Dr Emma Whipday is a Lecturer in Renaissance Literature at Newcastle University. Emma is interested in family, gender, and power on stage and in popular culture in early modern England. Her current project, funded by a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, explores the cultural importance of the brother-sister relationship, and how it intersects with issues of patriarchal power, female agency, domestic authority, and the place of the unmarried woman in early modern society.
Emma studied English Language and Literature at Oxford as an undergraduate, before studying for an MA in ‘English: Shakespeare in History’ and a PhD at UCL. She has taught at Shakespeare's Globe, UCL, King’s College London, the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, and Brasenose College, Oxford; and has published on Elizabethan true crimes; domestic tragedy; and performance practice as research. Emma’s thesis explored the relationship between Shakespeare’s tragedies and the genre of domestic tragedy. The resulting monograph, Shakespeare's Domestic Tragedies, argues that in Hamlet, Othello, and Macbeth, Shakespeare creates new versions of domestic tragedy, using heightened language, foreign settings, and elite spheres to stage familiar domestic worlds. Shakespeare Domestic Tragedies recently received a positive review in the Times Literary Supplement, is co-winner of the Shakespeare's Globe Book Award, and is now available in paperback.
Peer-reviewed Publications
Shakespeare's Domestic Tragedies (Cambridge University Press, 2019); co-winner of the Shakespeare's Globe Book Award 2020
‘“My tears will choke me, if I ope my mouth”: Framing, Feasting, and Speaking Sexual Violence in Titus Andronicus, 2006–2017’, in Farah Karim-Cooper (ed.), Titus Andronicus: The State of Play (Arden Shakespeare, 2020)
‘“Keep the Widow Waking”, or Early Modern Verbatim Theatre’, with Lucy Munro, in David McInnis et al (eds), Lost Plays and the Literary Culture of Shakespeare’s Time (Palgrave, 2020)
'Sounding Offstage Worlds: Experiencing Liminal Space and Time in Macbeth and Othello' (with Sarah Lewis), Shakespeare 15.3 (Aug 2019)
‘Everyday Murder and Household Work in Shakespeare’s Domestic Tragedies’, Staged Normality in Shakespeare's England ed. by Edel Semple and Rory Loughnane (Palgrave, 2019)
‘“Original Practices and Historical Imagination”: Staging A Tragedie Called Merrie’, with Freyja Cox Jensen, Shakespeare Bulletin 35.2 (Summer 2017), 289-307
‘Is He a Dramatist? Or, Something Singular! Staging Dickensian Drama as Practice-Led Research’, with Oskar Cox Jensen and Joanna Robinson, Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 43.2 (Summer 2017), 160-182
‘Daniel’s Cleopatra and Lady Anne Clifford: From a Jacobean Portrait to Modern Performance’, with Helen Hackett and Yasmin Arshad, Early Theatre 18.2 (2015), 167–86
‘“Marrow Prying Neighbours”: Staging Domestic Space and Neighbourhood Surveillance in Arden of Faversham’, Cahiers Élisabéthains 88.1 (October 2015), 95–110
‘“The Picture of a Woman”: Roaring Girls and Alternative Histories in the RSC 2014 Season’, Shakespeare 11.3 (Aug 2015), 272–285
‘“A True Reporte”: News and the Neighbourhood in Early Modern Domestic Murder Texts’, in Simon Davies and Puck Fletcher (eds), News in Early Modern Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2014), pp.159–174
Conference Organisation
'Playing and Playgoing in Early Modern England' (with Simon Smith), the Queen's College, Oxford, June 2017
'The Performance and Experience of Domestic Service', London Renaissance Seminar, Birkbeck, July 2015
Shakespeare's Domestic Tragedies (Cambridge University Press, 2019); co-winner of the Shakespeare's Globe Book Award 2020
‘“My tears will choke me, if I ope my mouth”: Framing, Feasting, and Speaking Sexual Violence in Titus Andronicus, 2006–2017’, in Farah Karim-Cooper (ed.), Titus Andronicus: The State of Play (Arden Shakespeare, 2020)
‘“Keep the Widow Waking”, or Early Modern Verbatim Theatre’, with Lucy Munro, in David McInnis et al (eds), Lost Plays and the Literary Culture of Shakespeare’s Time (Palgrave, 2020)
'Sounding Offstage Worlds: Experiencing Liminal Space and Time in Macbeth and Othello' (with Sarah Lewis), Shakespeare 15.3 (Aug 2019)
‘Everyday Murder and Household Work in Shakespeare’s Domestic Tragedies’, Staged Normality in Shakespeare's England ed. by Edel Semple and Rory Loughnane (Palgrave, 2019)
‘“Original Practices and Historical Imagination”: Staging A Tragedie Called Merrie’, with Freyja Cox Jensen, Shakespeare Bulletin 35.2 (Summer 2017), 289-307
‘Is He a Dramatist? Or, Something Singular! Staging Dickensian Drama as Practice-Led Research’, with Oskar Cox Jensen and Joanna Robinson, Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 43.2 (Summer 2017), 160-182
‘Daniel’s Cleopatra and Lady Anne Clifford: From a Jacobean Portrait to Modern Performance’, with Helen Hackett and Yasmin Arshad, Early Theatre 18.2 (2015), 167–86
‘“Marrow Prying Neighbours”: Staging Domestic Space and Neighbourhood Surveillance in Arden of Faversham’, Cahiers Élisabéthains 88.1 (October 2015), 95–110
‘“The Picture of a Woman”: Roaring Girls and Alternative Histories in the RSC 2014 Season’, Shakespeare 11.3 (Aug 2015), 272–285
‘“A True Reporte”: News and the Neighbourhood in Early Modern Domestic Murder Texts’, in Simon Davies and Puck Fletcher (eds), News in Early Modern Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2014), pp.159–174
Conference Organisation
'Playing and Playgoing in Early Modern England' (with Simon Smith), the Queen's College, Oxford, June 2017
'The Performance and Experience of Domestic Service', London Renaissance Seminar, Birkbeck, July 2015
Public Engagement
Emma spoke about the RSC's gender-swapped Taming of the Shrew on BBC Woman's Hour.
Emma recently appeared at cinemas across the UK, in an interval interview for the RSC Live screening of Measure for Measure (31st July 2019).
You can listen to Emma talking about domestic violence in Macbeth on BBC Radio 3's 'Free Thinking' (11 April 2018), with James Shapiro and Mark Ravenhill.
You can watch Emma discussing Jacobean masques in the BBC documentary The Best King We Never Had (aired 30 November 2017), along with a clip from her production of Masque of Queens.
You can also see Emma discussing her research with Dr Freyja Cox Jensen in a TEDx talk, below.
Emma spoke about the RSC's gender-swapped Taming of the Shrew on BBC Woman's Hour.
Emma recently appeared at cinemas across the UK, in an interval interview for the RSC Live screening of Measure for Measure (31st July 2019).
You can listen to Emma talking about domestic violence in Macbeth on BBC Radio 3's 'Free Thinking' (11 April 2018), with James Shapiro and Mark Ravenhill.
You can watch Emma discussing Jacobean masques in the BBC documentary The Best King We Never Had (aired 30 November 2017), along with a clip from her production of Masque of Queens.
You can also see Emma discussing her research with Dr Freyja Cox Jensen in a TEDx talk, below.
