Taking you inside Shakespeare’s plays on the radio – how they sound and how they change and evolve – Andrea Smith provides an innovative history of Shakespearean performance. Based on meticulous new research using documentary evidence and archive audio recordings, Smith explores what it means to present Shakespeare as audio and how this can help us to gain a greater understanding of the plays themselves and the art of performing them. The BBC’s remit to ‘inform, educate and entertain’ has led to assumptions that these plays were presented as scholarly works rather than showbiz. Wrong! They feature all the careful crafting of any other production of Shakespeare’s work. This book puts these audio productions on a par with other forms of Shakespearean performance and offers detailed case studies to further the readers’ understanding of Shakespeare’s texts on air.

Prizes

Winner of Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2025 (UK)

An indispensable guide to the huge (and largely free) treasures of our greatest writer. It’s often said that radio plays have the best scenery; this book proves that they have the best words as well. -- Samuel West, actor and director
Forget the old chestnut that if Shakespeare were alive now, he’d be writing for Hollywood: Andrea Smith makes clear that he’d be writing for the verbal, imaginative medium of radio. This revelatory book opens a fascinating new field of study. -- Emma Smith, University of Oxford
Smith (Univ. of Suffolk, England) offers a fascinating history in an underrepresented area of Shakespeare studies. Treating radio adaptations of Shakespeare as texts in their own right, with their own performance traditions and technical practices, this volume places (mostly BBC) radio adaptations in their historical and cultural contexts, in chronological order, organized in chapters of roughly 20-year spans from the origins of radio to the present. The introduction serves as a history of British radio engineering practice. Radio as a medium offers a fascinating way to consider Shakespeare’s language in performance, as the artists must convert any visual elements of performance to the purely aural, with all the challenges that entails. Smith’s chronicle demonstrates the significant role of Val Gielgud, brother to the more famous actor John, in shaping radio Shakespeare. One of the strengths of the volume is Smith’s detailed case studies of exemplary radio productions from each period, tracking changes in preferred plays, actor choices, and audience and critical responses. Perhaps the most surprising element: for much of the history of radio Shakespeare, men produced the shows, but in the 21st century, female producers dominate the form. -- K. J. Wetmore Jr., Loyola Marymount University * Choice *

Andrea Smith is Lecturer in English and Creative Writing at the University of Suffolk. Her research focuses on audio interpretations of early modern plays, listening to how they transform something for the stage into something for the ear. She brings her research into her teaching and outreach work, using audio clips to help people understand Shakespeare’s texts and inspire their own creative work. Her research has been published in Shakespeare Survey, Shakespeare, Women’s History Today and Radio Journal. She has also discussed her research in the short documentary series, The Beeb and the Bard on BBC Radio 3, as well as participating in the network’s discussion programme, Free Thinking.