Professor Emma Smith

My research focuses on Shakespeare, on early modern drama, and on book history. I am particularly interested in Shakespeare’s reception in print, performance, and criticism, and in the long histories of why and how we have engaged with these works.

My research combines academic publication with work for a general audience. Recent specialist work includes my ongoing collaboration with Laurie Maguire on collaborative playwrighting in the early modern period. I am currently editing Thomas Nashe’s plague play Summer’s Last Will and Testament (for the Oxford Nashe Project) and Shakespeare’s comedy Twelfth Night (for the Fourth Arden series).

For a wider audience I have published Portable Magic: A History of Books and their Readers, shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize in 2023, and This Is Shakespeare: How to Read the World’s Greatest Playwright. My book The First Elizabethans: England’s Sixteenth Century Renaissance, will be published in 2026. I often give talks to literary societies and festivals, theatre audiences and other groups, and write pieces for theatre programmes and the press. I’ve done some bits of radio broadcasting, including the series Taking Issue With Shakespeare (BBC R4, April 2023), and appearances on In Our Time and Start the Week. I was the literary consultant for the BBC’s Shakespeare: Rise of a Genius documentary serial, and got my first film credit as an advisor on Josie Rourke’s Mary Queen of Scots.

I am also interested in early modern plays in performance, and have acted as consultant, dramaturge or reviewer for a number of recent productions at the RSC, National Theatre, Almeida, and Donmar Warehouse. I am an Associate Scholar at the RSC, and in 2023 was the Sam Wanamaker Fellow at Shakespeare’s Globe.