Emma Smith

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.