Siew-Yue Killingley

BA (Malaya), MA (Malaya), PhD (London)

17th December 19408th June 2004
Siew-Yue Killingley was born in 1940 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaya (now West Malaysia), in a Cantonese-speaking
family, and moved to England in 1968. Her work as a teacher began in 1961, when she taught in schools while
still a student at the University of Malaya. After graduating she taught English language, literature, phonetics,
and linguistics at the University of Malaya, and then taught English and other subjects at St. Johns Institution,
Kuala Lumpur, and La Salle School, Petaling Jaya.

On coming to Newcastle in 1970, she taught linguistics and phonetics part-time in the School of English,
University of Newcastle, and from 1972 to 1980 she was Lecturer, later Senior Lecturer, at St. Marys College,
Fenham, where she taught linguistics, English language and literature, and supervised teaching practice in
schools.

From 1980 she was constantly engaged in part-time teaching, including linguistics and phonetics at the
Department of Speech and the School of Education in Newcastle University, and Community Interpreting and
Bilingual Skills at the College of Arts and Technology (now Newcastle College). At different times from 1968 she
gave individual tuition in Cantonese to children.

From 1988, she taught in the Centre for Continuing Education (now the Centre for Life-long Learning) in the
University of Newcastle, mainly on aspects of language and its use in society.

In 1994 she introduced courses on Chinese language and culture at the Centre. In 2003, these courses became
part of the programme of the Workers Educational Association.

Siew-Yue did not just teach her students; she worked with them, using whatever mental equipment they brought
to the class. They were impressed by her devotion to the subjects she taught, and to the high scholarly
standards she set herself and them. They recognised her deep learning in many fields, and her willingness to
share it with others. They were also aware that she was always interested in them as individuals, responding to
the personal and academic needs of each of them.

Besides teaching, Siew-Yue was active in creative and performing arts. She wrote poetry and plays, drew
competently, and played the flute to a high standard. In her school years she studied ballet, and she continued
to take an active interest in dance, including choreography. She also carried out linguistic and literary research
on English and Chinese.

In 1981 she founded the non-commercial publishing business Grevatt & Grevatt, named in memory of her
father-in-law Arthur Victor Grevatt Killingley (1897-1979), publishing academic work and poetry by herself and
others. Since her death the business has been carried on by Dermot Killingley.

Siew-Yues Northumbrian Passion Play (Grevatt & Grevatt, Newcastle upon Tyne, 1999) was performed at All
Saints Church, Gosforth in 1999, the Church of St. Thomas the Martyr, Newcastle, in 2001, and St. Georges
Church, Morpeth in 2002. Her dramatization of John Bunyans Pilgrims Progress was performed at the Church of
St. Thomas the Martyr in 2002. The last three productions were by St. Toms Players, for which she worked as
literary adviser, choreographer and flautist.

Susan Glaspell
Susan Keating Glaspell (1 July 1876 27 July 1948) was an American Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright,
actress, director, and bestselling novelist. She was a founding member of the Provincetown Players, one of the
most important collaboratives in the development of modern drama in the United States. She also served in
the Works Progress Administration as Midwest Bureau Director of the Federal Theater Project.
Her novels and plays are committed to developing deep, sympathetic characters, to understanding 'life' in its
complexity. Though realism was the medium of her fiction, she was also greatly interested in philosophy and
religion. Many of her characters make principled stands.

Early years
Glaspell was born in 1876 to Elmer S. Glaspell and Alice Keating in Davenport, Iowa. (The fabricated birth year of
1882 is sometimes seen.) She attended public schools in Davenport, and went on to graduate from Drake
University in Des Moines with a Bachelor's degree in 1899. She worked as a reporter for a Des Moines paper,
where she was appointed to report on the murder trial of John Hossack in 1900. Hossack had been murdered in
his sleep with an axe, and his wife with whom he was supposedly unhappy, ended up as the most logical
suspect. Though she claimed to have slept through the event, she was eventually convicted. A later trial found
her innocent, but the story lived on. This crime would be the basis for two of Glaspell's best remembered
works, A Jury of Her Peers (1917), a short-story, and the one-act-play Trifles (1916). In 2008, The Library of
America selected the original newspaper article upon which A Jury of Her Peers is based, "The Hossack Murder,"
for inclusion in its two-century retrospective of American True Crime.
Glaspell studied for one semester of graduate school at the University of Chicago in 1902.

