James Harriman-Smith

Category: Thesis

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Promptbooks and Publication

    As is no doubt evident from my last few posts, I’ve been looking into Francis Gentleman and his work on John Bell’s 1774 edition of Shakespeare quite a lot. I’m now writing my ideas up, and – as ever in this process – there’s quite a lot that won’t fit into my chapter. This includes…

  • Francis Gentleman & Bell’s Shakespeare: A Short Bibliography

    This is a new kind of post. I wrote to the mailing list C18-L a few weeks back asking for details of books and articles about the Irish actor, orator, teacher, and critic Francis Gentleman (1728-1784) and his work as the editor of John Bell’s 1774 edition of Shakespeare. I got a few, very useful…

  • Adventures in the BNF

    I spend a lot of time in libraries, but have – shockingly – never really written about them on this blog. This post will change that, as I’ve spent the last week familiarising myself with the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (or, as everyone calls it, the BNF, pronounced ‘bay-enn-eff’), and have all sorts of things…

  • 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…