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 has been positively reviewed 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. It is now available in paperback.
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's mini-book Teaching Shakespeare and His Sisters: An Embodied Approach (2023), for the Cambridge Elements 'Shakespeare and Pedagogy' series, asks: What are we teaching, when we teach Shakespeare? Today, the Shakespeare classroom is often also a rehearsal room; we teach Shakespeare plays as both literary texts and cues for theatrical performance. This Element explores the possibilities of an 'embodied' pedagogical approach as a tool to inform literary analysis. It explores how an embodied approach might be applied to Shakespeare plays in a playhouse context; applies this framework to the play-making, performance, and story-telling of early modern women ('Shakespeare's sisters'); and suggests how an embodied pedagogy might be possible digitally, in relation to online teaching.
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Can one life be measured against another? Can a woman's body be measured against a man's life? Can consensual sex be measured against rape? Measure for Measure explores these questions through a series of substitutions: Angelo deputises for the Duke, who disguises himself to spy on his subjects; corrupt Angelo demands that almost-nun Isabella gives her body in exchange for her brother's life; and the Duke substitutes living bodies and decapitated heads to bring about a 'happy ending' in this problematic comedy. Exploring corrupt power, state surveillance, and the silencing of women by powerful men, Measure for Measure continues to resonate today.
Emma wrote the introduction to this Oxford World's Classics edition of the play, edited by Terri Bourus. |
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.