Playing and Playgoing in Early Modern England

Simon Smith is Associate Professor of Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama at the Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-upon-Avon and the Department of English Literature, University of Birmingham. He researches early modern drama, music and sensory culture. He is the author of Musical Response in the Early Modern Playhouse, 1603–1625 (Cambridge, 2017), for which he won the Shakespeare's Globe Book Award and the University English Book Prize. He edited Shakespeare/Sense (2020) and, with Jackie Watson and Amy Kenny, The Senses in Early Modern England, 1558–1660 (2015). He has acted as a historical music and theatre consultant to the RSC, Shakespeare's Globe, The Independent and the BBC adaptation of Wolf Hall. Emma Whipday is Lecturer in Renaissance Literature at Newcastle University. She researches domestic violence, gender and power, familial structures, and performance in and beyond the playhouse. Her monograph Shakespeare's Domestic Tragedies: Violence in the Early Modern Home (Cambridge, 2019) won the 2020 Shakespeare's Globe Book Award. She is currently working on a Leverhulme-funded book on brother-sister relationships on the early modern stage. Emma regularly directs 'practice as research' stagings of early modern texts. She also writes plays, including Shakespeare's Sister (2016) and The Defamation of Cicely Lee (2019), winner of the American Shakespeare Center's 'Shakespeare's New Contemporaries' award.