Dr Beth Sharrock

About

I am interested in how Shakespeare's works have been presented to readers and audiences through paratexts, particularly in "new" media. Prior to my role at Warwick, I taught at the University of Nottingham, University of Birmingham, and Coventry University. I first joined Warwick in the Department of Theatre and Performance Studies in 2021 and have taught with the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies since 2022. In 2024, I won a Warwick Award for Teaching Excellence.

Research

My doctoral thesis explored the development of Shakespearean paratexts - including short films, live interviews, trailers - in live theatre broadcast productions from 2009-2019. My current research investigates how editors in the long eighteenth century use paratexts (introductions, prefaces, footnotes) to articulate their roles in relation to the text and to record networks of editorial collaboration and contention. In 2022, I was awarded an M4C Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the University of Birmingham to undertake work on the (anti)sociability of Shakespeare's eighteenth century editors. I am currently editing a tranche of previously undiscovered correspondence from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century between the Stratford vicar, Rev. James Davenport, and the influential Shakespearean editor, Edmond Malone.

My first book, Shakespeare Broadcasts and the Question of Value (2025, Cambridge University Press), explores how theatre institutions and adapters have negotiated the tricky value of Shakespeare's canonically marginal plays. It questions how these plays are presented to audiences in line with narratives of Shakespeare's cultural centrality in Britain and other Anglophone contexts. The book reflects my wider methodology in setting framing media in conversation across forms and different periods: comparing contemporary broadcast paratexts produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company with Restoration prefaces, editorial introductions, and Augustan tracts of literary criticism.

Selected Publications

Shakespeare Broadcasts and the Question of Value (Cambridge University Press, March 2025)

'Shakespeare’s New Mediators: Theatre Space and the Celebrity Actor in Broadcast Paratexts', Shakespeare (Forthcoming)

'Framing Shakespeare in New Digital Canons: Paratextual Conventions of RSC Live and NT Live', Shakespeare Bulletin 40.2 (2022), pp. 239-67.

'A View from the Stage: Interviews with Performers', Shakespeare and the "Live" Theatre Broadcast Experience, edited by Pascale Aebischer, Susanne Greenhalgh, and Laurie E. Osborne (London: Arden Bloomsbury, 2018), pp. 95-101.

Education

Ph.D Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham
M.A. Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham
B.A. University of York