I’m delighted to be speaking at the Oxford Literary Festival later this month! I’ll be speaking about Searching for Juliet, romance, and the myth of Verona’s most famous teenager (from Shakespeare to West Side Story) in Lincoln College’s Oakeshott Room at 10 am on Friday, 22 March. It’s my first time at the Oxford Literary Festival and a lovely way to mark Searching for Juliet’s publication in paperback! You can book tickets (and order Searching for Juliet in both hardback and paperback!) here. Hope to see many of you there.
BBC Radio 3 Free Thinking
Last month, I had a great time on Free Thinking discussing Shakespeare’s Women with Anne McElvoy, Hailey Bachrach, Anouska Lester, and Emma Whipday. I also saw absolutely enormous posters of The Traitors: thrilled. Listen to us talk about Ellen Terry, Marie Corelli, the incomparable Harriet Walter, and also yes technically W. Shakespeare himself.
HistoryExtra podcast
Earlier this term I was delighted to appear on the BBC History Extra podcast discussing Romeo and Juliet and what Shakespeare’s play can teach us about Tudor youth in Early Modern England. You can listen on Spotify or Apple (and, I should think, plenty of other places too). If you enjoyed it, please let me know!
Some of the research in this episode is taken from my book Searching for Juliet, available here.
Cambridge Literary Festival – 20 April
On 20 April I’ll be in conversation with the amazing Preti Taneja at the Cambridge Literary Festival, talking about Searching for Juliet. Our event is at the Old Divinity Schools from 4–5 pm. Tickets are £14 fully-priced, but I’m delighted to say that they’re free for the under 25s, unwaged, and anyone who would otherwise be unable to attend.
Find out more and book here. I’m really excited about the event and hope to see many of you there!
(as a reminder, Searching for Juliet is released in the UK on 6 April and in the USA on 6 June. These links will give you a good choice of places to pre-order, including via independents! Here is a great article from The Irish Times on why pre-ordering really helps authors out…)
[REVIEW] Sunday Times – Searching for Juliet
There’s a lovely & generous review of Searching for Juliet by Sophie Elmhirst in The Sunday Times today, specifically the Culture magazine. I love Culture magazine so reading such kind words about my book is a dream. I was especially glad that the reviewer talked about the work I did with older people at the Oxford Playhouse – for me, this was one of the book’s great joys. Run, do not walk to buy The Sunday Times! There is also an excellent pic of Ms Danes and Mr DiCaprio at their absolute 90s peak!
Advance praise for Searching for Juliet
It’s less than a month until Searching for Juliet is published in the UK, and I’m so excited to share the advance reviews with you! There’ll be quite a bit of info coming up on the blog over the next few weeks about where you can see/hear me in conversation about the book, and come to a signing, so please stay tuned!
Here is what people have been saying so far….
I love the combination of authority, research, anger, and dry wit. Sophie Duncan shows us that Juliet has created templates for young women that are both enabling and stifling – and traces that paradox unflinchingly across slave plantations, teenage mental health, and the erotics of the beautiful dead girl. Searching for Juliet offers the play and its reception a fresh kind of attention: a sort of tough love which avoids sentimentality without becoming cynical. Really eye-opening — Emma Smith, author of This Is Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s Juliet represents far more than passionate but doomed teenage love, and in her brilliant new book Sophie Duncan shows us why. Deeply researched and wryly written, Searching for Juliet makes us think again about a character and a story we thought we knew — Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, author of Metamorphosis: A Life in Pieces
Sophie Duncan’s wonderful new book tells the story of the most famous love story of Western literature as you’ve never seen it before. This story is an astonishing tour-de-force . . . Duncan does not shy away from the dark side of this story but her absolute passion for the subject shines through on every page. Juliet has found the biographer she deserves — Marion Turner, author of The Wife of Bath: A Biography
