Elizabeth Scott-Baumann is Reader in Early Modern Literature at King's College London. Her first monograph, Forms of Engagement: Women, Poetry, and Culture 1640-1680 (2013), explored how seventeenth-century women poets' uses of different poetic forms drew from the culture around them. With Hannah Crawforth, she has collaborated extensively on Shakespeare's poems, co-editing a collection of essays (The Sonnets: State of Play) and commissioning poets to respond to the Sonnets (for the Shakespeare400 commemorations in 2016).

Emma Smith is Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Hertford College, Oxford. Her work focuses on the reception of Shakespeare in print, performance and criticism, and she has written for students, enthusiasts, theatregoers and scholars. She has co-edited The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Tragedy (Cambridge, 2010), Marlowe in Context (Cambridge, 2013) and The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare's First Folio (Cambridge, 2016). For undergraduate readers, she wrote The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare (Cambridge, 2007) and The Cambridge Shakespeare Guide (Cambridge, 2012). Her work on the First Folio includes The Making of the First Folio (Bodleian Library, 2016) and Shakespeare's First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book (Oxford, 2016). This Is Shakespeare (Penguin, 2019) and Portable Magic: A History of Books and Their Readers (Penguin, 2022) address a wide readership. She is an associate scholar with the Royal Shakespeare Company and a regular speaker in schools, literary festivals, theatres, libraries and book groups, as well as in universities. She has contributed to radio and TV programmes and written extensively for newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, the Telegraph, the Observer and the Guardian.