Prof Laurie Johnson

@lostplayhouse.bsky.social

Professor of English and Cultural Studies @ University of Southern Queensland. Shakespeare scholar. Finder of lost playhouses. FSA FRHistS. He/him.

𝗦𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗦𝗽𝗮𝗰𝗲 𝗶𝗻 𝗘𝗮𝗿𝗹𝘆 𝗠𝗼𝗱𝗲𝗿𝗻 𝗩𝗮𝗹𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗶𝗮 𝗰.𝟭𝟰𝟬𝟬–𝗰.𝟭𝟳𝟬𝟬 𝗦𝗼𝗻𝗶𝗱𝗼 𝘆 𝗲𝘀𝗽𝗮𝗰𝗶𝗼 𝗲𝗻 𝗹𝗮 𝗰𝗶𝘂𝗱𝗮𝗱 𝗱𝗲 𝗩𝗮𝗹𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗶𝗮 Edited by Eduardo Carrero Santamaría, Tess Knighton and Francesc Orts-Ruiz Available in Open Access More Info: bit.ly/4fw40Fv #UrbanHistory #Music #Renaissance #Baroque #Musicology #Valencia #History

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If anybody in my network is still on the fence about attending the World Shakespeare Congress in Verona (kicking off in just 19 days' time), the convenors have announced registration is still open until 10 July -- come and join in the fun! www.wsc2026.org/registration/

Registration - World Shakespeare Congress Verona

Click here to register. Early bird registration: from 15 January 2026 to 31 March 2026; Regular: 1 April to 10 July 2026 FEES        Faculty 1     … Read more "Registration"

wsc2026.org

Can't tell you how thrilled I am to see my PhD student Mary Bellman's first article published! 🥳 'The Demetrius Dilemma: The Implications of Induced Love in A Midsummer Night’s Dream' in the British Shakespeare Association's journal, *Shakespeare*: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

The Demetrius Dilemma: The Implications of Induced Love in A Midsummer Night’s Dream

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the use of the love-in-idleness enchantment is not confined to producing Titania’s comic union with Bottom but is also applied to Lysander and is the source of Demetri...

tandfonline.com

Dear Dr Johnson, you are invited to submit a paper for "insert very important sounding Encyclopedia name here." You are very important. Accepted papers will attract a "insert value well over $2,000 here" processing fee after acceptance. Oh, how I laughed.

Truly uncanny to see universities all doing the same suicidal things: centralizing decision-making, erecting bafflingly expensive new buildings, stacking the board with money guys, hiding info about the budget, throwing money at consultants. Atriums everywhere! They all got the same memo.

To all the misogynists claiming "batsman" is the traditional term in cricket and that "batter" is a "woke" copout, I give you Exhibit A for "batter" being much older = in The Cricketer's Guide Being a Complete Manual of the Game of Cricket (1896), "Batter" is used throughout.

An open letter to @theguardian.com about their article last week about the Crown’s Silence, requesting that the Black scholar of Caribbean heritage who did the years of archival research behind this claim, and published it in 1979, Roger Norman Buckley, be acknowledged as the source of this reveal:

OPEN LETTER TO THE GUARDIAN
Dear Editors,
We write in reference to a recent article published in the UK online edition of The Guardian on Friday, 23 January 2026, which carried the following misleading headline: "British crown was world's largest buyer of enslaved people by 1807, book reveals."
The article in question, by Chris Osuh, showcases a new book by Dr. Brooke Newman, The Crown's
Silence: The Hidden History of Slavery and the British Monarchy (Harper Collins, 2026). But Newman's book is not the original source of that claim. That claim derives from earlier scholarship, the painstaking archival work of a Black historian of Caribbean heritage: the late Roger Norman Buckley.
It is unfortunate that the silencing of his original scholarship appears in the profiling of a book advertised as uncovering silences. While it is great to see public attention brought to the history of the Crown's involvement in slavery through the new book and its profiling in The Guardian, the headline compromises The Guardian's efforts to address the legacies of slavery generally and its own institutional links when it extracts and reframes earlier work by a Black scholar as a revelation new to this book.
The relevant passage in The Crown's Silence draws on original scholarship by Roger Norman
Buckley in Slaves in Red Coats: The British West India Regiments, 1795-1815 (1979). Dr. Brooke Newman repeats Buckley's figures, which she cites (referencing page 55 of Buckley's book, see attached) while changing his "British government" to "Crown." She then converts his careful "perhaps the largest individual buyer" to a more conclusive claim, changing his "British government" to "king" but without citing Buckley for that claim which is on page 56 of his book (see attached) and which, uncited in Newman's book, is the Guardian headline.
There is room for popular histories that rely largely on the secondary scholarship of other historians. But other historians have not been silent. Page from Buckley’s 1979 book2nd page from Buckley’s 1979 book

Hi. Do you look like I might have loaned you my copy of Rudolph Fiehler's Strange History of John Oldcastle (bought in a second hand bookshop in New Orleans in 2016, just like the one pictured below)? If you fit that description, I could really use it back. Thanks.

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Apparently the Barmy Army cheered the players leaving for rain -- they do realise, don't they, that a draw means the Ashes definitely stay with Australia? The only way for England to win the Ashes is to be on the field to bat for an unlikely, but still possible, win.