Charles Rush Forker, late Professor Emeritus of English at Indiana University, was born on March 11, 1927 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The eldest son of Edson W. and Mary Rush Forker, Charles received his early education at Western Reserve Academy in Hudson, Ohio. After his graduation in 1945, Forker was quickly drafted into the U.S. Army, near the close of World War II. He ultimately served two years in the Army in the role of a medical corpsman. Upon leaving the army in 1947, Forker enrolled in Bowdoin College where he studied Shakespeare and acted in plays as a member of the college-affiliated dramatic society. Upon his graduation in 1951 (and induction into Phi Beta Kappa), Forker was a recipient of a Fulbright grant to study at Oxford University, where he received a second BA in 1953 before continuing on with graduate work. After earning an M.A. from Oxford in 1955, Forker returned to the United States to continue his doctoral studies at Harvard University under the noted scholar Alfred Harbage. He received his doctorate in 1957.

After spending his initial post-graduate career at the University of Wisconsin, Forker came to Indiana University in 1959 as an instructor at the Department of English. His ascent as a scholar at I.U. was steady and rapid. By 1961, Forker was an assistant professor in the English Department. In 1965 he was promoted to an associate professor and in 1968 he became a full professor at the university. Forker was an active presence within his department, teaching a number of courses on Shakespeare, Elizabethan drama, and other literary topics around that time period. Over the many years that Forker spent at I.U. he also directed multiple doctoral dissertations and served on the committees of a number of other dissertations.

In addition to his teaching duties, Forker was an active scholar. He was a regular contributor to the Modern Language Association as an editorial reader and his works appeared regularly in such publications as Notes & Queries, Shakespeare Studies, English Language Notes, Modern Language Quarterly, and Seventeenth-Century News. Forker also made significant contributions in larger published works, both as an editor and as a sole author. Among the works edited or co-edited by Forker are critical editions of James Shirley's play The Cardinal, new editions of Henry V, and a new critical edition of King Richard II. As a sole author Forker's Skull Beneath the Skin: The Achievement of John Webster (1986) may stand as his magnum opus, an attempt to create a standard work on the dramatist. Later on he also issued Fancy's Images: Contexts, Settings, and Perspectives in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (1990).

Upon his retirement from Indiana University in 1992, Charles Forker continued to remain active both scholarly and professionally until his death on February 15, 2014.