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Emma Smith

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Emma Smith
Academic Position:
CUF Lecturer and Tutorial Fellow
College:
Hertford
Research Interests:
Early Modern

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