Emma's academic monograph, Shakespeare's Domestic Tragedies: Violence in the Early Modern Home (Cambridge University Press, 2019), explores the relationship between Shakespeare’s plays and the emerging genre of domestic tragedy: a group of plays portraying violent events in ordinary English homes, often inspired by recent ‘true crimes’. Emma 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.
Emma's essay collection Playing and Playgoing in Early Modern England: Actor, Audience and Performance, co-edited with Simon Smith, was published by Cambridge University Press in January 2022.
This book brings together leading scholars of early modern drama and playhouse culture to reflect upon the study of playing and playgoing in early modern England. The essays in this collection explore the interactions between: players; play-texts; performance spaces; the bodily, sensory and material experiences of the playhouse; and playgoers' responses to, and engagements with, the theatre.
Emma has also written journal articles and book chapters on early modern true crime, staging domestic space, performing blushing and blanching, domestic and sexual violence in contemporary productions, and performance practice-as-research. To view a full list of publications, see her university profile page.