James Harriman-Smith

Category: Thesis

  • What are you working on?

    “What’s your research about?” “Err…” I think this is a fairly common situation for someone doing a PhD, and I know for sure that it’s something I’ve struggled with. This blog has a ‘big picture‘ page, which, in quite a lot of words, gives you a breakdown of what I (currently) want my thesis to…

  • Thou art a scholar, speak to it… (II)

    BSECS 2014 is next week, and I’ve finally got a draft of my paper together. As is becoming my habit, I recorded myself reading it as a way of measuring length and clarity, and now, finding myself with this recording, have decided to put it up as a blog post. Enjoy!   “The rubbish cast…

  • Editors and Actors: Capell

    Working on this edition nearly broke me. That’s an exaggeration, but not much of one. Starting out, things looked to be plain sailing, with a brief introduction and a relatively unadorned text to the plays. I spotted, though, a few footnotes directing me to the ‘notes’, which I dutifully called up from the bowels of…

  • The Contrivances

    Harry Carey’s The Contrivances has a problem: the severe lack of what I will call dramatic tension. Admittedly, as an afterpiece to be performed in a rowdy and perhaps intellectually satiated theatre, I suppose suspense is not an absolute requirement. Still, it would have been nice, not least because this plot is once more along…

  • The Non-Juror

    Colley Cibber’s The Non-Juror is a bit of an odd comedy. Nicholas Rowe’s prologue, however, gives the gist: Tonight, ye Whigs and Tories both be safe, Nor hope, at one another’s cost, to laugh: We mean to souse old Satan and the Pope; They’ve no relations here, nor friends we hope. To expand on this,…

  • Editors and Actors: Blair/Reid

    In order to look at this Scottish edition of Shakespeare, edited by Hugh Blair and John Reid, I had to take my first trip to the British Library. Even in this collection, the only version available was a 1753 London reprint of the original 1752 Edinburgh edition. It was all I needed to see, though,…

  • Editors and Actors: Steevens

    George Steevens’s edition of twenty plays of Shakespeare, being all those works published during the playwright’s lifetime, has a clear, and wonderfully scholarly, aim: disgusted at the variously exaggerated and insufficient efforts at collating Shakespeare’s plays so far, Steevens aspires simply to have “collected materials for future artists”, by making the quartos accessible to a…

  • Small pricks to their subsequent volumes…

    My supervisor asked me to write an overview of my thesis as it currently stands. I thought it would be a useful text to post here, under a title drawn from a rambling speech by Nestor in Troilus and Cressida: “in such indexes, although small pricks / To their subsequent volumes, there is seen /…

  • 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…