The project is coordinated by Research Professor Jean-Christophe Mayer (French National Centre for Scientific Research) and Emeritus Professor Charles Whitworth of the Institute for Research on the Renaissance, the Neoclassical age and the Enlightenment, at Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier, France.

Gilles BERTHEAU has been teaching at the University of Tours and the CESR (Centre for Advanced Renaissance Studies) since 2003 and, as university professor, since 2023. For the current project, he is in charge of George Chapman's plays.
Publications: He edited (in collaboration with Jean-Pierre Villquin) Sir Thomas More, by Anthony Munday, William Shakespeare et alii for volume 2 of Histoires de Shakespeare (Paris, Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 2008). In 2016, he published La Tragédie de Chabot, amiral de France / The Tragedy of Chabot, Admiral of France, by George Chapman and James Shirley (Paris, Classiques Garnier) in a bilingual edition. In addition to numerous articles on George Chapman and in particular his French tragedies, he has also published on the historical English theatre of Christopher Marlowe (The Massacre at Paris), Anthony Munday, Thomas Heywood, Philip Massinger (The Tragedy of Sir John van Olden Barnevelt written with John Fletcher and Believe as You List), John Dryden and Nathaniel Lee (The Duke of Guise) and John Banks. Another part of his research focuses on the writings of James VI of Scotland/I of England, to whom he has devoted six articles and whose speeches he is preparing for an annotated translation.
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Luc BOROT is Emeritus Professor of early modern British civilisation at University of Montpellier Paul-Valéry, France. His main field of research is political and religious ideas and the history of mentalities. The first version of the "Representing France and the French database" was designed by him. He has also worked for this project on Shakespeare's Richard II, 1 Henry IV, 2 Henry IV (in collaboration with J.-C. Mayer) and on Jonson's The New Inn, Bartholomew Fair and The Staple of News.
Publications: "Le langage de la valeur dans Richard II de Shakespeare: lexique, rhétorique et légitimité", in Shakespeare et l'argent, ed. M.-T. Jones-Davies (Belles Lettres, 1993); "Source, Spectacle, Idéologie: Richard II de Holinshed à Shakespeare", in Tudor Theatre, Narrative and Drama, le narratif et le dramatique. Théta 2. (Peter Lang, 1995); (ed.) James Harrington and the Notion of Commonwealth (Montpellier UP, 1998); (ed.) Civisme et citoyenneté... une longue histoire (Montpellier UP, 1999); "The Bible and Protestant Inculturation in the Homilies of the Church of England", in The Bible in the Renaissance, Essays on Biblical Commentary and Translation in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries, ed. Richard Griffiths (Ashgate, 2001); edition of Thomas Hobbes, "A Preface to the Reader", critical annotated edition of Hobbes's translation of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey (1675), with introduction ("Hobbes's Poetics by himself"), Cahiers Élisabéthains 60 (October 2001).
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Jean-Louis CLARET is Associate Professor at Aix-Marseille University, where he teaches Elizabethan drama. As far as this project is concerned, he focuses his attention on Shakespeare's tragedies.
Publications: He has authored several books and numerous articles about William Shakespeare. For many years, he has been exploring the connections between words and images, emphasising the relationships between early modern drama and the works of the great Italian and Flemish masters of the Renaissance. As an illustrator, he has focused his recent publications on the translation of literature into visual images, effectively combining theoretical knowledge with practical technical skills. His latest book, Illustre Shakespeare (PUP, 2024), later published by Anthem Press under the title Picturing Shakespeare (2025), is dedicated to this dual pursuit.

Jean-Paul DEBAX is Professor Emeritus of English literature at the University of Toulouse, France. He has taught literary theory, diachronic and synchronic linguistics, medieval studies and theatre studies. His main field of research is late medieval theatre. For the current project, he has worked on a number of late medieval and early Tudor dramatists.
Publications: “Oh, oh, oh, Ah, ah, ah, The Meanings of laughter in the English Interludes", in Tudor Theatre, vol. 6, ed. A. Lascombes, Coll. Theta, 2002. "From the Throne of God to the Throne of Man: The Throne as Prop and Allegory in Tudor Drama" , European Medieval Drama, Volume 5 / 2002, 17-26. "De la Cène à la scène, le banquet du Moyen Age à Shakespeare", Proceedings of the French Shakespeare Society, 1-3 February 2001, Montpellier UP, 2002. "Note sur Recklessness et sprezzatura", L’Articulation langue- littérature dans les textes médiévaux anglais, dir. C. Stévanovitch,  Publications de l’AMAES, Collection GRENDEL 5, Nancy (2005),  461-472. "Farce and Farcical Elements in the English Interludes", in Ludus, ed. W. Husken (Rodopi, 2002). "Le déguisement comme métamorphose dans les interludes anglais", in Métamorphoses, ed. A. Papahagi. AMAES 26, 2003. "Le Vice, créature des profondeurs", in Surface et Profondeur, Hommage à Guy Bourquin, ed. C. Stévanovitch et R. Tixier, Nancy, Grendel 7, 2003.

