Taking my time to wake up last Bank Holiday Monday it was serendipitous to be tuned into Radio 4. I probably lost and regained consciousness once or twice while it became apparent the radio was discussing the 'canon', Chaucer, Shakespeare and, as I tried to focus on it, I realized this must be Prof. Emma promoting her new book. By the time Andrew Marr wound up the chat, the book had elbowed its way to priority ordering status. It arrived yesterday morning and I arrived at the end of the Epilogue, on page 324, at 6.20 this evening. Recommendations don't come much higher than that.More than once in the early chapters Prof. Smith points out that Shakespeare's plays ask more questions than they answer but she soon gets out of the habit. She adds that this makes them 'wonderfully unsuited to the exam system'.
I hope that is not due to any recent prescriptiveness in Eng Lit education. One would have thought that plenty of questions to discuss might make the plays rich material for essays and that Emma's day job setting out such questions and then ascertaining how well her students have answered them would be the more rewarding for it. She certainly makes a very good job herself of adjusting some long-established assumptions about the plays she covers here. Many of us weren't as averse to Eng Lit exams as Shakespeare's schoolboy,
with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school.
From her breezy introduction, through chapters devoted to individual plays, Emma clearly and entertainingly offers a valuable range of insights and approaches, many of them challenging what we might have thought we knew, sometimes examining how Shakespeare had adapted from his source material, what it meant to his contemporary audience and how so much of it has remained relevant to us, more than 400 years later. It takes one kind of genius to do such a thing quite so compellingly and another kind of highly talented interpreter to set out her thoughts quite so lucidly.
We needn't find The Taming of the Shrew as difficult as recent progress in gender politics appears to have made it, it all depends 'how you look at it'.
Everything happens too quickly in Romeo & Juliet and if it hadn't, they might have been alright. If the scenario in Much Ado is a bit like the final episode of Friends, in which relationships with mates are sidelined in favour of pairing off with opposite sex partners, or Cliff's Goodbye Sam, Hello Samantha (for me), R&J is Too Much, Too Young, and too hasty. In further comparisons with characters from our own time, Emma parallels Falstaff with Homer Simpson.
A Midsummer Night's Dream is x-rated, highly sexually charged and most unsuitable as children's first introduction to Shakespeare, as it was ours in 1971.
I'm glad to see the role of the poet is seen as apolitical in Julius Caesar but am unsure if Tony Harrison, Sean O'Brien or Carol Ann Duffy would agree.
Richmond's role in Richard III as 'deus ex machina' would be a corny device in anybody else's hands but, of course, in Shakepeare's it is ironic and so absolutely fine.
Othello is about the disempowered status of a number of outsiders; Macbeth might not be Lady Macbeth's fault or even his own and after a succinct review of critical reaction to Lear, we are told it replaced Hamlet as the most profound of the plays after the experiences of Passchendaele, Auschwitz and Hiroshima. Not for me, it didn't. It is when you get to Hamlet that you reach a new level.
There are already two tremendous essay questions suggested here that might be taken together, or not. Why hasn't Hamlet succeeded his father as king, and why are Protestants so concerned about Purgatory (maybe some other time but they are worth finding answers to). But having originally said that 'there's nothing more to say about the facts of Shakespeare's own life', Emma adjusts it to,
Shakespeare biography continues to fascinate us as we try to invent an emotional life,
which are compatible ideas but likely to conflict when she allows herself to be drawn into the close, and occassionally interchanged, names of the play and the boy born to Ann Hathaway that died in 1596.
Emma does well to elude that one by not eliding Hamlet and Hamnet on the grounds that it
may be to underestimate the inventive, creative powers of the dramatist on the one hand, and to overestimate the claims of confessional emotional writing on the other.
That's fine but she doesn't pursue her Twitter contribution from three years ago when she joined in with the Birthplace Trust authorities and others in attacking the Curtis-Green 'twins theory' (that Hamnet and Judith were fathered by Hamnet Sadler) even though it was a fresh contribution to what she has said there's nothing more to say about and she allows that the subject 'continues to fascinate'. No, of course there is no 'evidence'. It's a theory. There are four things in play- a story about Amleth taken from Saxo Grammaticus that is the source of Hamlet and a Stratford man called Hamnet Sadler that the boy was probably named after for whatever reason.
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In her treatment of The Tempest, Emma refers to the idea, from Gary Taylor, that after his success in the 1590's, Shakespeare's career was in decline in the 1600's. The Tempest, the argument goes, is a re-working of old themes and I'm sure that such a thing happens at a certain age for some artists. One either runs out of ideas, 'gets bored' with one's own art or starts repeating oneself. Thus the later collaborations, with John Fletcher or anybody else is not them getting in on his coat-tails but Shakespeare attaching himself to them where we might treat ourselves to another pop music analogy and remember Marc Bolan claiming to be the Godfather of punk and appearing on the same bill as the Damned.
It happens. And Emma does one of my favourites, The Winter's Tale, no favours by showing how close Shakespeare comes to not retrieving its ending from its tragic beginning.
Having even been re-acquainted with Wimsatt and Beardsley's 'intentional fallacy' and been told it is still in fashion, which came as some surprise, This is Shakespeare, despite having a title not unlike such books as Shakespeare Revealed, which at least wasn't the one that said he was really Sir Henry Neville because he spoke French, settles on the plays as shifting, many-splendoured things, which they are, and not the man.
She says that, apart from Falstaff being fat, we know nothing about what Shakespeare's characters look like. That must be because they look like whichever actor plays the part, the playwright's job being to provide the text and the play being the production on the stage the producer makes out of it. Thomas Hardy can make Eustacia Vye as sexy as he likes in a novel but Shakespeare can't do that for Desdemona or Juliet.
And thus it is texts we are dealing with, and she reads them as much as she sees them in performance which isn't wise because that's not what they were intended for. He was a theatre man concerned with selling seats or standing space in his playspace where plays were performed, not read from books at home.
All of which (almost throughout) only demonstrates what a well-informed, coherent and insightful guide to the ongoing study of Shakespeare Emma Smith is.
If you are only going to read one book about Shakespeare's plays, this is the latest and most highly recommended. I knew what to do for a day and a half, which was to read it, but now I've read it I almost know the same emptiness that so many of the characters encounter. I'll either have to read it again or go back 40 years and treat myself to writing a B minus essay.