Career
Glaspell began to publish her fiction in periodicals. "For the Love of the Hills" won a prize of US$500 from Black
Cat Magazine, an augur of her future success. She became involved with the Davenport Monist Society, and
there she met George Cram Cook, a sometime classics professor, novelist, poet and an itinerant farmer.
Glaspell spent time in Chicago and is associated with the Chicago Renaissance. Her first novel, The Glory of the
Conquered, set in Chicago, was published in 1909. She published the Visioning (1911) and Fidelity (1915). By
the time she wrote and published Fidelity, Glaspell had already moved east with Cook, where she married him.
The couple moved to Provincetown, Massachusetts, spending summers in Greenwich Village in New York City. It
was Cook who first suggested to Glaspell that she write plays and co-authored her first play Suppressed Desires.
Together with friends, they founded the influential Provincetown Players theater group in 1915 on an abandoned
wharf by their house on Commercial Street. The group produced plays by both Cook and Glaspell, as well as
helping to launch the career of Eugene O'Neill. Other notables associated with the group include Edna St.
Vincent Millay, Theodore Dreiser and Glaspell's longtime friend Floyd Dell. Glaspell's plays for the Provincetown
Players won critical acclaim. Plays she wrote for the group include Trifles, Inheritors and The Verge. The group
was run on a collaborative model. Glaspell also acted in some of the plays.
She and her husband depended on royalties from her short-stories and novels for most of their income. Glaspell
knew many of the era's reformers and socialists, including Emma Goldman, John Reed,Louise Bryant, and Upton
Sinclair. In 1922 Glaspell and Cook left their successful theater behind so Cook could write and study in Delphi,
Greece. Cook died there in 1924.
Glaspell returned to Cape Cod. She wrote a biography of her late husband called The Road to the Temple. During
the late twenties, she was romantically involved with the younger writer Norman Matson. In this period, she
wrote three novels, including the bestselling Brook Evans. She also wrote the play, Alison's House, for which she
was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

In the 1930s, Glaspell lived again briefly in Chicago, where she served as Midwest Bureau Director for
the Federal Theater Project. During her time in the Midwest, she reconnected with siblings and gained control of
her drinking and creativity.
When her work for the Federal Theater Project was finished, Glaspell returned to Provincetown. The time she
spent in the Midwest influenced her work, and Glaspell's last three novels increasingly focused on family life.
The early 1930s were years of low productivity for Glaspell, as she struggled with alcoholism and poor health.
Her relationship with Matson had ended. She lived mostly in Truro. Her house in Provincetown had various
tenants, including Edmund Wilson and his family.Glaspell died in Provincetown in 1948.

Revival
Glaspell was highly regarded in her own time, and was well known as both a playwright and novelist. Several of
her novels were bestsellers. Her Pulitzer Prize for Alison's House is among the more controversial awards in the
prize's history. Although her early work had attracted considerable critical attention, her final three novels were
especially neglected.
Her popularity decreased after her death, and almost all of her novels are still out of print (with the exception
of Fidelity and Brook Evans, republished by Persephone Books). In the United States, her work was seriously
neglected for many years. Internationally, she received some attention by scholars who were interested mostly
in her more experimental work from the Provincetown years.

Feminist Recuperation
More recently, Glaspell has become more widely known for her oft-anthologized works: the short story " A Jury of
Her Peers" and her one-act play "Trifles." These two works have, in the last twenty years, become staples of
Womens Studies curricula across the United States and the world.
Writer/Director Sally Heckel released a film adaptation of A Jury of Her Peers which was nominated for an
Academy Award in 1981. After a long delay in release, it is now available on DVD from Women Make Movies.
In 2005, members of the Women in the Audience Supporting Women Artists Now (WITASWAN) initiative held a
Silver Anniversary Celebration in Chicago with Heckel as the special guest. Also featured were Patricia L. Bryan
and Thomas Wolf, the authors of Midnight Assassin: A Murder in Americas Heartland (an account of the trial on
which A Jury of Her Peers is based. It includes extensive quotes from Glaspell's original newspaper articles about
the case).
The literary and cultural critic, Elaine Showalter adopted the title of Glaspell's short story "A Jury of Her Peers"
for her 2009 book, applying it to the whole canon of American Womens Writing.