 

Athéna EFSTATHIOU-LAVABRE is Senior Lecturer at Paris Nanterre University. For the current project, she has worked on all the plays of Richard Brome.
Publications:  she is a specialist in the theatre of Richard Brome, to whom she has devoted numerous papers and publications.
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Antoine ERTLÉ has been Senior Lecturer at Bordeaux Montaigne University since 2000. For this project, he has worked on Thomas Middleton's dramatic works and on Middleton's numerous collaborations with Rowley, Dekker, Webster, Fletcher, Massinger, Wilkins and Shakespeare.
Publications: His doctoral thesis and publications are mainly devoted to Thomas Middleton and early modern English theatre. He is the author of a bilingual critical edition of Thomas Middleton's plays A Game at Chess and The Old Law. He regularly lectures on Elizabethan theatre to students studying for a Bachelor's degree in Theatre at his university and to students at the Bordeaux Aquitaine National Theatre School. He co-organised an international symposium with Catherine Lisak on black humour on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage. In addition to his teaching and research activities, he was Deputy Vice-President for International Relations and the first Director of the "Cité des langues étrangères, du français et des francophonies" (Centre for Foreign Languages, French and Francophonia)..
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Richard HILLMAN is Professor Emeritus at the Université de Tours, (Department of English and Centre d'Études Supérieures de la Renaissance). For the project, he is responsible for the works of Kyd, Marlowe and Marston, as well as for Eastward Ho! (Chapman, Jonson and Marston).
Publications: his chief specialty is the English theatre of the Renaissance, a field in which he has published numerous articles and eight books, the most recent of which testify to the concentration of his research on links between England and France: Shakespeare, Marlowe and the Politics of France (Palgrave, 2002), French Origins of English Tragedy (2010), French Reflections in the Shakespearean Tragic: Three Case Studies (2012), and The Shakespearean Comic and Tragicomic: French Inflections (2020), the last three with Manchester UP. He has also translated works by Marie de Gournay (with Colette Quesnel), as well as more than twenty sixteenth- and seventeenth-century French plays, latterly for “Scène Européenne - Traductions Introuvables”, the series he directs for Les Presses Universitaires François-Rabelais (Tours).
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Jean-Marie MAGUIN † was Professor Emeritus of English literature at the University of Montpellier Paul-Valéry (France), where he co-founded in 1970 the Centre d'Études et de Recherches sur la Renaissance Anglaise (now incorporated in Institute for Research on the Renaissance, the Neoclassical age and Enlightenment (an associate research institute of the French National Centre for Scientific Research). He co-founded in 1972 the international journal Cahiers Élisabéthains and was an honorary president of the Société Française Shakespeare. Within the team working on "Representing France and the French", J.-M. Maguin was in charge of some of Shakespeare's comedies.
Publications: He has published many articles on the drama and poetry of Renaissance England, with a special focus on theatre semiotics, poetics, and rhetoric. His books include La Nuit dans le théâtre de Shakespeare et de ses prédécesseurs (Night in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Predecessors) [Lille, 1980, 2 vols.]; William Shakespeare (Paris: Fayard, 1996), in collaboration with Angela Maguin;  Coriolanus: Shakespeare (Paris: Atlande, 2007); Théâtre élisabéthain (coed., Pléiade, Paris: Gallimard, 2009, 2 vols.), an anthology of English Renaissance plays in translation; and Shakespeare and the Rhetoric of Elocution: Thirteen Plays (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2017).

Florence MARCH is Professor in Early Modern English Drama at Université de Montpellier Paul-Valéry, France, and Director of the Institute for Research on the Renaissance, the Neo-Classical Age and the Enlightenment (IRCL) at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). As part of this project, she has worked on all of Ben Jonson's dramatic works.
Publications: Her research focuses on Elizabethan and Restoration drama and theatre, as well as on the contemporary dynamics of these legacies in France and Europe. She studies Shakespeare’s structuring function in France’s history of theatre for all people in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, particularly through festivals. She recently co-edited Shakespeare on European Festival Stages (Bloomsbury/Arden, 2022) with Nicoleta Cinpoes and Paul Prescott, and has published extensively on South France festivals (Avignon, Montpellier and more broadly Provence and Occitanie). She is co-editor-in-chief of Cahiers Élisabéthains (SAGE); co-managing editor of Arrêt sur Scène. Théâtres européens de la Renaissance aux Lumières / Scene Focus. Early Modern European Theatre (OpenEdition); and translator at the Maison Antoine Vitez, International Centre for Theatre Translation.
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 Professional Profile

