. 42.
OIL is in the news again, so it’s fitting that a new production of John McGrath’s landmark play, The Cheviot, The Stag, And The Black, Black Oil is in the pipeline too, as Dundee Rep launch a major revival. First produced in 1973, The Cheviot appeared at a unique moment in Scottish history: the build-up to a referendum on Scotland’s future. It was...
Willy Maley, ‘I favour peer review over metrics. Better to be judged by a panel of
one’s peers than by citations’, ‘On the receiving end’, Times Higher Education 2,215
(6-12 August 2015), pp. 30-37, at p. 35.
Willy Maley, ‘Indoctrination, then liberation’: Review of Terri Ochiagha, Achebe and Friends at Umuahia: The Making of a Literary Elite (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, 2015), Times Higher Education 2,210 (2-8 July 2015), p. 50.
Willy Maley, ‘Fatal Attraction: Programme Note for National Theatre of Scotland production of The Driver’s Seat, by Muriel Spark, adapted and directed by Laurie Sansom, Touring to The Lyceum, Edinburgh (13-27 June 2015) and Tramway, Glasgow (2-4 July 2015), Theatre Programme, pp.4-5.
This paper was presented at a conference in York in 2015 to mark the 70th birthday of my former tutor Derek Attridge. It touches on Literary Theory at the University of Strathclyde in the 1980s, James Joyce, African Literature, and Scottish independence.
‘Attridge, Apartheid, and the Angularity of Literature’, Derek Attridge at 70: The Languages o...
Willy Maley, ‘“A law unto himself”: Review of Quentin Skinner, Forensic Shakespeare, Clarendon Lectures in English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014)’, Times Higher Education 2,186 (15-21 January 2015), p. 52.
Review of Alan Warner, Their Lips Talk of Mischief (London: Faber & Faber, 2014), Edinburgh Review 141, Away Home (2015), pp. 157-160.
Willy Maley, Review of Adam Putz, The Celtic Revival in Shakespeare’s Wake: Appropriation and Cultural Politics in Dublin, 1867-1922 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), Irish Studies Review, 23, 3 (2015), pp. 373-375.
This article examines the response of the Catholic Church in Ireland and Scotland to the Spanish Civil War. Published as ‘They Stood Beside the Spanish People’, The Irish Voice 18 (January 2015), pp. 8-9.
Filth (1998), Irvine Welsh’s fourth novel, scrubbed up well for the big screen in 2013, adapting to a new art form in a manner that suggests its themes and issues remain relevant, but in its latest airing does it still risk reproducing the very misogyny it exposes, asks Willy Maley.
Willy Maley, Review of Anthony Grafton and Joanna Weinberg (with Alastair Hamilton), “I Have Always Loved the Holy Tongue”: Isaac Casaubon, the Jews, and a Forgotten Chapter in Renaissance Scholarship (Cambridge, Mass. and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011)’ Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 14, 3 (2015), pp. 527-528.
Willy Maley, Review of Brendan Kane and Valerie McGowan-Doyle (eds.), Elizabeth I and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014)], Spenser Review 45.2.33 (Fall 2015), ISSN 1559-1697, http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/spenseronline/review/item/45.2.33
Willy Maley, ‘It should have been “aye”’, Opinion: Scotland, Times Higher Education 2,171 (25 September-1 October 2014), p. 29. A response to the 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum result.
Lynn Staley’s The Island Garden goes back further and digs deeper than any previous intervention into the debate on the origins and development of English/British national identity. The three key planks of her study are the medieval/early modern “divide,” the ideation of England as a place, and the history of England’s histories (8). Staley takes a...
This chapter follows the fortunes of Arthur as a figure contested and celebrated in equal measure between Malory's Morte Darthur (1485), and Milton's History of Britain (1670). Malory depicted the French wars under the guise of Arthur's sixth-century campaign against Rome, and Arthur was key to medieval and Renaissance representations of sovereignt...
Willy Maley, ‘Holy war of weighty words’: Review of Alan Jacobs, The Book of Common Prayer: A Biography, Lives of Great Religious Books (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), Times Higher Education 2,135 (16-22 January 2014), p. 52.