If you’d like to support the channel (gold bars, gemstones, rare earth rocks accepted) 👉 www.patreon.com/c/SolomonSmith/membership In this long-form literary conversation, Emma Smith—Shakespeare scholar at Oxford (Hertford College)—joins us for a broad discussion of Shakespeare, with a special focus on Othello and Timon of Athens. The conversation explores why Iago has been imbued with such psychological complexity, how Othello is often denied the same interpretive generosity, and what race, rhetoric, and language do inside Shakespeare’s plays. We look at magic, words as world-making, jealousy, authorship, and power, and ask whether Othello might be read as a magician? We also turn to Timon of Athens: its survival through the First Folio, its collaborative authorship, its absence of women and family structures, and why the play has  ...