Jean-Christophe MAYER is a Research Professor employed by the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). A specialist of Shakespeare's history plays, he has worked for this project on all ten of the Bard's English histories.
Publications: (ed.) Lectures de Shakespeare: Antony and Cleopatra (Rennes UP, 2000); (ed.) Breaking the Silence on the Succession: A Sourcebook of Manuscripts and Rare Texts (Montpellier UP, 2003); (ed.) The Succession Struggle in Late Elizabethan England: Politics, Polemics and Cultural Representations (Montpellier UP, 2004); Shakespeare's Hybrid Faith—History Religion and the Stage (Palgrave, 2006); (ed) Representing France and the French in Early Modern English Drama (University of Delaware Press, 2008); edition and translation of Henry Porter's Two Angry Women of Abingdon (Pléiade, Gallimard, 2009); Shakespeare et la postmodernité: Essais sur l'Auteur, le Religieux, l'Histoire et le Lecteur (Peter Lang, 2012); Shakespeare's Early Readers: A Cultural History from 1590 to 1800 (Cambridge University Press, 2018).
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 Full CV on HAL Science

Nick MYERS retired from the IRCL and l'Université de Montpellier Paul-Valéry in 2019. Since 2021 he has intervened as adjunct professor at l'Université Catholique de Lille, teaching courses on research methodology, Victorian Gothic fiction and British and Irish Modernist fiction. For the project, he has worked on Ford, Webster and the Shakespearean Romance plays.
Latest Publication: « Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, entre théâtre et histoire », in Théâtre et usages de l'histoire, 2021, available on the online site of the CESR (Centre d'Études Supérieures de la Renaissance), under the rubric « Regards croisés sur la scène européenne ».
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Ladan NIAYESH is Professor of early modern English studies at Université Paris Cité and a member of the ECHELLES (UMR 8264, CNRS) research centre. Her research focuses on early modern English travels to Muscovy and Persia, as well as the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. For the "France and the French" project, she works mainly on travel plays from the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods.
Selected publications: Aux Frontières de l’humain: Figures du cannibalisme dans le théâtre anglais de la Renaissance (Honoré Champion, 2009); (ed.) A Knight’s Legacy: Mandeville and Mandevillian Lore in Early Modern England(Manchester UP, 2011); (ed.) Special issue “Curiosité et géographie en Orient et en Occident, XVIème–XVIIIème siècles”, Études Épistémè 26 (automne 2014); (ed.) Special Issue “L’Empire”, XVII-XVIII 74 (2017); Three Romances of Eastern Conquest: Alphonsus, King of Aragon by Robert Greene, Soliman and Perseda by Thomas Kyd, The Four Prentices of London by Thomas Heywood(Manchester UP, 2018); (ed.) Eastern Resonances in Early Modern England: Receptions and Transformations from the Renaissance to the Romantic Period (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019); (ed.) Special issue “Captain Cook after 250 Years: Re-exploring the Voyages of James Cook”, Astrolabe 49 (2020); Echoing Cities in Muscovy Company Merchants’ Itineraries in Persia and Central Asia, 1558-1570 (Hakluyt Society, 2022); (ed.) Special issue “Diplomatic Gifts and Countergifts between Britain and the Muslim East from the 17th to the Early 20th Century”, Revue Française de Civilisation Britannique 29.3 (2024); (ed.) Writing Distant Travels and Linguistic Otherness in Early Modern England (c. 1550-1660) (Brepols, 2025).
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Christelle RIPOLL is a member of the administrative staff at the Institute for Research on the Renaissance, the Neoclassical age and the Enlightenment (IRCL). Her main employer is the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). She works as a librarian and a financial manager at the Institute and has also been in charge of assembling the data collected by the team since the beginning of the project.
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Charles WHITWORTH is Emeritus Professor of English Renaissance Studies, and a former Director of the Institute for Research on the Renaissance, the Neo-Classical Age, and the Enlightenment (IRCL), at University Paul Valéry (Montpellier 3). From 1976 to 1992, he was Lecturer in English Literature and a teaching associate of the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham. He is co-director of the "Representing France and the French" project, with Jean-Christophe Mayer. His research interests include English literature and drama from the later Middle Ages to the seventeenth century. On the project, he is responsible for the dramatic works of the 'University Wits' (Lyly, Peele, Greene, Lodge, Nashe) and several of Shakespeare's comedies, and shares medieval and early Tudor drama with Jean-Paul Debax.
Publications: among his publications are editions of The Comedy of Errors (Oxford Shakespeare) and several Elizabethan comedies in the New Mermaids series, as well as articles on early Tudor and Elizabethan drama and on Elizabethan poetry and prose fiction. In 2022, in the context of celebrations of Molière's 400th anniversary, he gave several public lectures on the influence of Molière on English Restoration drama.
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