John Ramsay Allardyce Nicoll (28 June 1894 – 17 April 1976) was a British literary scholar and teacher. Allardyce Nicoll was born in

Partick Partick ( sco, Pairtick, Scottish Gaelic: ''Partaig'') is an area of Glasgow on the north bank of the River Clyde, just across from Govan. To the west lies Whiteinch, to the east Yorkhill and Kelvingrove Park (across the River Kelvin), and ...

, Glasgow, and educated at

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and the

University of Glasgow , image = UofG Coat of Arms.png , image_size = 150px , caption = Coat of arms Flag , latin_name = Universitas Glasguensis , motto = la, Via, Veritas, Vita , ...

, where he was the G. A. Clark scholar in English. He became a lecturer at King's College London in 1920 and took the chair of English at East London College (later Queen Mary's College) in 1923. In 1933 he went to

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as professor of the history of drama and dramatic criticism and chair of the drama department. He established a strong graduate programme in theatre history. Around 1943–45 he performed war work at the British embassy in Washington. From 1945 to 1961 he headed the English Department at the

University of Birmingham The University of Birmingham (informally Birmingham University) is a Public university, public research university located in Edgbaston, Birmingham, United Kingdom. It received its royal charter in 1900 as a successor to Queen's College, Birmingha ...

; from 1951 to 1961 he was also founding director of the Shakespeare Institute at Birmingham. He served as president of the Society for Theatre Research from 1958 to 1976.

Research

His major work was his six-volume ''History of English Drama, 1660–1900'', published as separate volumes starting in 1923, and reissued as a set in 1952–59. He also wrote many other books on English drama. He is credited with having made Restoration plays acceptable for scholarly study. When he began teaching in 1923, many colleges forbade Restoration drama on curricula because of its sometimes ribald topics and humorous examples of promiscuity. That changed in the course of the twentieth century. Allardyce Nicoll’s ''Film and Theatre'' (1936) offered a pioneering way of distinguising live theatrical performance from films. Nicoll argues that live audiences always know they are being presented with an "illusion of reality; it is always imaginative illusion" (166). People watching films, on the other hand, tend to believe the camera is representing something real. Furthermore, he argues that the characters in stage plays often represent ‘types,’ but the people acting in films are widely believed to be ‘individuals.’ According to this theory, it follows that film actors can attain more sophisticated, deeper portrayals of human beings. Steve Dixon called Nicoll's early theories a "surprising anticipation of postmodern media theories as exemplified by

Jean Baudrillard Jean Baudrillard ( , , ; 27 July 1929 – 6 March 2007) was a French sociologist, philosopher and poet with interest in cultural studies. He is best known for his analyses of media, contemporary culture, and technological communication, as ...

." Beginning in 1948 and for many years in the 1950s, he edited the Cambridge University Press yearbook ''Shakespeare Survey''. Nicoll had founded it upon his return to England after the war, with the ''Shakespeare Jahrbuch'' in mind as a general prototype, and the Survey soon developed into a respected international forum for Shakespeare criticism. He later turned to Commedia dell'Arte, publishing what reviewer Jack Violi called a brilliant probe.

Personal life

He was married twice and had no children.

References

Bibliography

* (Unsigned obituary), ''The Times'', 22 April 1976.
''New General Catalog of Old Books and Authors''
British literary critics British literary theorists Drama teachers Academics of the University of Birmingham 1894 births 1976 deaths Academics of King's College London Yale University faculty {{UK-academic-bio-stub