Alice Walker (scholar)


Alice Walker was a British scholar of the Elizabethan and Jacobean writer Thomas Lodge and the poet and playwright William Shakespeare.

Life

Walker was born in 1900 in Crumpsall in Manchester. Her parents were George Edward and Mary Alice Walker. She went to school at Blackburn High School for Girls. She did well at Royal Holloway College graduating in 1923 and three years later she gained her doctorate for her thesis on the Elizabethan and Jacobean writer Thomas Lodge. She decided that she should write a four volume description of Lodge's works and obtained a Jex-Blake scholarship.
She travelled for a year before beginning three years of lecturing at the Royal Holloway from 1928 to 1931 and then she does not appear to have taken paid work until she became a librarian in 1939. In 1933 she published The Life of Thomas Lodge again about this physician and writer of the sixteenth century.
She became an expert on the works of William Shakespeare publishing editions of his work. She was known for saying that there would never be a definitive version of his work unless a law was passed to decide it.
Walker died at Plymouth Hospital in 1982.

Works

Life of Thomas Lodge, 1933The Arte of English Poesie, with Gladys Doidge Willcock, 1934Edward Capell and his edition of Shakespeare, 1960OthelloTextual problems of the First Folio Richard III, King Lear, Troilus & Cressida, 2 Henry IV, Hamlet, OthelloTroilus and Cressida