Emma Smith (scholar)

• 1. Introduction

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  Emma Josephine Smith was born on the 15th of May 1970 in Leeds, and grew up in a city with no particular expectation that she would end up at one of the world's most storied universities. She attended Abbey Grange school, then arrived at Somerville College, Oxford in 1988. By her own account, she did not come from a family where going to Oxford was the done thing. Yet by 1997, she had completed a doctorate and taken up a Tutorial Fellowship at Hertford College. By 2016, she had authenticated a previously unknown copy of Shakespeare's First Folio. And by 2019, a single book about Shakespeare's plays had, in her own words, produced a response that was "exciting and unexpected."

  What follows is the story of how a scholar from Leeds built one of the most distinctive careers in Shakespeare studies: through close attention to how books are made, how plays collaborate, and how a supposedly familiar writer can still surprise us.

• 2. A Path Through Oxford

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  Smith's undergraduate years at Somerville College ran from 1988 to 1991. She later told the Oxford Review of Books that she was not from "a terribly deprived background" but that she also was not from a family or school where Oxford was a natural destination. That candour about her own trajectory has informed much of her public voice.

  After finishing her degree she became a Prize Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, one of the most prestigious research fellowships in British academia. She completed her doctorate in 1997 during that fellowship. The experience was not without its difficulties. Smith has described the Prize Fellowship as formative for her academic career, but also as "isolating," and she said she "felt the miss of having a graduate cohort" around her. Before joining Hertford College as Tutorial Fellow in English in 1997, she had held a junior position at New Hall, Cambridge.

  In November 2015, the University of Oxford awarded her the Title of Distinction of Professor of Shakespeare Studies. In June 2025, Somerville College elected her to an honorary fellowship, the same college where she had arrived as a student more than three decades earlier.

• 3. The First Folio and the Book

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  Much of Smith's scholarly attention has gone not just to what Shakespeare wrote, but to the physical objects through which his writing has survived. The First Folio, published in 1623, is the earliest collected edition of Shakespeare's plays, and Smith has made it a central subject of her research.

  At the Bodleian Library, she worked alongside conservators and digital specialists on a project to digitise one of the library's copies of the First Folio, with the project drawing on crowd-sourced funding. Her engagement with this object was not merely archival. In 2016, she authenticated a newly discovered copy of the First Folio that had turned up at Mount Stuart House on the Isle of Bute. The find was significant: locating an uncatalogued copy of the book is rare.

  This preoccupation with books as physical things extends into her writing. Portable Magic, her later work, is, by her own description, "a book about books, rather than words." It was shortlisted for the 2023 Wolfson History Prize, placing her work alongside historians engaging with the broadest public audiences.

• 4. Collaborative Authorship

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  One of the more consequential arguments in recent Shakespeare scholarship came from Smith and her Oxford colleague Laurie Maguire in 2012. Together they proposed that All's Well that Ends Well, long treated as a Shakespeare play, was in fact a collaboration between Shakespeare and the playwright Thomas Middleton.

  The argument was taken seriously enough that the New Oxford Shakespeare edition of 2016, edited by Bourus and colleagues, became the first printed edition of the play to list Middleton alongside Shakespeare as a joint author. That kind of direct impact on a major scholarly edition is unusual for a single article. A separate piece by Smith and Maguire went further still, winning the 2014 Hoffman Prize.

  Smith's connection to Middleton has continued. In 2025 she appeared on BBC Radio 4's In Our Time to discuss the playwright, a figure whose relationship to Shakespeare she has clearly found worth returning to.

• 5. This Is Shakespeare

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  Smith published This Is Shakespeare in 2019, and the book's origins lie in the lecture halls of Oxford rather than in a research library. The chapters grew out of lectures she had given to Oxford undergraduates, material she also shaped into her Approaching Shakespeare podcast, in which she discusses twenty of Shakespeare's plays in order.

  She has described the two goals she held for the book: to convey the range of Shakespeare's work across his career, and to make each chapter stand alone, so a reader could pick one up before a theatre visit without needing to have read the rest. The book was received well beyond academic circles. Smith has described the public response as "exciting and unexpected," and commentary at the time noted that it "catapulted Smith's name into literary renown."

  Alongside This Is Shakespeare, her lecture series Not Shakespeare: Elizabethan and Jacobean Popular Theatre is also available as a podcast, placing early modern drama more broadly in reach of general listeners.

• 6. Beyond the Page

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  Smith's work has reached beyond scholarship and publishing into theatre, film, and broadcasting. She served as a script advisor on Josie Rourke's 2018 film Mary Queen of Scots and on the BBC's 2023 documentary series Shakespeare: The Rise of a Genius.

  On BBC Radio 4's discussion programme In Our Time, she has appeared across episodes covering Marlowe in 2005, Shakespeare's Plantagenet histories in 2018, Macbeth in 2020, Shakespeare's sonnets in 2021, Romeo and Juliet in 2022, Twelfth Night in 2023, and Henry IV, Part 1 in 2026. In August 2024 she appeared on Radio 4's Great Lives to discuss Marlowe with director Julien Temple.

  She edits Shakespeare Survey for Cambridge University Press and serves as general editor of the Oxford World's Classics Shakespeare series for Oxford University Press. In September 2024 she joined the board of the Royal Shakespeare Company, having been named an RSC Associate Scholar in 2021. She was made an Honorary Bencher at Middle Temple in 2024, and her name is among those on the sculpture Ribbons, also unveiled that year.