Shakespeare scholar whose accuracy of perception brought out the playwright's brilliance and humanity
Considering the moment when, in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, Cleopatra finally gets rid of the clown who has delivered the basket of figs and asps, Anne Barton wrote: "We feel that precisely because she has walked through the fire of ridicule … she has earned the right to say, 'Give me my robe, put on my crown, I have/Immortal longings in me.' And she does so at once. Comedy flowers into tragedy, without a break or mediating pause."
Anne, who has died aged 80, had the gift for a Shakespeare critic of pinpointing a moment perfectly, the elegance of her prose and accuracy of her perception combining to bring out the playwright's brilliance and humanity. The generations of students who read her introductions to Shakespeare's comedies in the US-published Riverside Shakespeare edition not only learned about the plays but also how one might write about them, and how critical writing can make the familiar startlingly unfamiliar in all its complexity. In this way she taught her readers exactly what Shakespeare (or Ben Jonson or Byron) achieve and how they do it.
Born BarbaraAnn Roesen in New York, she was the daughter of Blanche and her wealthy engineer husband, Oscar. Her final-year paper at Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania – under the name of Bobbyann Roesen – on Love's Labour's Lost achieved the distinction of being published in Shakespeare Quarterly (1953), America's leading journal in the field.
A chance encounter on a summer course in Britain encouraged her to apply to Cambridge and she arrived at Girton College in 1954 to write a doctoral thesis, supervised by Muriel Bradbrook. Published as Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play (1962), it pointed to Shakespeare's conception of what a play is and how his drama shows its self-consciousness as a play.
While still a graduate student, now named Anne, she married William Righter in 1957. She returned to Girton in 1960 as a research fellow and then joined the faculty of English.
After her divorce from Righter, in 1969 she married John Barton, one of the creators, with Peter Hall, of the Royal Shakespeare Company. The result of their marriage was a series of productions highly informed by critical analysis. They shared a passion for plays they felt had always been undervalued and for ways in which the theatricality of production could be emphasised, as in John's Richard II for the RSC in 1971. Anne's analysis of Hamlet as a play overwhelmingly self-conscious of its own status as a play, set out in her introduction to the New Penguin Shakespeare edition in 1980, was fully reflected in John's RSC production in the same year.
Anne and John bought a near-derelict Elizabethan manor house near Stratford-upon-Avon with appropriately Shakespearean connections. Hillborough Manor gave Anne the chance to entertain lavishly and stylishly for her friends, graduate students and – at Christmas – the RSC.
In 1972, she left Cambridge as a lecturer to take up a chair at Bedford College, London. Two years later she became the first female fellow of New College, Oxford.
In 1984 she returned to Cambridge as a professor and a fellow of Trinity College, where she would live for the rest of her life. That year she published Ben Jonson, Dramatist, a book of vast scope and imaginative sympathy in its understanding of what makes Jonson so unlike Shakespeare, and a rescue-act in its astonishing demonstration of the successfully experimental nature of Jonson's last plays, works till then dismissed as failures. It was her prompting that led the RSC triumphantly to produce The New Inn (1987) and Sejanus (2005), neither works that most thought worth staging.
She continued to pursue her other literary passion, Byron, whose Don Juan she held, as had Shelley, to be the greatest English long poem since Paradise Lost. She brought together many of her articles in Essays, Mainly Shakespearean (1994) and never quite finished her study of forests and parks in early modern drama.
After the sale of Hillborough Manor, Anne bought an equally striking home, Leverington Hall, near Wisbech, but she came to prefer being in college in Cambridge, in rooms full of beautiful paintings, the small Japanese sculptures known as netsuke, the last of her father's collection of clocks and her cats. Her opening chapter in The Names of Comedy (1990) – was shaped around TS Eliot's poem on the naming of cats.
As a girl, Anne had tolerated being taken to dances, provided her escort left her alone in a corner with a book. Macular degeneration in her last years was a cruel affliction, but her prodigious memory, to which she had committed an astonishingly wide range of poetry, was a comfort. In hospital she entertained herself and astonished others by reciting Shakespeare sonnets by the score.
She is survived by John.
• Anne Barton, Shakespeare scholar, born 9 May 1933; died 11 November 2013