Professor Kevin Sharpe passed away in Southampton General Hospital on Saturday 5 November. It was a real loss not only to his family and friends, but also to English history and literature.
Obituaries and tributes will be appearing shortly, and they will tell a tale of two Kevins, the historian and the man. His was a brilliant and prolific career in writing. His publications describe a trajectory from revisionist early-Stuart history, in which he drew attention to short-term interventions and minute circumstances in the processes of historical causation … and moved, extraordinarily, into critical interpretation of literature and art (and into an English department), a drift that was accompanied and paralleled by a gradual, more or less unspoken drift from political right to left. And the plain inadequacy of this generalisation is a revealing one: because even his early work showed an attentive reader of texts and a methodological innovator. His first book, on Sir Robert Cotton (1979), anticipated later developments in the histories of books and of reading that he would himself foreground in Reading Revolutions (2000), which was not a strange departure from the historical mainstream so much as an imaginative return to questions he’d asked decades earlier. A similar case could be made for his trilogy on art and literature and power in sixteenth and seventeenth-century England (Selling the Tudor Monarchy, 2009, Image Wars, 2010; the third volume is complete but not yet published). His Criticism and Compliment (1987), an authoritative account of court culture and court masques in the 1630s, essential reading for students of literature, was in effect a digression he pursued while working on high politics. I read every single word (and especially the footnotes) of The Personal Rule of Charles I (1992) in December/January 1992/3 as a doctoral student while pushing my older son around the Oxford Parks in a pushchair, and his influence on my own work is thorough and unmeasurable.
His output was extraordinary, and the only thing fiercer than his work ethic was his play ethic. This is the other Kevin: those fortunate enough to have been his friend will know him as a truly and remarkably caring and funny man, whose humour was deep, broad and frequently inappropriate. Many of the anecdotes will be unpublishable and have to be saved for the pubs across the world where he will be being remembered. He was an insightful and empathic commentator and adviser on affairs of the head and heart; he was the first person I would have called to express my grief at his absence.
The photograph shows him holding my younger boy in early 1997 – I think we’re in the quiet room of the King’s Arms, opposite Bodley.
Joad Raymond
Early Modern News Networks 
Thank you Joad for a very moving and touching obituary to our friend Kevin. This tribute, to both the Historian and the man captures Kevin very well. I can vouch that the pubs of Leamington, of which he was so fond, are saddened and his friends are in disbelief. The anecdotes, jokes and stories (especially the in appropriate ones) Kevin has left us with are helping us to come to terms with this very sad loss.
Now also:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/dec/12/kevin-sharpe-obituary
http://www.english.qmul.ac.uk/news/Tributes%20to%20Kevin%20Sharpe/58978.html
JR
He was a friend of mine, I met him when I was an undergraduate of English at Southampton University. I hadn’t been in touch with him in years but suddenly thought of him only to discover he is gone – so sad.
I was fortunate to be tutored by KS at Southampton and reading the many obituaries it is both sad but also a joy to note the aspects of his personality that I can still vividly recall 30 years later. He made a lasting impression on me and I remember the delight and possibly surprise on his face when I stumbled upon some wonderfully disparaging comments from congregations about their unscrupulous and hypocritical Ministers, or the bawdy goings-on around the Royal Dockyards as recorded within the Calendar of State Papers Domestic. I often think of Kevin and only recently became aware of his passing, so wanted to pass on my tribute and best wishes to his family and friends.
Thank you for your words. He’s much missed.
Oh gosh – the wonders of the internet! I googled your pamphlets books and somehow saw a picture of Kevin looking exactly as I remember him from the mid 1990s when I was doing my PhD at Southampton. I left academia for some time after that and never heard that he had died, so it was a bit of a shock to hear it now. It’s a bit late maybe for more eulogies but he was indeed an extraordinary person. I was in the English Department, being supervised by Jonathan Sawday and they were big pals and I think the pair of them were chiefly responsible for the cross-fertilisation between the two departments which were both strong on early modern. We would go to their graduate seminars and he would come to ours. So it’s fascinating to hear that he ended up teaching in an English Department.
The shelves of his office were crammed with his enormous books in which he had an almost child-like pride. Prolific would be an understatement. And yes this completely unexpected normalness and niceness and always a smile even for a humble graduate student. I still remember feeling very proud of myself making a smart point after his talk on the publications of James I and getting a pat on the back from Jonathan who chuckled about it. But then I also felt a bit guilty about making a smart point because he was so nice! Now in memory of him I must go and read his book on Charles I … it’s about time I did.