Booking and details
Dates Sat, Apr 18, 2026 at 7pm
Venue Folger Theatre
Tickets Free; registration requested
Walk-ins will be accommodated day of, as available
ASL interpretation will be provided.
Join us for the Folger Institute’s annual Shakespeare’s Birthday Lecture with Dr. Emma Smith, Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Oxford University. Every year, in commemoration of William Shakespeare’s birthday, the Folger invites a scholar to speak about Shakespeare and early modern life.
All guests are invited to join us after the lecture for a dessert reception in the Great Hall.
The Shakespeare’s Birthday Lecture will also be livestreamed on the Folger YouTube channel. Link to watch
About the talk
Dr. Emma Smith, Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Oxford University, will discuss Shakespeare’s own migration to the US—including to the Folger Shakespeare Library—alongside stories of migration within his works. Juxtaposing the spread of Shakespeare’s works alongside the geographies of his plays raises questions about immigration and citizenship in our own age of mass movement. What would happen if we understood the journeys in Shakespeare’s plays less as remnants from medieval romance and more presciently in the light of exile, diaspora, and forced migration?
Smith’s talk will focus on the play The Book of Sir Thomas More, to which we know Shakespeare contributed a speech in his own hand, alongside Othello and Twelfth Night, to discuss identity, displacement, prejudice, and the figure of the “good immigrant” across the long life of Shakespeare’s plays.
About the speaker
Emma Smith
Emma Smith is Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Hertford College, University of Oxford, UK. Her research is about the reception of Shakespeare’s works in the theatre, in print, and in criticism – and especially on why we are so invested in particular stories about his life and canon. Her books include Shakespeare’s First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book (2016), This Is Shakespeare (2019), and the new Arden edition of Twelfth Night (forthcoming in 2026).
She is Associate Scholar and Trustee at the Royal Shakespeare Company, and was the 2023 Sam Wanamaker Fellow at Shakespeare’s Globe. She is currently at work on a Shakespeare graphic novel and completing a book on whether England had a renaissance in the sixteenth century. She has just been awarded a three-year fellowship to research connections between books, slavery, and forms of value.
About Folger Institute
The Folger Institute is a center for early modern research at the Folger Shakespeare Library that brings public audiences together with researchers to explore the cultures and legacies of the early modern world. Learn more.
Happening earlier in the day
Shakespeare's Birthday Celebration
Related
Read book excerpts and listen to interviews with Smith on the Folger’s Shakespeare Unlimited podcast.
400 Years of Shakespeare's First Folio, with Emma Smith
Emma Smith of Oxford University tells us what the First Folio has been up to since it was published 400 years ago.
Emma Smith on This Is Shakespeare
Is there a right way to interpret the plays? No, says Emma Smith, and there’s a good reason for that. In her book This Is Shakespeare, she writes that they are characterized by gaps—unknowable elements and unanswered questions that require us to insert our own readings.
Emma Smith on Falstaff: An excerpt from 'This Is Shakespeare'
Shakespeare scholar Emma Smith takes 20 chapters to discuss 20 different Shakespeare plays in her new book This Is Shakespeare, offering insights on key characters, plot twists, and performance challenges. The excerpt below, which focuses on the character of Falstaff…
Prospero's epilogue as Shakespeare's farewell? Excerpt - 'This is Shakespeare' by Emma Smith
In this excerpt from her new book, This is Shakespeare (published Mar 31 in the United States), Emma Smith probes the biographical interpretations that readers have layered over Shakespeare’s plays, particularly The Tempest, and how that shapes what we think.