Professor Zdeněk Stříbrný, the founder of modern Czech Shakespeare studies and the Head of the English department at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University, between 1962 and 1969, was born a century ago, on 1 October 1922. After graduating from Charles University in 1952, he worked first at the Centre for Foreign Languages at the Czech Academy of Sciences. In 1958, he was on a research visit in The Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon, where he started to work with a number of leading British and US Shakespeareans, including Stanley Wells, Reginald Foakes, and many others. In the same year, his first monograph, Shakespearovy historické hry (Shakespeare’s Histories) was published. In the 1960s he taught at the University of California at Los Angeles and gave lectures at a number of US universities. At that time his second book, Shakespearovi předchůdci  (Shakespeare’s Predecessors, 1965) appeared. He also edited an important collection of essays, Charles University on Shakespeare (1966). After the Soviet invasion in 1968 he was dismissed from Charles University due to his political stance. In the period of Soviet occupation, he wrote a two-volume Dějiny anglické literatury (A History of English Literature, 1987) and he returned to UCLA to teach Shakespeare in 1988. Only after the Velvet Revolution in 1989 he could return to the Department of English at the Faculty of Arts, where he taught until the end of the last century. In 1996, he was awarded a Doctorate of Honour at the University of Leicester. In 2000, his major work, Shakespeare and the Eastern Europe, mapping the Shakespeare reception in Russia and Central Europe, appeared from Oxford University Press. The collection of his major essays, The Whirligig of Time, was published by University of Delaware Press in 2006. Its introduction contains an autobiographical memoir, which also introduces a collection of Stříbrný’s Czech essays, Proud času (The Flow of Time, 2002). In the first decade of this century, Professor Stříbrný was a member of the Executive Committee of the International Shakespeare Association (ISA). He taught and lectured at a number of universities, including Konstanz and Greifswald in Germany. Thanks to his influence, the Ninth World Shakespeare Congress, organized by the Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures, took place in July 2011 at the Faculty of Arts and the National Theatre in Prague. As a leading Czech Anglicist, a dedicated teacher and a gentle, humane person, Professor Stříbrný is remembered by a great number of his students and colleagues, including the writer of these lines.

Martin Procházka