Rodney Cottier

Black and white close-up portrait of a middle-aged man with dark hair, smiling at the camera in an open-collared shirt

Professor of Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama

Professor of Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama Rodney Cottier is Professor of Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama at LAMDA. Prior to this, he was Head of the Drama School at LAMDA, where he has had over forty years’ experience as a stage director and teacher of stage combat, acting and text, and where he has directed twenty-six plays from Shakespeare’s canon, as well as many by Shakespeare’s contemporaries: Webster, Middleton, Tourneur, Ford, and the later English Comedies of Manners by Congreve, Etherege, Vanbrugh, Shadwell. He now divides his time between LAMDA and North America, where to date he has visited one-hundred-and-eighty-four universities & theatre companies in thirty-five states, focusing on Shakespeare’s First Folio. As a fight director, Rodney has worked at Shakespeare’s Globe as Master-of-Fight, choreographing Mark Rylance’s Hamlet, King Lear [twice, most recently with Kathryn Hunter], Two Noble Kinsmen, and Romeo & Juliet, as well as at the Royal Opera House, English and Welsh National Opera, the National Theatre Studio and many regional theatres.