A renowned Newcastle University professor is to be remembered with an annual lecture in his honour.

Emeritus Professor Ernst Honigmann was an eminent Shakespearean scholar and his work is still influential today. His edition of Othello for Arden continues to be a bestseller.

He came to Newcastle University in 1968 as Reader of English and became the Joseph Cowan Chair of English Literature two years later. He retired in 1989 and became Emeritus Professor. He died in 2011.

His early life was spent in Breslau, Germany, now Wroclaw in Poland, where his father was director of the zoo. He and his family arrived in the UK as refugees in 1935 after fleeing Nazi Germany.

The inaugural Honigmann Shakespeare Lecture will take place on 13th December. The talk, ‘Cormorant: A History of Greed in Shakespeare’, will be given by Professor Gordon McMullan from Kings College London. He was Professor Honigmann’s replacement when he joined Newcastle University in 1989. Like his predecessor, he is a respected editor of Shakespeare.

Professor Kate Chedgzoy is head of the School of English Literature Language and Linguistics, and is also an expert on Shakespeare. She said: “Professor Honigmann’s widely used editions, as well as his detective work on the previously-mysterious years of Shakespeare’s early adulthood helped to shape the way we understand Shakespeare’s life and plays now."

The lecture, which has been organised by the School of English Literature Language and Linguistics and the University’s Medieval and Early Modern Research Group, will take place at 6pm, in the Literary and Philosophical Society, in Westgate Road, Newcastle on Thursday (13 December). Entrance is free and all are welcome to attend. Please book your place,  and for more information, please see the Medieval and Early Modern Studies website.

published on: 10 December 2012