John Kerrigan established himself during the 1980s as one of a group of scholars who revolutionised the editing of Shakespeare by discrediting the practice of 'conflating' variant editions of such plays as Hamlet and King Lear. His own editions include Love's Labour's Lost (1982) and Shakespeare's Sonnets and a Lover's Complaint (1986). He did further work on A Lover's Complaint recovering its sources and analogues in Motives of Woe (1991).
He won the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in 1998 for Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon, an ambitious study in comparative literature, and in 2001 published a book of essays On Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature.
Over the last decade he has published numerous essays on contemporary poetry, including Geoffrey Hill, Denise Riley and Paul Muldoon. His Archipelagic English: Literature, History, and Politics 1603-1707 (2008) seeks to correct the traditional Anglocentric account of seventeenth-century English Literature by showing how much remarkable writing was produced in Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, and how preoccupied such English authors as Shakespeare, Milton, and Marvell were with the often fraught interactions between ethnic, religious, and national groups around Britain and Ireland. He has written extensively for theTimes Literary Supplement (London) and the London Review of Books.
