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Dateline: 13th June, 2010
Wells Wins Globe Award Leading Shakespeare scholar Professor Stanley Wells, CBE, has accepted Shakespeare's Globe’s Sam Wanamaker Award, given annually in the name of the Globe's founder to celebrate work which has increased the understanding and enjoyment of Shakespeare.
Author and editor of over forty books, Professor Wells spent ten years editing the Oxford Complete Works of Shakespeare - the most important and groundbreaking edition since the first ever collected works was published in 1623.
As well as the Oxford editions, he was also General Editor of the Penguin series and 19 volumes of the Shakespeare Survey journal. He is a former trustee of Shakespeare's Globe and a member of the Globe’s Council, former Director of the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon and Emeritus Professor and an Honorary Fellow at the University of Birmingham, as well as the Chairman of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon.
He is a former trustee of the Royal Shakespeare Company and a trustee of the Rose Theatre, and lectures extensively on Shakespeare and his contemporaries. His recent engagements have taken him to Venice, Elsinore and Romania, and his most recent book, published in April of this year by Oxford University Press, is Shakespeare, Sex, and Love. He was awarded the CBE for services to literature in 1997.
Professor Wells celebrated his 80th birthday in May, and in July he will be awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Marburg having been similarly honoured by Furman, Munich, Craiova, Durham, Hull and Warwick Universities.
The Sam Wanamaker Award was instituted by Shakespeare’s Globe in 1994 to honour work which has a similar quality to Wanamaker’s own pioneering mission. He spent the final 23 years of his life tirelessly fundraising, advancing research into the design of the original Globe, and planning the reconstructed Theatre with its architect, Theo Crosby.
On receiving the award, Professor Stanley Wells, CBE, said, “I’m honoured and delighted to be the recipient of the 2010 Sam Wanamaker Award. I knew Sam when the reconstruction of the Globe on Bankside was no more than a twinkle in his eye, and I had the greatest admiration for the enthusiasm and doggedness with which, against obstacles that would have defeated a lesser man, he pursued the task of raising funds for its completion and of gaining support for its aims. He was a great man of the theatre who also had a high respect for scholarly values.
“He saw the reconstructed Globe as an opportunity both for entertainment and for the pursuit of knowledge and understanding about the theatrical conditions of Shakespeare’s time. He would have been thrilled beyond measure to know of the success with which his aims have been fulfilled.
“It has been a privilege for me to be involved with the work of the Globe in a variety of ways at every stage of its history, and in accepting the award I express both my thanks and my very best wishes for its future.”
The Award was presented on stage after the Globe Theatre’s matinee performance of Henry IV Part 1 on Saturday, 12th June – the anniversary of Sam Wanamaker’s birthday – by Olivier Award-winning cast member Roger Allam, who plays Falstaff.
Please note that all three Archive indices are very long and will therefore take some time to download.
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