In Verona, an office answers letters posted to Juliet from all over the world. At college, Romeo and Juliet is the top Shakespeare pick by students for their studies. Tracing Juliet’s afterlife through many an enthralling by-way, Sophie Duncan begins this original, stylish and compelling narrative with the enthralling and sometimes poignant story of the boy actors and young women who first took on the role of Shakespeare’s first eponymous – and wonderfully spirited – heroine. It’s a marvellous book, and one that delivers a powerfully inspiring message to the young Juliets of our own troubled times — Miranda Seymour, author of I Used to Live Here Once: The Haunted Life of Jean Rhys
Breathtaking in its range, this is far more than a deep dive into an ocean of Juliets (although it is, gloriously, that): it is a powerful, witty, and provocative exploration of sex and gender, youth and age, love and death — Dr Anna Beer, author of Eve Bites Back: An Alternative History of English Literature
Bursting with energy, wit, and page-turning satisfaction, Sophie Duncan’s book unpacks the rich, and sometimes uncomfortable cultural history of Shakespeare’s Juliet — Gilli Bush-Bailey, author of Treading the Bawds: Actresses and Playwrights on the Late Stuart Stage
Sophie Duncan uses her expertise in theatre history to give us both a biography of Shakespeare’s Juliet and a capacious cultural study of people and politics. Duncan takes us from Shakespeare’s stage through plantation slaves to Mussolini’s Italy. She writes with wit and acumen, so that the story of Juliet across the centuries is imbued with personality and compassion. This is an extraordinary achievement — Laurie Maguire, author of The Rhetoric of the Page
Pre-order Searching for Juliet in Hardback, Kindle, or Audiobook for delivery in the UK; in the USA (release date 6 June 2023), and in Australia & New Zealand (release date 11 July 2023).
Pre-Order Searching for Juliet
I’m thrilled to say that my next book, Searching for Juliet (UK) or just Juliet (USA title) is now available for pre-order!
This book has been a delight to write, and I am – say it quietly – proud of it. I said a little bit about why, and about the benefits of writing for a wider audience, here.
Here is some blurb for Juliet:
Romeo and Juliet may be the greatest love story ever told, but who is Juliet? Demure ingénue? Or dangerous Mediterranean madwoman? From tearstained copies of the First Folio to Civil War–era fanfiction, Shakespeare’s star-crossed heroine has long captured our collective imagination.
Juliet is her story, traced across continents through centuries of history, theatre, and film. As scholar Sophie Duncan reveals, Juliet’s legacy stretches beyond her literary lifespan into a cultural afterlife ranging from enslaved African girls in the British Caribbean to the real-life Juliets of sectarian violence in Bosnia and Belfast. She argues that our dangerous aestheticization of the beautiful dead teenager and Juliet’s meteoric rise as a defiant sexual icon have come to define the Western ideal of romance.
Wry and inventive, Juliet is a tribute to fiction’s most famous teenage girl who died young, but who lives forever.
[from the USA publisher’s page]
The lovely UK edition, from Sceptre (an imprint of Hachette) will be released in hardback, ebook, and audio download on 6 April 2023. So far, you can pre-order it at all of the following!
The equally gorgeous USA edition will be released in hardcover and ebook by Seal Press (part of Basic Books). You can pre-order it thus far at…
Independent booksellers: If you’re an independent and it’s possible to pre-order from you, that would be very lovely to know! Please leave a comment and I’ll add your link to this post.
[REVIEW] – In Love With Hell
My review of William Palmer’s In Love With Hell: Drink in the Lives and Work of Eleven Writers (Robinson, 262pp, £20) is out now in May’s issue of Literary Review. Subscribers can also read the review via the Literary Review website. To my mind, the best aspects of the book are the passages describing postwar backstreet & provincial pub culture. Parts chimed sometimes of the work of C.P. Snow (early Strangers and Brothers), Colin Dexter, Stan Barstow, and Keith Waterhouse. Elsewhere in In Love With Hell, I had reservations about the author’s depiction of non-consensual sex, as I discuss in the review.
Race and the history of theatre criticism
I’m quoted in playwright Naomi Obeng’s lengthy article for The Stage‘s special issue on theatre and race this week, guest edited by Naomi with actor Emmanuel Kojo.
You can read the article here – although The Stage is usually subscription-only, a free registration will let you read all the new articles on race. It was great to talk to Naomi about Ira Aldridge, nineteenth-century women theatregoers, and the astonishing contradictions of some people’s make-believe: Oberon has just made himself invisible yes, King Duncan has a black son no. You can find Naomi on Twitter here.
