Stephen Orgel is Professor of English at Stanford University. Best known as a scholar of Shakespeare, Orgel writes primarily about the political and historical context of Renaissance literature.^[1]

Orgel received his B.A. from Columbia University in 1954 and his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1959.^[2] He has taught at Stanford since 1985. He is a noted book collector.^[3]

Selected critical works

• The Illusion of Power. U California P, 1975.
• Impersonations:The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare's England. Cambridge, 1996.
• The Authentic Shakespeare. Routledge, 2002.
• Imagining Shakespeare. Palgrave, 2003.
• John Milton: The Major Works. Edited by Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg. Oxford, 1991.