Emma Smith

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Academic Position:

CUF Lecturer and Tutorial Fellow

College:

Hertford

Research Interests:

Early Modern

Links:

Faculty Profile Page | College Profile Page | Online Podcasts | Sprint for Shakespeare | Personal Website

Emma Smith's research focuses on the reception of Shakespeare in print, on stage, and in criticism. Her Shakespeare’s First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book (2016) combined aspects of the history of the book, histories of reading, and the interpretation of Shakespeare on the page to produce a biography of the book. Most recently, This Is Shakespeare (2019) makes a case for Shakespeare’s intrinsic ‘gappiness’, those spaces, ambiguities and unknowns that create opportunities for readers to engage, and demand that we complete the works for ourselves. She is currently working on editions of Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and Testament and of Twelfth Night, and edits the journal Shakespeare Survey. Her collaborations with Laurie Maguire, including among a number of co-authored pieces a new theory about who wrote All’s Well that Ends Well, and the book Thirty Great Myths About Shakespeare, have developed into a new project about collaboration, historical, creative, and academic. In addition, pedagogy is important to her and she continues to work on readerly editions of early modern texts and on books, articles and lectures which disseminate research to the widest possible audience.

Recent Publications

This Is Shakespeare (Penguin, 2019)
Shakespeare’s First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book (Oxford University Press, 2016)
The Making of Shakespeare’s First Folio (Bodleian Publishing, 2015)

#	Title	Description	Contributor
1	Memorialising Shakespeare: The First Folio and other elegies	Emma Smith (Professor of English Literature, Oxford), gives a talk on Shakespeare memorials. Ben...	Emma Smith
2	16.To Shakespeare and Beyond: a panel discussion.	Cultural Connections discussion panel Casandra Ash, Peter Kirwan, Jose Perez Diaz and Emma Smith...	Cassandra Ash, Peter Kirwan, José Pérez Díez, Emma Smith

