Smith claims she wants the book to appeal to everyone: “Readers, theatregoers, students and all those who feel that they missed out on Shakespeare at some earlier point and are willing to have another pop at these extraordinary works.” To achieve this, she sets about slaughtering a whole herd of sacred cows, holding up for examination many of the pieties about Shakespeare that we are taught to observe at school. “Confession: I don’t really care what he might have meant, and nor should you,” she says at one point. Smith’s written voice, like that of her lectures, is disarmingly frank, refreshingly irreverent, full of pop culture, from Homer Simpson to Friends to screwball comedy. “There’s nothing more to say about the facts of Shakespeare’s own life, and vitality is a property of the works, not their long-dead author.” This, she is saying, is Shakespeare he is his plays. This is the power of her central thesis: we find Shakespeare not in speculative biopics or the reductive quibbling of academic exegesis, but rather in the work itself. What she is doing by conjuring up these unwritten books is subtly reminding you that her book is all of these and more. She might, she tells us, have composed a literary biography of Shakespeare (like we need another one of those), or a theatrical study of his work in performance, or a historical treatise exploring ideas of “Elizabethan succession politics, religion, social organisation and city life”. She summons the beautiful image of the ghost buildings and settlements revealed by the “long, dry summer” of 2018 to trace these works buried within her own book. In her epilogue, Smith imagines other books she might have written that are “present in the archaeology of this one”. Now Smith has turned 20 of her Approaching Shakespeare podcasts into a book, expanding upon and weaving together her original lectures to create This Is Shakespeare, already burnished with glowing praise from Hilary Mantel and James Shapiro. Smith’s written voice, like that of her lectures, is disarmingly frank, refreshingly irreverent, full of pop culture There was a lovely moment on the train up to London late last year when, taking my 10-year-old son to his first Shakespeare – Christopher Eccleston’s Macbeth at the Barbican – we shared an ear each of an Emma Smith podcast, and I felt as I always feel when I introduce someone to her work: as if I’m passing on a gift, one that simultaneously enchants and demystifies the work of our greatest literary genius. These lectures have since become a staple of my cultural life, essential preparation for encounters with the Bard in theatre and film, pressed eagerly on friends real and virtual, shamelessly cribbed from whenever I review a Shakespeare play on the radio. Like many, I regretted not applying myself more diligently to my studies, and so it felt like a second chance when, 10 years ago, Smith began to release podcasts of her undergraduate lectures online. She has since become one of our leading Shakespeare scholars, publishing a brilliant, exhaustive history of the First Folio in 2016. One of those whose lectures I studiously avoided 20 years ago was a relatively new employee of the university, Emma Smith, who must have been only a few years older than me. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of lectures I attended during my three years, too busy with the more serious business of propping up bars and pursuing romantic complications. The head of collections at Mount Stuart, Alice Martin, said: “In terms of literary discoveries, they do not come much bigger than a new first folio, and we are really excited that this has happened on Bute.Youth is wasted on the young and so, in my case, was undergraduate education. The discovery will form the focal point for a new education programme and will go on display from 7 April at Mount Stuart as part of an exhibition that will run until 30 October. I hope this anniversary year encourages people to reread the texts of his work.” But the written word and the first folio is central to our understanding of Shakespeare. Smith said: “When we think of Shakespeare we usually think of his plays being performed on stage. The Mount Stuart edition is unusual because it was bound in three volumes with many blank pages which would have been used for illustrations. It was at some point between these two dates that Mount Stuart acquired the book because it is mentioned in a catalogue of the library in 1896. Mount Stuart’s copy belonged to Isaac Reed, a well-connected literary editor working in London in the 18th century, Smith said.Ī letter from Reed shows he acquired it in 1786 and further records indicate it was sold after Reed’s death in 1807 to a “JW” for £38.Īfter this sale there are no public records of the folio and it was not included in Sidney Lee’s 1906 census of first folios.
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