This Is Shakespeare

About the Author EMMA SMITH is professor of Shakespeare Studies at Oxford University. She has published widely on Shakespeare and other early dramatists. She lives in Oxford, England. Product Description "Brilliantly illuminating ... The best introduction to Shakespeare's plays that I've read, perhaps the best book on Shakespeare, full stop. Emma Smith's voice is disarmingly frank, refreshingly irreverent, full of pop culture Her reading of the plays is dazzling, her original research totally convincing." ---Alex Preston, The Observer (London) "I admire the freshness and attack of Smith's writing, the passion and curiosity that light up the page." "Thought-provoking Anyone who doesn't understand what all the fuss is about should read This Is Shakespeare. Smith-who is no enemy of fun: her book fizzes with jokes-is celebrating a Shakespeare who talks to the present. She does it all with such a light touch you barely notice how much you're learning." ---Colin Burrow, The Guardlan (London) "Smith is perhaps the preeminent Shakespeare communicator working today. This Is Shakespeare cuts through the accumulated crust of `schoolroom platitudes,' cant, and literary piety in order to dust Shakespeare off and see him as he is, was, and might be." ---Tim Smith-Laing, The Dally Telegraph (London) "If I were asked to recommend one guide for readers keen on discovering what's at stake in Shakespeare's plays, This Is Shakespeare would be it." ---James Shapiro, author of The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606 Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. INTRODUCTION Why should you read a book about Shakespeare? Because he is a literary genius and prophet whose works speak to'more, they encapsulate'the human condition. Because he presents timeless values of tolerance and humanity. Because his writing is technically brilliant and endlessly verbally inventive. Because he put it all so much better than anyone else. Nope. That's not why; not at all. Sure, that's what we always say about Shakespeare, but it doesn't really get to the truth about the value of these works for the twenty-first century. The Shakespeare in this book is more questioning and ambiguous, more specific to the historical circumstances of his own time, more unexpectedly relevant to ours. Lots of what we trot out about Shakespeare and iambic pentameter and the divine right of kings and 'merrie England' and his enormous vocabulary blah blah blah is just not true, and just not important. They are the critical equivalent of 'dead-catting' in a meeting or negotiation (placing a dead cat on the table to divert attention from more tricky or substantive issues). They deflect us from investigating the artistic and ideological implications of Shakespeare's silences, inconsistencies and, above all, the sheer and permissive gappiness of his drama. That gappy quality is so crucial to my approach that I want to outline it here. Shakespeare's plays are incomplete, woven of what's said and what's unsaid, with holes in between. This is true at the most mundane level: what do Hamlet, or Viola, or Brutus look like? A novelist would probably tell us; Shakespeare the dramatist does not. That means that the clues to personality that we might expect from a novel, or from a fi lm, are not there. If The Taming of the Shrew's Katherine looks vulnerable, or ballsy, or beautiful, that makes a difference to our interpretation of this most ambiguous of plays, and if her imposed husband Petruchio is attractive, or boorish, or nervous, that too has an impact. Fantasy casting'where you imagine a particular modern actor in a role'is a very interesting game to play with Shakespeare's plays: if you cast action-guy Mel Gibson as Hamlet (as Franco Zeffirelli did in 1990), you immediately produce a particular take on the play, which is quite different from casting Michelle Terry (at Shakespeare's Globe in London in 2018), or Benedict Cumberbatch (directed by Lyndsey Turner, 2015). That w