William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare (baptised 26 April 1564; died 23 April 1616) [a] was an English poet and playwright,
widely regarded as the greatest writer in theEnglish language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. [1] He is

often

called

England's national

poet and

some collaborations, consist of 38 plays,

[c]

the

"Bard

of

Avon".[2][b] His

surviving

works,

including

154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and several other poems. His

plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any
other playwright.[3]
Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, who
bore him three children: Susanna, and twinsHamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful
career in London as an actor, writer, and part owner of a playing company called theLord Chamberlain's Men,
later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613, where he died three years
later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such
matters as his physical appearance, sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him
were written by others.[4]
Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1589 and 1613. [5][d] His early plays were
mainly comedies and histories, genres he raised to the peak of sophistication and artistry by the end of the
sixteenth century. He then wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, King Lear, andMacbeth,
considered some of the finest works in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also
known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights.
Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime. In 1623, two of
his former theatrical colleagues published theFirst Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included
all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare's.
Shakespeare was a respected poet and playwright in his own day, but his reputation did not rise to its present
heights until the nineteenth century. TheRomantics, in particular, acclaimed Shakespeare's genius, and
the Victorians worshipped Shakespeare with a reverence that George Bernard Shaw called "bardolatry".[6] In the
twentieth century, his work was repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and
performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are constantly studied, performed and reinterpreted in
diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world.
Early life
William

Shakespeare

was

the

son

of John

Shakespeare,

successful glover and alderman originally

from Snitterfield, and Mary Arden, the daughter of an affluent landowning farmer. [7] He was born in Stratfordupon-Avon and baptised on 26 April 1564. His actual birthdate is unknown, but is traditionally observed on 23
April, St George's Day.[8] This date, which can be traced back to an eighteenth-century scholar's mistake, has
proved appealing because Shakespeare died on 23 April 1616. [9] He was the third child of eight and the eldest
surviving son.[10]
Although no attendance records for the period survive, most biographers agree that Shakespeare may have
been educated at the King's New School in Stratford,[11] a free school chartered in 1553,[12]about a quarter of a
mile from his home. Grammar schools varied in quality during the Elizabethan era, but the curriculum was
dictated by law throughout England,[13] and the school would have provided an intensive education in Latin
grammar and the classics.
At the age of 18, Shakespeare married the 26-year-old Anne Hathaway. The consistory court of the Diocese of
Worcester issued a marriage licence on 27 November 1582. Two of Hathaway's neighbours posted bonds the
next day as surety that there were no impediments to the marriage. [14] The couple may have arranged the
ceremony in some haste, since the Worcester chancellor allowed the marriage banns to be read once instead of
the usual three times. [15] Anne's pregnancy could have been the reason for this. Six months after the marriage,
she gave birth to a daughter, Susanna, who was baptised on 26 May 1583.[16]Twins, son Hamnet and
daughter Judith, followed almost two years later and were baptised on 2 February 1585. [17] Hamnet died of
unknown causes at the age of 11 and was buried on 11 August 1596. [18]

After the birth of the twins, there are few historical traces of Shakespeare until he is mentioned as part of the
London theatre scene in 1592. Because of this gap, scholars refer to the years between 1585 and 1592 as
Shakespeare's

"lost

years".[19] Biographers

attempting

to

account

for

this

period

have

reported

manyapocryphal stories. Nicholas Rowe, Shakespeares first biographer, recounted a Stratford legend that
Shakespeare fled the town for London to escape prosecution for deer poaching.[20] Another eighteenth-century
story has Shakespeare starting his theatrical career minding the horses of theatre patrons in London. [21] John
Aubrey reported that Shakespeare had been a country schoolmaster. [22] Some twentieth-century scholars have
suggested that Shakespeare may have been employed as a schoolmaster by Alexander Hoghton of Lancashire,
a Catholic landowner who named a certain "William Shakeshafte" in his will. [23] No evidence substantiates such
stories other than hearsay collected after his death and the name Shakeshafte was common in the Lancashire
area.[24]
Later years and death
Rowe was the first biographer to pass down the tradition that Shakespeare retired to Stratford some years
before his death;[47] but retirement from all work was uncommon at that time, [48] and Shakespeare continued to
visit London.[47] In 1612 he was called as a witness in a court case concerning the marriage settlement of
Mountjoy's daughter, Mary.[49] In March 1613 he bought a gatehousein the former Blackfriars priory;[50] and from
November 1614 he was in London for several weeks with his son-in-law, John Hall.[51]
After 16061607, Shakespeare wrote fewer plays, and none are attributed to him after 1613. [52] His last three
plays were collaborations, probably with John Fletcher,[53]who succeeded him as the house playwright for the
Kings Men.[54]
Shakespeare died on 23 April 1616 [55] and was survived by his wife and two daughters. Susanna had married a
physician, John Hall, in 1607,[56] and Judith had marriedThomas Quiney, a vintner, two months before
Shakespeares death.[57]