Nick de Somogyi

Education

Nick de Somogyi attended Dulwich College. He received a Ph. D. at Pembroke College, Cambridge.

Career

From 1996 to 2012 Nick worked as a Proofreader, Copy-editor, and Indexer. His clients included Faber & Faber, Macmillan Children's Books, Methuen, Nick Hern Books, Quercus, and SelfMadeHero. He continued his career working as an Author and Editor, working on different books from 1997 to 2012. At Shakespeare's Globe Nick de Somogyi worked as a Visiting Curator from 2002 to 2005. From 2002 to the present day de Somogyi works as an Independent Scholar and Textual Consultant.

Nick de Somogyi is the author of Shakespeare's Theatre of War. In this book, de Somogyi presents evidence to illustrate how the military conflicts in Europe during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries influenced the content of William Shakespeare's plays. "In this reconstructed context of protracted wartime and its attendant anxieties," wrote Jonathan Baldo in Shakespeare Quarterly, "characters such as Pistol and Osric, as well as entire plays, frequently acquire a new and often surprising dimension."

At the time Shakespeare was writing, England was involved in military conflicts with Spain and Ireland, and there was also strife across Europe, such as the war in the Low Countries during the 1590s. Depictions of and references to war are therefore not surprising in Shakespeare's plays, but de Somogyi goes beyond the obvious to analyze how Bard's plays, as well as those by contemporary writers such as Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Kyd, illuminate changing concepts about the world as perceived by English society. For example, Baldo noted, "the figures of knight and scholar, conceived as mutually exclusive in the Middle Ages, were fused in Elizabethan England." De Somogyi also "explores the theatrical dimensions of the war on the home front" and notes the nostalgic power of war that evokes cultural memories for the audience, revealing how Shakespeare utilized this phenomenon to good effect in his plays.

Although Baldo felt that de Somogyi could have offered a "more sustained discussion of the memory of war" and that he sometimes focuses "too narrowly on the relation between war and popular superstition," the critic concluded that the book provides "a valuable service to Shakespeareans by rounding out our awareness of the European conflicts that pressed upon the English people of the time." Reviewing the book in Renaissance Quarterly, Clifford Davidson called it "exceptional."

Achievements

• Nick de Somogyi is known as an experienced scholar and editor. One of his most favorite spheres is William Shakespeare's plays, with almost a dozen books edited.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Romeo and Juliet

    (The Shakespeare Folios series - offering the absolute aut...)

    2009
  • As You Like It 2003

References

• Contemporary Authors vol. 233