Anne Barton obituary

Anne Barton, who was born in New York, arrived at Girton School, Cambridge, in 1954. Photograph: Ramsey &amp Muspratt

Thinking about the moment when, in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, Cleopatra ultimately will get rid of the clown who has delivered the basket of figs and asps, Anne Barton wrote: “We truly feel that exactly because she has walked by way of the fire of ridicule … she has earned the right to say, ‘Give me my robe, put on my crown, I have/Immortal longings in me.’ And she does so at when. Comedy flowers into tragedy, with no a break or mediating pause.”

Anne, who has died aged 80, had the gift for a Shakespeare critic of pinpointing a second flawlessly, the elegance of her prose and accuracy of her perception combining to bring out the playwright’s brilliance and humanity. The generations of students who read through her introductions to Shakespeare’s comedies in the US-published Riverside Shakespeare edition not only realized about the plays but also how one might compose about them, and how crucial creating can make the acquainted startlingly unfamiliar in all its complexity. In this way she taught her readers precisely what Shakespeare (or Ben Jonson or Byron) obtain and how they do it.

Born BarbaraAnn Roesen in New York, she was the daughter of Blanche and her wealthy engineer husband, Oscar. Her final-yr paper at Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania – below the identify of Bobbyann Roesen – on Love’s Labour’s Lost accomplished the distinction of getting published in Shakespeare Quarterly (1953), America’s leading journal in the field.

A possibility encounter on a summer course in Britain encouraged her to apply to Cambridge and she arrived at Girton School in 1954 to publish a doctoral thesis, supervised by Muriel Bradbrook. Published as Shakespeare and the Notion of the Perform (1962), it pointed to Shakespeare’s conception of what a perform is and how his drama exhibits its self-consciousness as a play.

Even though nevertheless a graduate student, now named Anne, she married William Righter in 1957. She returned to Girton in 1960 as a study fellow and then joined the faculty of English.

After her divorce from Righter, in 1969 she married John Barton, one of the creators, with Peter Hall, of the Royal Shakespeare Organization. The end result of their marriage was a series of productions highly informed by crucial evaluation. They shared a passion for plays they felt had often been undervalued and for techniques in which the theatricality of manufacturing could be emphasised, as in John’s Richard II for the RSC in 1971. Anne’s analysis of Hamlet as a play overwhelmingly self-aware of its very own standing as a perform, set out in her introduction to the New Penguin Shakespeare edition in 1980, was entirely reflected in John’s RSC production in the identical yr.

Anne and John bought a close to-derelict Elizabethan manor property close to Stratford-upon-Avon with appropriately Shakespearean connections. Hillborough Manor gave Anne the chance to entertain lavishly and stylishly for her pals, graduate college students and – at Christmas – the RSC.

In 1972, she left Cambridge as a lecturer to consider up a chair at Bedford University, London. Two many years later she grew to become the initial female fellow of New College, Oxford.

In 1984 she returned to Cambridge as a professor and a fellow of Trinity University, exactly where she would dwell for the rest of her life. That 12 months she published Ben Jonson, Dramatist, a guide of vast scope and imaginative sympathy in its comprehending of what helps make Jonson so in contrast to Shakespeare, and a rescue-act in its astonishing demonstration of the effectively experimental nature of Jonson’s last plays, operates till then dismissed as failures. It was her prompting that led the RSC triumphantly to generate The New Inn (1987) and Sejanus (2005), neither performs that most believed well worth staging.

She continued to pursue her other literary passion, Byron, whose Don Juan she held, as had Shelley, to be the best English prolonged poem given that Paradise Lost. She brought together several of her articles or blog posts in Essays, Largely Shakespearean (1994) and in no way fairly finished her review of forests and parks in early contemporary drama.

After the sale of Hillborough Manor, Anne bought an equally striking residence, Leverington Hall, near Wisbech, but she came to favor getting in university in Cambridge, in rooms total of stunning paintings, the tiny Japanese sculptures known as netsuke, the final of her father’s collection of clocks and her cats. Her opening chapter in The Names of Comedy (1990) – was shaped close to TS Eliot’s poem on the naming of cats.

As a lady, Anne had tolerated becoming taken to dances, supplied her escort left her alone in a corner with a book. Macular degeneration in her last many years was a cruel affliction, but her prodigious memory, to which she had committed an astonishingly wide range of poetry, was a comfort. In hospital she entertained herself and astonished others by reciting Shakespeare sonnets by the score.

She is survived by John.

• Anne Barton, Shakespeare scholar, born 9 Could 1933 died 11 November 2013

Anne Barton obituary