Carol Chillington Rutter

Carol Chillington Rutter is an award-winning writer and university lecturer, occasional broadcaster, widely-quoted reviewer and regular consultant to actors and directors in rehearsal rooms. Five books, including Clamorous Voices: Shakespeare's Women Today (a ground-breaking book, wrote one reviewer, that 'captured a generation); Enter the Body: Women and Representation on Shakespeare's Stage; and Shakespeare and Child's Play: Performing Lost Boys on Stage and Screen, have established her as the foremost writer on Shakespeare performance today.

Described as 'dazzling', 'finely observed', 'witty', her writing engages with Shakespeare in his own time to see his plays grappling with issues of love, death, sex, violence, race, power, politics, childhood (and much more, including some of the funniest jokes ever written). But she doesn't leave the playwright in the past. She sees him as a writer for the contemporary stage, those same issues engaging actors, directors and audiences today. She argues: Shakespeare mattered then. He matters now. And he challenged his audiences with ideas we're only catching up with. Demonstrating that Shakespeare put a black African queen on stage in 1606, Rutter exposes the long history into the twenty-first century of 'whiting out' Cleopatra. Her scholarship can be credited with returning Shakespeare's Cleopatra to the English stage.

Confessing herself an enthusiast of dust and recurrent sufferer of archive fever, Rutter dives deep into theatre records to write the biography of an Elizabethan theatre in Documents of the Rose Playhouse. Her new book, Lying Abroad: Henry Wotton and the Invention of Diplomacy mines state papers in London and Venice to tell the story of one of Shakespeare's most golden (and tarnished) contemporaries. Student, traveller, soldier, scoundrel, spy, and ultimately diplomat Wotton was the Earl of Essex's personal secretary across the fives years when Devereux was raiding Cadiz and campaigning disastrously in Ireland -- where a treaty bearing Wotton's handwriting sealed the earl's disgrace and ultimate downfall. Wotton survived, but only in self-exile in Italy. A sensational accident brought him to the attention of James VI of Scotland who, when he ascended the English throne as James I, called Wotton home from Venice -- then immediately sent him back, as ambassador to restore Anglo-Venetian relations lapsed for fifty years. Recounting his daily life in Venice Rutter shows Wotton as a maverick and 'honest dissembler' whose statecraft still finds traces in international relations today.

Now Emerita Professor of Shakespeare and Performance Studies at the University of Warwick, she holds a Warwick Award for Teaching Excellence and is a UK National Teaching Fellow. She lives in a corner of Shakespeare's Warwickshire where she plants tree and keeps bees. After ignoring it for fifty years has once again taken up her cello (following Wotton who travelled to Venice with his viol da gamba). Her ambition: one day to play Bach's first cello Suite with something like musical competence.