James Harriman-Smith

Category: Shakespeare

  • 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.

  • 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 –…

  • Missed Chances

    Again, I’m going to start this blog-post with an apology. My latest lack of publications is the result of devoting all my spare time and energy to the writing of a great many applications for post-doctoral positions. Those same applications have, however, inspired this little text, so it’s not all bad news. I want to…