James Harriman-Smith

Category: Uncategorized

  • Some more about Saint Omer

    In late November 2014, a First Folio was discovered in the Bibliothèque d’Agglomeration Saint-Omer. I realise I’m a bit late to the party with a blog post on this extremely rare qnd exciting event, but, still,I hope what I have to say here about another of Saint-Omer’s Shakespearean connections remains of interest.

  • Curating Letourneur

    This is a bibliographical post. In the following table, I’m going to list the rough contents of all twenty volumes of Pierre Letourneur’s translation of Shakespeare into French. I am also going to provide a link to the digital copy of each volume on Google Books. To find out why I think this is important,…

  • Doing things with style

    I hesitate to admit this, but it’s quite rare for me to find an academic book that I enjoy reading. Maybe it’s because I’m picking the wrong authors, or maybe it’s because I always come to these volumes with such a utilitarian mindset that I make myself capable of taking pleasure in them. Sometimes, however,…

  • 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.

  • Completion?

    I recently had my a review session, combining – due to a bit of disorganisation – feedback on both the second and third years of my PhD. As part of the process, I had to submit a “plan for completion of the thesis”. I thought it would be worth posting it here, if only as…

  • Feeling Between the Lines: The Passions and Performance of Shakespeare

    Location: Reading Group in Performance, University of Cambridge This paper argues for the importance of studying the passions in both Shakespeare’s plays and in their eighteenth-century reception. More than isolated emotions, however, the passions must be understand in a performance context of sequential emotion connected through a specialised techniqe of transition.

  • 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.

  • 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…