James Harriman-Smith

Category: Feeling

  • Magical Thinking

    I remember when I first told someone that I played the fantasy cardgame Magic: The Gathering. That was nearly a decade ago now, and the excruciating set of emotions I experienced then have faded, but I still don’t tell many people this. To the best of my knowledge, none of my colleagues know that I…

  • Orphan Black and General Sensibility

    Have you been watching Orphan Black? I have, and enjoying it immensely as a way to get away from writing up my PhD. Unfortunately, though, the fact that my thesis is all about performance makes it pretty much impossible to ignore my research completely when watching a TV series. Especially this one. I can’t help…

  • A wave o’th’sea

    My posts have been few and far between of late, as I am nearing the end of my thesis, and pouring my energies into making three years of thinking and reading presentable. I couldn’t, however, resist a little post about these lines from The Winter’s Tale. Florizel is watching Perdita. FLORIZEL When you do dance,…

  • Theobald’s Baobab Theatre

    Almost a decade ago now, I spent two months of my summer holidays teaching English in Madagascar as a volunteer for The Dodwell Trust. I worked in the capital Antananarivo, in the cattle town of Tsiromandidy and in Vatomandry on the eastern seaboard. Wherever I went, I met so many extraordinary people and learnt so…

  • An Article Comes Forth

    So, back in the mists of time, back before this blog and even back before the start of this thesis, I decided to read some writing by Madame de Staël. Everyone should do this. In my case, I read her Corinne, ou l’Italie, her De la littérature and her De l‘Allemagne. My interest in Shakespeare…

  • La Haine de Shakespeare

    There’s  a conference this December entitled ‘La haine de Shakespeare’, part of a larger research project at the Sorbonne on ‘La haine du théâtre’. After going to one of their colloques, I really wanted to take part myself, and was glad of what seemed like an ideal opportunity.

  • Monsters

    This post is so far out of the Christmas spirit that I’ve decided to put this warning at the head of it. Apologies. Continue only if you’re feeling Scroogish. Continuing my sideline of reading whatever roughly contemporary anecdotal accounts of acting and performance I find in secondhand bookshops (e.g. Sher’s, and Brook’s), I’ve just finished…

  • Johnson and Shakespeare

    Just a quick post this time to announce the I’ve been invited to speak at a conference in Pembroke College, Oxford, marking the 350th anniversary of Samuel Johnson’s edition of the plays of Shakespeare. The event will take place in August 2015, so – all being well – I should have finished writing my thesis…

  • Translation / Performance

    I am not good at German. I am painfully aware of this, because I can measure my ability in this language against my skill with French, and so tell, with depressing accuracy, that I have the level of a first-year undergraduate. This has been making life hard for me recently, as I decided to include…

  • Shakespeare’s Dog

    I stumbled across an amazing quotation from Heinrich Heine the other day, as I was busy preparing for a talk in Nice and, beyond that, the writing of my last chapter on how an actor’s Shakespeare was seen from abroad in the long eighteenth century.