James Harriman-Smith

Category: Blog

  • What I Did

    My second book was published earlier this week. It’s called What Would Garrick Do? Or, Acting Lessons from the Eighteenth Century. The long title is deliberate: it has excellent search-engine optimization and recalls the titles of many of the three-hundred-year-old books I drew on to write it. When speaking about the publication, though, I tend…

  • Learning to Lose

    Like a lot of people (although mainly men) who were born in the late 80s, I grew up playing videogames. I played my first games on a BBC Micro that my mum brought home from work, then on a PC, and then on an N64 and Playstation 2 before going to university, and just playing…

  • Strictly and the Sentimental

    During the lockdowns of the Covid-19 pandemic, I got into Strictly Come Dancing. In this show, fifteen or so celebrities pair up with professional dancers. Every pair dances once or (in the latter rounds) twice each week before a panel of four judges. Those judges score each pair; members of the public also vote by…

  • On Time and Teaching

    I’m writing this blog post in the middle of graduation season. Seeing all the students finish their time at university, and talking with them about the tumultuous last few years and their plans for the future has made me muse a little about how they (and I) have experienced time. Students talk about time in…

  • No.

    In most seminars for my third-year module on Restoration and eighteenth-century drama, we do some close reading. In the spring of 2021, we were studying George Farquhar’s The Beaux’ Stratagem together, and I found myself trying to explain just how good this play is, by getting students to see how much he’s managed to pack…

  • Giving a Talk Online

    Two days ago, I gave a talk about my book for the Oxford Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture seminar. I think it went quite well. In response to some requests from attendees, and my own desire to try and remember things, this post records how I went about preparing to present a 40-minute presentation on theatre…

  • The Images

    Inside the cover of my book, you will find five black-and-white images. They are: A page from James Burgh’s Art of Speaking (1761), which shows how he marked up the passions to be found in a conversation between Shylock and Tubal. Two images showing Richard Steele’s attempts in 1775 to write down exactly how Hamlet’s…

  • The Beginnings

    I’m trying to think of where my book began, and realizing very swiftly the obvious truth that no book has a single point of origin. Better then to talk about a book’s beginnings, and this short post will discuss two of them, and from two very different points in time. The earlist beginning I can…

  • The Index

    One of the greatest pleasures of producing a book has to be the opportunity of discovering how others respond to your ideas. Such pleasures begin long before the book is published, of course, with, in my case, so many coffees and conversations and conference papers. But the process of publication does give some particularly interesting…

  • The Cover Image

    I really like the cover of my book. I wish I knew the designer who put it together. I’d like to thank her or him for the way they lined up the foot of Garrick-as-Jaffeir so that it fits over the ‘f’ and the ‘o’ of ‘Performance; how they made the pedestal’s edge align with…