Hughes (London: Scala, 2023) (forthcoming) 'Pepys, silk, and The Triumphant Weaver (1682)', in Word, Image, Music: Essays on the Treasures of the Pepys Library, Cambridge. 'Body language: making love in lyric in Romeo and Juliet', Review of English Studies 74 (2023), 237-53 Body Language Romeo and Juliet (New Cambridge Shakespeare) (Cambridge, 2023) (forthcoming) Shakespeare and Memory (Oxford Shakespeare Topics) (Oxford, 2013)Įngland’s Helicon: fountains in early modern literature and culture (Oxford, 2007) Shakespeare and early modern literature, especially (but far from exclusively) drama visual and material culture, and performance. I read and respond to comments on all the previous blogs and value hearing from teachers in particular! Follow for new posts and other (mostly) Shakespeare-related things.

My 2021-2 #SlowShakespeare blog was #DaggerDrawn, about Macbeth and my current blog is #BurningBarge, slow-reading Antony and Cleopatra. In 2018 I wrote about Romeo and Juliet every day you can see the whole thing here. In 2019-20 I wrote another #SlowShakespeare blog about The Tempest, called #StormTossed, here, and in 2020-21 I wrote #KingedUnkinged about Richard II. I'm just getting started on a new long-term project, a new edition of Shakespeare's Two Gentlemen of Verona (the one with a dog) for the Arden 4th Series. I'm a member of the editorial board of Shakespeare Survey and of the Advisory Board for Cambridge Shakespeare Editions. I prepared The Shakespearean Forest, by the late Anne Barton, for publication by Cambridge University Press (2017). I'm also writing Shakespeare's Histories: A Very Short Introduction (OUP). I work on Shakespeare and early modern literature in general, with a particular interest in performance and visual and material culture, and in interdisciplinary approaches. My current monograph project is Textile Shakespeare, which will be published by Oxford University Press: it's about silk, embroidery, linen, gloves and shoes (and leather and wool), folds, tailors and cutting, sewing scenes, and cloaks, cloaking, and black cloth. I coordinate the programme of exhibitions for the Centre for Material Texts. I lecture and supervise for the Shakespeare and Renaissance papers in Part I and the Material Renaissance and Early Modern Drama papers at Part II, and frequently teach the Renaissance textual studies component of the MPhil.

From 2003-6 I was a Research Fellow at Magdalene College. I completed my BA and MA (Hons.) at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand, before coming to Cambridge as a Commonwealth Scholar to begin my PhD in 1999. I'm a University Associate Professor and a Fellow of St Catharine's College, where I'm one of the directors of studies in English.

Renaissance Paratexts by Helen Smith