James Harriman-Smith

Category: Eighteenth Century

  • Shakespeare’s Ambassador

    I’m going to be speaking soon at a conference in Nice, entitled Musical and Theatrical Circulation in the Long Eighteenth Century. As is traditional now, I’ll post here my proposal, and, all being well, should have a recording of my rehearsal to put up in the nearish future.

  • Thou art a scholar, speak to it… (III)

    As is I have done not once, but twice before, I’m uploading a recording of myself speaking a seminar paper. This is a rough version of what I will be delivering on Monday 3rd November 2014, from 4pm in the Board Room of the English Faculty at Cambridge. As the file is large and hypothesis…

  • La Haine du Théâtre

    I spent three very enjoyable days at the Sorbonne last week at a conference held as part of the Haine du théâtre (The Hatred of the Theatre) project. I was going to write up my thoughts immediately afterwards, but than came down with some horrible digestive disease, hence this delayed and probably less accurate account.…

  • Garrick’s Scale of Emotions

    There’s a famous passage in Diderot’s Paradoxe sur le comédien, where he describes Garrick’s ability to portray a sequence of emotions. I’m going to be using it in a forthcoming presentation, and, as part of my preparation have prepared a little visualisation of the passage in question.

  • The Abstract and (not so) Brief Chronicles of Lichtenberg

    It’s been a rather painful process, but I have finally read Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’s Briefe aus England in their original German. Although the lack of available translations forced my hand, I’m glad that I spent some time on this: not only has my German improved because of it, but I also – I suspect –…

  • Promptbooks and Publication

    As is no doubt evident from my last few posts, I’ve been looking into Francis Gentleman and his work on John Bell’s 1774 edition of Shakespeare quite a lot. I’m now writing my ideas up, and – as ever in this process – there’s quite a lot that won’t fit into my chapter. This includes…

  • Francis Gentleman & Bell’s Shakespeare: A Short Bibliography

    This is a new kind of post. I wrote to the mailing list C18-L a few weeks back asking for details of books and articles about the Irish actor, orator, teacher, and critic Francis Gentleman (1728-1784) and his work as the editor of John Bell’s 1774 edition of Shakespeare. I got a few, very useful…

  • On having your pencil ready

    I have been reading Joseph Roach‘s Cities of the Dead recently. It’s amazing, and I’m learning a great deal. While there will probably be a blog post dedicated to the text in the near(ish) future, I wanted to write today about something else instead. It all begins with an innocuous pair of sentences about halfway…

  • Commemorating Shakespeare

    To join in the celebrations of Shakespeare’s birthday, here is a repost of something I wrote in 2012 for the Royal Shakesepare Company as part of their ‘Happy Birthday Shakespeare’ collection. The date of an author’s death is always more important than that of his birth. This is not to say that we shouldn’t be…

  • Millennium Actress (Sennen Joyû)

    Without a doubt, and for reasons that will soon become clear, Satoshi Kon’s 2001 masterpiece is one of my favourite animated films. The story is relatively simple: we watch a film journalist, Genya Tachibana, and his unnamed cameraman interview the famous retired actress Chiyoko Fujiwara about her life whilst a series of earthquakes shake the…