Bob is a Professor Emeritus of Communication and Performance Studies at Northern Michigan University, where he taught for 35 years.  He has degrees from Concordia College, U. of North Dakota, U. of Minnesota, Danforth Fellow at Indiana University.  Former Board member, Stratford Festival of Canada, and former member of the National Executive Council of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP).  He considers himself a teacher, not a researcher, and devoted himself to undergraduate instruction. 

He remarks that he joined ESU because "the group clearly supports the study of language and literature and humanity in all the best ways."

His talk is titled:

“Richard III and Sportive Villainy”.

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"Richard III and Sportive Villainy" grows from the experience of teaching Richard III at the Stratford Seminar at Northern Michigan University in June, 2002, and later seeing the superb production (starring Tom McCamus) which formed the cornerstone of the fiftieth season of the Stratford Festival of Canada.

Although he reigned for only 26 months (1483-1485), Richard has inspired more than his share of scholarship, commentary, myth, and good and bad historical writing.  The play occupies a key position in the Shakespearean canon, as the capstone of the eight histories covering the 15th Century and the Wars of the Roses.  Richard Armour once said there are only two important dates in English history--one is 1066 and the other one he couldn't remember.  It might well be 1485, when Richard's death at Bosworth opened the way for Henry VII and the Tudor Dynasty, and the glory of the Elizabethan Renaissance.

Was Richard Gloucester the unalloyed villain Shakespeare made him out to be?  Should he be canonized a saint as his revisionist supporters suggest?  Is there a middle ground?  Was Richard slandered--like The Big Bad Wolf--simply because a couple of his alleged victims were innocent and cute?

Let us examine the historical Richard, and the methods used by Shakespeare to transform him into the villain--the character everybody loves to hate--at the center of the most popular play Shakespeare ever wrote.