James Harriman-Smith

Category: Idols

  • 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.

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Queen and My Thesis

    This idea for a post came to me during a run. Around the twelfth kilometre, as the endorphins were kicking in and the village of Coton disappearing behind me, Queen’s 1991 hit, The Show Must Go On came up on my playlist, and it struck me that the lyrics of the song – recounting Freddie…

  • Marian Hobson-Jeanneret and My Thesis

    Following on from my post on Anne Barton (née Righter), this post is dedicated to Marian Hobson-Jeanneret (née Hobson), and, more particularly, her book The Object of Art: The Theory of Illusion in Eighteenth-Century France, published in 1982. Like Barton’s Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play, this book grew out of Hobson-Jeanneret’s thesis, so…

  • Anne Barton and My Thesis

    I came across Anne Barton’s Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play on a nicely named ‘local interest’ shelf at the Chaucer Head bookshop, Stratford-upon-Avon. The title immediately leapt out at me, as it offered a way of formulating my own thoughts on Shakespeare and drama in the eighteenth-century: the phrase ‘the idea of’ neatly…