James Harriman-Smith

Category: Eighteenth Century

  • Syncopation

    I’ve been meaning to write this post ever since I went to a seminar on Stein’s idea of ‘syncopation’ in her essay ‘Plays’, and have decided to do it now, even if my memory of what happened is fast fading. Actually, the question of the temporality of response is one that fascinates Stein, so perhaps…

  • Editors and Actors: Malone

    This is the final, brief and incomplete summary of an editor whose works I am studying for the first chapter of my thesis. It’s taken me a long time to get here, Malone’s 1790 edition of The Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare, since setting out from a summary of Rowe‘s attitudes to actors I…

  • Charity and the end of an actress

    Not too long ago, I took my family to the Ashmolean in Oxford, where I stumbled upon this remarkable painting (click to enlarge). Joshua Reynolds painted this image of Elizabeth Linley as Charity as part of a 1777 commission to provide designs for new glass in the chapel of New College, Oxford. This painting, only…

  • The Lion

    One reason why this blog has become a bit less regular of late is that I am supervising this term. That said, supervising students this term is also one reason for me to discover and rediscover a lot of new material for this blog. Hence this post, which is born out of a little seminar…

  • Carpets

    I have a document on my computer where I jot down ideas for blog posts. In this place, my thoughts about Benedict Cumberbatch, Love, Death, and talking about my research languished until recently. Now, I have just two topics left. One involves carpets, the other is about a Japanese anime film. For all those who…

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

    BSECS 2014 is next week, and I’ve finally got a draft of my paper together. As is becoming my habit, I recorded myself reading it as a way of measuring length and clarity, and now, finding myself with this recording, have decided to put it up as a blog post. Enjoy!   “The rubbish cast…

  • Editors and Actors: Capell

    Working on this edition nearly broke me. That’s an exaggeration, but not much of one. Starting out, things looked to be plain sailing, with a brief introduction and a relatively unadorned text to the plays. I spotted, though, a few footnotes directing me to the ‘notes’, which I dutifully called up from the bowels of…

  • The Contrivances

    Harry Carey’s The Contrivances has a problem: the severe lack of what I will call dramatic tension. Admittedly, as an afterpiece to be performed in a rowdy and perhaps intellectually satiated theatre, I suppose suspense is not an absolute requirement. Still, it would have been nice, not least because this plot is once more along…

  • The Non-Juror

    Colley Cibber’s The Non-Juror is a bit of an odd comedy. Nicholas Rowe’s prologue, however, gives the gist: Tonight, ye Whigs and Tories both be safe, Nor hope, at one another’s cost, to laugh: We mean to souse old Satan and the Pope; They’ve no relations here, nor friends we hope. To expand on this,…

  • Editors and Actors: Blair/Reid

    In order to look at this Scottish edition of Shakespeare, edited by Hugh Blair and John Reid, I had to take my first trip to the British Library. Even in this collection, the only version available was a 1753 London reprint of the original 1752 Edinburgh edition. It was all I needed to see, though,…