I’d love to hear what you think about the article, and the special issue in general – do let me know!
On Playreadings
I didn’t know theatrical wonder was possible on Teams: guess what
— Dr Sophie Duncan (@clamorousvoice) November 23, 2020
I am wearing a jumper with Rock & Roll written on it, and to honour that garment I have spent the past hour finalising the cast list for Monday’s online Christ Church playreading, which will be Romeo and Juliet. I was surprised to realise it will be the fourteenth playreading I’ve run since taking up my Christ Church Fellowship in October 2018 – and the fourth I’ve run online. I’m sharing the list below in case it’s of interest, and also to note that our last in-person playreading was on 2 March 2020 – almost exactly a year before we’ll read Romeo and Juliet. I tracked down an email to make sure (I have been… variable at archiving the readings) and detected no hint of concern; we did then cram about 25 people into my office.
I began the play readings because (as a graduate student and ECR) I’d really loved the Liripoop playreadings run by Laurie Maguire and Emma Smith. I thought that a version for undergraduates could build community and introduce sixteenth-to-eighteenth-century plays to students in a low-stakes, enjoyable way. Those who know the Oxford BA syllabus will see that I followed it very closely pre-pandemic. This means reading Early Modern drama in Michaelmas (Autumn) Term; Restoration/eighteenth-century drama in Hilary (Spring) Term; and Shakespeare in Trinity (Summer). That’s been helpful, and I scheduled plays to complement my classes; during the pandemic, I also moved to a very deliberate pedagogy of Bangers Only. Where possible, I choose short plays with (in pre-pandemic times) a lot of hard copies available in Oxford’s lending libraries and (very cheaply) online.
Almost fourteen playreadings in, the regular cast includes undergraduates, postgraduates and recent students from across the university – not just English and not just Christ Church. During lockdown we’ve had people from all over the UK, and also from France, come together to read. I look forward to seeing all the participants again in person, but online playreadings have also been absolutely lovely: The Winter’s Tale, before Christmas, was one of my favourites. There were two reasons: first, several Freshers genuinely didn’t know what was coming when the royal family assembled to see Dead Hermione’s Statue; second, people wore costumes. Another joy is seeing students who initially attended as an “audience member” start to request small parts of their own, and then bigger, and then bigger. That’s another big thing: you don’t need to read to attend. Nor do you need any acting experience or ability. The only real rule is not to bring dark-coloured drinks into a study with pale grey carpet.
Reading the plays of course throws up new textual insights and delights; preparing the cast lists and doubling charts has been illuminating (it’s also given me some good research ideas). But that’s not really been the point. It’s taught me more about how plays sound, and how people read, and about the merits and demerits of snack foods sold in the vicinity of St Aldate’s. This blog post is to mark the fourteenth playreading of its kind, and to say thank you to everyone who’s attended over the past two-and-a-half years. It’s also to challenge me to create an archive of the readings in a much more deliberate way.
If you have questions, or run a similar series of your own, I’d love to hear from you. These are the plays we’ve read together – now I’ll get thinking about where we’ll go next!
- Autumn 2018: The Massacre at Paris (Christopher Marlowe)
- Autumn 2018: Arden of Faversham (Anon.)
- Spring 2019: The Country Wife (William Wycherley)
- Spring 2019: The Beaux Stratagem (George Farquhar)
- Summer 2019: The Merry Wives of Windsor (W. Shakespeare)
- Summer 2019: Pericles (W. Shakespeare)
- Autumn 2019: The Witch (Thomas Middleton)
- Autumn 2019: The Changeling (Thomas Middleton and William Rowley)
- Spring 2020: Venice Preserv’d (Thomas Otway)
- Spring 2020: The Enchanted Island (John Dryden and William Davenant)
- Summer 2020: Twelfth Night (W. Shakespeare)
- Autumn 2020: Edward II (Christopher Marlowe)
- Autumn 2020: The Winter’s Tale (W. Shakespeare)
- Spring 2021: Romeo and Juliet (see above)
- ?????
CLAMOROUS VOICE 