Engaging with the Humanities: Emma Smith

Engaging with the Humanities – Emma Smith ‘What’s aught but as ‘tis valued?’: Shakespeare’s value

Wednesday 17 February 2016, 12:30-14:00

This talk considers a number of different ways to value Shakespeare: personal, educational, economic, aesthetic – by focusing on the life stories of the first collected edition of his plays, the First Folio of 1623. This book was sold for 15 shillings on publication; copies now fetch millions of pounds. A book that often shows marks of casual use – wine-ring stains, doodling, even pet paw prints – is now treated as a relic. The cultural geographer Tim Cresswell argues that ‘value is produced by the passage of things in and out of different regimes of value… objects have biographies that are formed as they pass through these regimes of value’. Tracing the biography of the book via its different regimes of value gives a new way to understand questions of Shakespeare, worth, and value. More about the speaker: Emma Smith is Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Hertford College, Oxford, and has written widely on Shakespeare and early modern drama. Her book Shakespeare’s First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book is published by Oxford University Press in March 2016.

Please arrive at the School from 12:15 for lunch from 12:30 with the talk starting promptly at 13:00. Tickets are non-transferable.

For details, link here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/engaging-with-the-humanities-emma-smith-registration-20726433320