Prof. Jane Kingsley-Smith works primarily on Shakespeare’s Sonnets, challenging some of the assumptions we make about their sequence, their protagonists, even what a Shakespearean sonnet is. Following her monograph, The Afterlife of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, which was the first book-length study of the Sonnets’ reception (1598-2019), she has continued to explore how they resonate in contemporary culture, by looking back at the interpretative traditions that have grown up around them.
In a recent project funded by the Southlands Methodist Trust, entitled ‘Shakespeare’s Black Sonnets’, she worked with Prof. Duncan Salkeld and Dr. Candace Scarborough on a portfolio of work around the language of race in the Sonnets, which included Scarborough’s short dance film titled ‘blak mistry,’.
Jane has also recently published an essay on the interpretation of Shakespeare’s loneliness in the recent collection, Writing Early Modern Loneliness, edited by Hannah Yip and Thomas Clifton, which pays particular attention to the interpretation of Sonnet 29 (‘When in disgrace with Fortune and men’s eyes’) through the lens of early modern Petrarchism, nineteenth-century anxiety about queer Shakespeare, and the modern interpretation of loneliness during the Covid pandemic.
She is currently editing Shakespeare’s Sonnets for the new Cambridge Shakespeare Editions series.