Brian Vickers was educated at St. Marylebone Grammar School and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he took a Double First in English and won both the Charles Oldham Shakespeare Scholarship and the Harness Shakespeare Essay Prize. He taught at Cambridge for ten years, before moving in 1972 to a Professorship at the University of Zürich. From 1975 to 2003 he held the Chair of English Literature at the ETH Zürich and directed the Centre for Renaissance Studies. In 1998 he was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy (which was commuted to a Ordinary Fellowship on his return to England in 2003). In 2007 he was elected an Honorary Foreign Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In the New Year’s Honours List for 2008 he was appointed to a knighthood.

His doctoral dissertation at Cambridge was on Francis Bacon (Francis Bacon and Renaissance Prose, CUP1968). Since then he has edited Bacon’s major English works in the ‘Oxford Authors’ series (Francis Bacon, OUP 1996), the Essays (OUP 1999) and Bacon’s History of Henry VII (CUP 1998). His work in the History of Science includes editing the Zurich symposium he organized, Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance (CUP 1984, 2005), and an anthology of English Science, Bacon to Newton (CUP 1987, 2007). He has served on the editorial board of Isis, the leading American journal in the History of Science, and is currently on the editorial board of the English journal, Annals of Science. In 2006 he became Chair of the Advisory Board for The Oxford Francis Bacon.

Brian Vickers is also known for his work on rhetoric from classical antiquity to the present day. His books incluce Classical Rhetoric in English Poetry (1970, 1989), and In Defence of Rhetoric (OUP 1988), which in 1989 won the Morris D. Forkosch prize in intellectual history, awarded by the Journal of the History of Ideas. In 1977 he was co-founder of the International Society for the History of Rhetoric, and served as its first President. The Society recently celebrated its 30th Anniversary.

Professor Vickers is perhaps best known for his writings on Shakespeare. They include The Artistry of Shakespeare’s Prose (Methuen 1968; 3rd edn., Routledge 2005), the standard work on the subject; a volume of essays, Returning to Shakespeare (Routledge 1989); and Appropriating Shakespeare. Contemporary Critical Quarrels (Yale University Press 1993). Between 1974 and 1981 he edited the six volume collection, Shakespeare, the Critical Heritage 1623-1801 (Routledge & Kegan Paul). Since 1996 he has been General Editor of the series “Shakespeare, the Critical Tradition” (originally Athlone; currently with Continuum), of which each volume documents the reception history of a Shakespeare play between 1780 and 1940. Six have been published so far, the most recent being The Merchant of Venice (2005; co-edited with William Baker). In recent years Brian Vickers has been studying authorship attribution problems relating to Shakespeare, under two aspects. The first concerns the identification of works spuriously added to Shakespeare’s canon, on which he has published two books, ‘Counterfeiting’ Shakespeare. Evidence, Authorship, and John Ford’s Funerall Elegye (CUP 2002), and Shakespeare, A Lover’s Complaint, and John Davies of Hereford (CUP 2007). The second concerns Shakespeare’s legitimate activity collaborating with other dramatists, treated in Shakespeare, Co-Author. A Historical Study of Five Collaborative Plays (OUP 2002). A further study, of Shakespeare’s interaction with George Peele and Thomas Kyd, is in progress.

In 2004 Professor Vickers was appointed a Distinguished Senior Fellow of the School of Advanced Study, and shortly afterwards a Senior Research Fellow of the Institute for English Studies. In 2005 he was awarded a five year AHRC grant to edit The Complete Works of John Ford. In the same year he founded the London Forum for Authorship Studies. He regularly teaches classe on Shakespeare and textual criticism in the School’s M.A. course in the History of the Book.