Did Shakespeare Actually Believe in Anything? | Emma Smith on Othello and Timon of Athens

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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 been neglected in England but embraced by Marx, Brecht, and German Romantic thinkers. Is Timon unfinished—or just radically experimental? What does it mean to imagine Shakespeare not as a solitary genius, but as a collaborative playwright working inside a theatrical system?

Along the way, we discuss:

Iago’s language, silence, and the meaning of “I am not what I am”

The handkerchief, contradictory histories, and narrative instability in Othello

Words as magic, rhetoric as spell-casting, and Shakespearean speech acts

Race, identity, and the limits of character psychology

Dual authorship, collaboration, and the myth of Shakespearean genius

Why Timon of Athens still feels strange, unfinished, and modern

How political, structural readings differ from psychological ones

Shakespeare, biography, and why we want authors to “believe in something”

Intro: 00:00

Opening general Shakespeare discussion: 18:29

Timon of Athens: 31:54

Othello: 1:06:30