James Harriman-Smith

Category: Feeling

  • 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.

  • The Shifting Point

    I read Peter Brook’s collection of essays some time ago, but – most unfairly – decided to write a post about John Barton first. This is not because Brook was any less interesting (if anything, he’s the opposite), but rather because of the usual lack of world and time this blog constantly suffers under.

  • 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.

  • John Barton, Playing Shakespeare

    About four or five months ago, I picked up John Barton’s Playing Shakespeare in one of Cambridge’s second-hand bookshops. It’s been sitting on various shelves ever since, but a recent long train journey gave me the time to sit down and read it. The book is based off a TV series of the same name…

  • 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 –…

  • Antony Sher, Beside Myself (2009)

    I bought Anthony Sher’s autobiography on a rainy day in Stratford-upon-Avon, and have just finished devouring it. What follows is shameless filleting of the text, a collection of Sher’s ideas about actors and acting that I found sufficiently interesting to refract them through my own prose. As this is a very anecdotic book, it seems…

  • A Stirling Conference (III)

    This wil be my last post, and will be just as egocentric as the last two. It will also deal with plenaries. Following on from de Grazia, the next eminent scholar to speak was Colin Burrow of All Souls, Oxford (charmingly mis-titled, All Scouts’ College). He spoke on ‘Shakespeare’s Authorities’, and made five “crazy” (his…

  • A Stirling Conference (II)

    Let me continue the tale of my Scottish exploits with a few words about my own panel. A four-person monstrosity wedged into a ninety-minute slot, where the usual frictions of spoken communication resulted in our running over into the break, to the point that there was only space for three questions, two of them to…