Maurice Hindle is a writer and independent scholar based in London. He spent years teaching literature as an Open University arts tutor, and he is a trustee of the Rose Playhouse, the Tudor theatre site on Bankside.
His subjects are Romantic and Gothic fiction, Shakespeare on screen, and John Lennon. The Lennon thread goes back to his student days. On 2 December 1968, as a Keele undergraduate, he and two friends spent a day interviewing Lennon and Yoko Ono about revolution, and a recording of that interview was released publicly in 2014. In his criticism he likes to set a novel firmly in its own time. His 1990 essay on Frankenstein and Romantic science is one example, and he believes it was among the first scholarly pieces to use the phrase "Romantic science".
His doctorate, awarded in 1989, grew out of a critical edition of William Godwin's political Gothic novel Caleb Williams, which Penguin published in 1988. A Penguin critical study of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein followed in 1994. In 1992 he was asked to prepare the first Penguin Classics edition of Dracula. Later he turned to film: Studying Shakespeare on Film appeared in 2007, and a second edition, Shakespeare on Film, came out from Palgrave Macmillan in 2015.
If you arrived from Dracula or Frankenstein, start with the Penguin edition you already know and read his introduction and notes once you have finished the novel. They are written to give context, not to replace the story. For something different, Shakespeare on Film is a clear guide to how plays change on their way to the screen.
