James Harriman-Smith

Category: From my PhD

  • Editors and Actors: Johnson

    Of all the editors I am reading for my first chapter, Samuel Johnson both excites and terrifies me the most. There’s just something so distinctive about his way of writing: the preface to his edition, first published in 1765, is a far more remarkable document than anything Warburton, Hanmer, Theobald or even Pope could manage.…

  • Editors and Actors: Warburton

    I’ve emerged from reading the (roughly) 2 395 footnotes Warburton affixes to his edition of Shakespeare’s plays, and once more have a few observations about how this editor uses the idea of that actor. Like Pope, whom he praises, and like Hanmer, whom he criticises, Warburton is very antitheatrical, and doesn’t mince his words. As…

  • Editors and Actors: Hanmer

    After going through Theobald’s hundreds of footnotes, Hanmer’s relatively unannotated text came – I must admit – as a bit of a relief. This doesn’t mean that there isn’t a lot to study here, but rather than this edition has to be studied in a slightly different way. That said, I did, as usual, start…

  • Editors and Actors: Theobald

    I’ve returned to Shakespeare’s editors, continuing the groundwork to chapter one begun at the end of summer. Having gone through Rowe and Pope, it was now the turn of Theobald. The UL had the first volume of his 1733 edition, but the rest I had to squint at on the HathiTrust website. It’s taken me…

  • The Chaplet

    Shorn of its music and most likely spectacular stage business and sets, Boyce’s “musical entertainment” took me five minutes to read. The Chaplet represents the vicissitudes of two couples: Damon and Laura, Palaemon and Pastora. “Scene: a Grove”, and everything is very pastoral indeed. The play opens with Damon abandoning his love Laura to go…

  • On Love

    Now this is a topic I’ve been thinking about a lot recently, since everything I read to do with acting seems to have something to do with it. Sticotti, about whom I just spoke at the Early Modern French seminar, argues, for instance, that both actors and authors need to have felt (or be feeling)…

  • Reprinting lost books…

    NOTE: This a reposting of something I wrote a while back, but as the website it is hosted on will soon be closing, I wished (aptly enough) to preserve it here. I’m afraid that the pictures will only last until the host website goes down, since I haven’t been able to extract them easily. Of…

  • The Suspicious Husband

    I’d been looking forward to reading Dr Benjamin Hoadly’s comedy, and I wasn’t disappointed. The plot goes something like this: Bellamy loves Jacintha, the daughter of Mr and Mrs Strictland; Mr Strictland is the jealous husband and does all he can to stop Jacintha marrrying Bellamy; meanwhile, Frankly loves Clarinda, whom he saw at Bath…

  • Thou art a scholar; speak to it…

    Time for something slightly different. In order to prepare for my upcoming presentation on Diderot and theories of acting, I recorded myself reading a draft version of my paper. As well as informing me that I need to cut about 800 words (a matter of some concern), this experiment with Audacity also left me with…

  • The Mock Doctor

    This afterpiece, again by Fielding, is a translation-adaptation of Molière’s Le médecin malgré lui. I don’t know the Molière version well enough to give a good comparison, so will just make observations on this text while the memory of it is fresh. The plot is easy to relate: Gregory, a woodman, is forever getting into…