Joseph Donohue is Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he has taught dramatic literature since 1971. A theatre historian with special interests in the British and Irish theatre from the late eighteenth century to the present and in the nineteenth-century British music hall, he is the author of Dramatic Character in the English Romantic Age (Princeton, 1970) and Theatre in the Age of Kean (1975), and editor (with Ruth Berggren) of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest: A Reconstructive Critical Edition of the Text of the First Production, St. James's Theatre, London, 1895 (Colin Smythe, 1995), which won the 1997 MLA prize for an outstanding scholarly edition and the 1997 Hewitt prize for an outstanding work of theatre history