Sir Simon Russell Beale and Professor Emma Smith
A Piece of Work: Playing Shakespeare and Other Stories
3pm Afternoon Tea
3.45pm Event starts
5pm Drinks Reception
Sir Simon Russell Beale is one of Britain’s most recognisable and well-loved actors and is the most recent recipient of an Honorary Fellowship from Somerville. He has played many roles on stage, film, television and radio – ranging from Winston Churchill to Stalin, George Smiley to King Arthur. But ever since his appearance at school as a glamorous Desdemona, complete with false eyelashes that rendered him half-blind, he has been captivated by Shakespeare.
In A Piece of Work, Russell Beale tries to get under the skin of the playwright and find out what interested him. Was Shakespeare an instinctive ‘conservative’ or, rather, gently subversive? How collaborative was he? Did he add a line to Hamlet in order to accommodate his ageing and increasingly chubby principal actor, Richard Burbage? Did he suffer from insomnia and experience sexual jealousy?
Professor Emma Smith (1988, English) is a leading Shakespeare academic, Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Hertford College and author of numerous books including Shakespeare’s First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book and This Is Shakespeare. She edits the journal Shakespeare Survey, is the General Editor for the Oxford World’s Classics Shakespeare and is currently working on a new edition of Twelfth Night for the Arden series. Emma has recently joined the Royal Shakespeare Company’s board.