Dr Pauline Kiernan is a distinguished Shakespeare scholar and literary critic as well as an awarded-winning playwright and screenwriter. She has held lectureships and fellowships at the Universities of Oxford and Reading and is the author of the acclaimed Shakespeare's Theory of Drama and of Staging Shakespeare at the New Globe and Screenwriting They Can't Resist. She was appointed Leverhulme Research Fellow at Shakespeare's Globe on Bankside in its first years, and gives talks on Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama in the UK, Europe and US. She's currently working on a major project about Shakespeare, an experimental biography of Keats and her first novel.