#	Title	Description	Contributor
1	Key Critical Concepts: Authorship	In this recording, Emma Smith introduces the concept of authorship as part of our...	Emma Smith
2	The Two Gentlemen of Verona	Professor Emma Smith gives the last of her 2017 Shakespeare lectures on his early comedy, Two...	Emma Smith
3	Henry VI, Part 2	Professor Emma Smith continues her Approaching Shakespeare series with a 2017 lecture on the...	Emma Smith
4	The Merry Wives of Windsor	Professor Emma Smith lectures on Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor.	Emma Smith
5	All's Well That Ends Well	Professor Emma Smith lectures on Shakespeare’s comedy All's Well That Ends Well.	Emma Smith
6	Cymbeline	Professor Emma Smith continues her Approaching Shakespeare series with a lecture on one of...	Emma Smith
7	The Tamer Tam'd: John Fletcher	Fletcher’s play is a riposte to Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew: in this lecture I discuss...	Emma Smith
8	Tis Pity She's a Whore: John Ford	This lecture discusses the play’s reboot of Romeo and Juliet and other Elizabethan plays, its...	Emma Smith
9	The Witch Of Edmonton	A collaborative play about witchcraft, bigamy - and a talking dog - what more could you want?...	Emma Smith
10	A Chaste Maid in Cheapside: Thomas Middleton	This lecture discusses comedy, fertility, and all those illegitimate children in this play about...	Emma Smith
11	The Alchemist: Ben Jonson	Written in the context of plague in London, The Alchemist’s plot and language are deeply...	Emma Smith
12	Dr Faustus: Christopher Marlowe	Emma Smith's lecture on this infernal play discusses Elizabethan religion, the revisions to the...	Emma Smith
13	Timon of Athens	Emma Smith finishes her Approaching Shakespeare series with a lecture on the play Timon of...	Emma Smith
14	Love's Labour's Lost	Emma Smith continues her Approaching Shakespeare series with a lecture on the play Love's Labour...	Emma Smith
15	Julius Caesar	This lecture on Julius Caesar discusses structure, tone, and politics by focusing on the cameo...	Emma Smith
16	Romeo and Juliet	This lecture on Romeo and Juliet tackles the issue of the spoiler-chorus, in an already-too-...	Emma Smith
17	Coriolanus	This lecture takes up a detail from Shakespeare’s late Roman tragedy Coriolanus to ask about the...	Emma Smith
18	16.To Shakespeare and Beyond: a panel discussion.	Cultural Connections discussion panel Casandra Ash, Peter Kirwan, Jose Perez Diaz and Emma Smith...	Cassandra Ash, Peter Kirwan, José Pérez Díez, Emma Smith
19	Why should we study Shakespeare?	Dr Emma Smith of Hertford College, Oxford, discusses her current research and proposes why we...	Emma Smith, Ilana Lassman
20	The Merchant of Venice	This lecture on The Merchant of Venice discusses the ways the play's personal relationships...	Emma Smith
21	Taming of the Shrew	Emma Smith uses evidence of early reception and from more recent productions to discuss the...	Emma Smith
22	A Midsummer Night's Dream	This lecture on A Midsummer Night's Dream uses modern and early modern understandings of...	Emma Smith
23	Much Ado About Nothing	Emma Smith asks why the characters are so quick to believe the self-proclaimed villain Don John...	Emma Smith
24	Hamlet	The fact that father and son share the same name in Hamlet is used to investigate the play'...	Emma Smith
25	As You Like It	Asking 'what happens in As You Like It', this lecture considers the play's...	Emma Smith
26	King Lear	Showing how generations of critics - and Shakespeare himself - have rewritten the ending of King...	Emma Smith
27	King John	At the heart of King John is the death of his rival Arthur: this fifteenth lecture in the...	Emma Smith
28	Pericles, Prince of Tyre	Pericles has been on the margins of the Shakespearean canon: this fourteenth lecture in the...	Emma Smith
29	Richard III	In this thirteenth lecture in the Approaching Shakespeare series the focus is on the...	Emma Smith
30	The Comedy of Errors	Lecture 12 in the Approaching Shakespeare series asks how seriously we can take the farcical...	Emma Smith
31	Henry IV part 1	Like generations of theatre-goers, this lecture concentrates on the (large) figure of Sir John...	Emma Smith
32	The Tempest	That the character of Prospero is a Shakespearean self-portrait is a common reading of The...	Emma Smith
33	Antony and Cleopatra	What kind of tragedy is this play, with its two central figures rather than a singular hero? The...	Emma Smith
34	Richard II	Lecture eight in the Approaching Shakespeare series asks the question that structures Richard II...	Emma Smith
35	Twelfth Night	The seventh Approaching Shakespeare lecture takes a minor character in Twelfth Night - Antonio...	Emma Smith
36	Titus Andronicus	Focusing in detail on one particular scene, and on critical responses to it, this sixth...	Emma Smith
37	The Winter's Tale	How we can make sense of a play that veers from tragedy to comedy and stretches credulity in its...	Emma Smith
38	Macbeth	In this fourth Approaching Shakespeare lecture the question is one of agency: who or what makes...	Emma Smith
39	Measure for Measure	The third Approaching Shakespeare lecture, on Measure for Measure, focuses on the vexed question...	Emma Smith
40	Henry V	The second lecture in the Approaching Shakespeare series looks at King Henry V, and asks whether...	Emma Smith
41	The Bodleian Shakespeare: A treasure lost... and regained	From the 2010 Alumni Weekend. Emma Smith reveals how Oxford University mobilised Alumni support...	Emma Smith
42	Othello	Othello - First in Emma Smith's Approaching Shakespeare lecture series; looking at the...	Emma Smith
43	The Duchess of Malfi: John Webster	In dramatizing a woman's sexual choices in a notably sympathetic manner, this tragedy...	Emma Smith
44	The Roaring Girl: Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker	Based on a contemporary scandal of a woman who dressed in male clothing, this play of topsy-...	Emma Smith
45	The Revenger's Tragedy: Thomas Middleton	A blackly camp tragedy - Hamlet without the narcissism - set in a court corrupted by lust and...	Emma Smith
46	The Shoemaker's Holiday: Thomas Dekker	Like a Busby Berkeley depression-era musical, Dekker's comedy is a feel-good antidote to a...	Emma Smith
47	Arden of Faversham: Anon	A true crime story of the murder of Thomas Arden by his wife and her lover, this play is...	Emma Smith
48	The Spanish Tragedy: Thomas Kyd	Popular tragedy in which Hieronimo pursues aristocratic murderers of his son Horatio and takes...	Emma Smith

#	Essay Title	Description	Contributor
1	Early Modern Drama on the Page and Stage	Many books and university courses, trying to compensate for a history of the neglect or mistrust...	Emma Smith
2	Shakespeare's Contemporary dramatists	The Elizabethan and Jacobean theatres specialized in new plays which had relatively few...	Emma Smith
3	Renaissance Theatre	When John Brayne built the Red Lion Theatre in London’s Whitechapel in 1569, he could hardly...	Emma Smith
4	William Shakespeare	How William Shakespeare (...	Emma Smith

#	Resource Title	Description	Contributor
1	Shakespeare & the plague	When he was in quarantine from the plague, William Shakespeare wrote “King Lear”, but what's the...	Emma Smith

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Emma Smith

Recent Publications