I’ve said it before, and I will say it again: William Shakespeare is my favorite author. He’s the reason I took the career path I have, and had I finished my Ph.D, my dissertation would have been about him. As such, I sometimes get a book on the Bard of Avon that looks promising enough.
As such, I grabbed a book by Oxford University professor Emma Smith and what she had to say about plays I have read, enjoyed, and loved many times over.
Smith’s work focuses on twenty plays, many of them the bigger ones but with a handful of exceptions like The Comedy of Errors. What she is doing differently is, rather than interpret the works based on what they say and how these words might reflect on modern readers, but on what the plays don’t say. Her work here looks at Shakespeare’s life and times and what they might mean to the works. As much as we might like to think of Shakespeare as universal, Smith posits, he was still a product of his time, and his work should be considered that way.
But given what she has to say about what Shakespeare doesn’t, she is quick to point out a number of things that fall into that category, ideas that scholars have speculated about for ages, like whether or not Shakespeare was a closet Catholic or what he may have thought about the big political ideas and controversies of his age that other writers weren’t shy about sharing. She even points out how rare it is for Shakespeare to physically describe his characters, with the biggest notable exception being Falstaff in Henry IV Part 1, a play that goes out of its way to describe Falstaff as old and fat, especially fat.
Instead, Smith takes the twenty plays and writes what are, in effect, twenty 14-16 page stand-alone essays. That means looking into things like love in Taming of the Shrew, the purpose of plot in The Comedy of Errors, the nature of fate and free will in Macbeth, the experimental nature of plays like The Winter’s Tale and Measure for Measure, or even just positing how much or how little The Tempest is Shakespeare’s farewell to the stage and how much Prospero is or is not a reflection of either Shakespeare or playwriting itself.
True, I don’t think some of her thoughts are all that revolutionary. Yes, much of what passes in Merchant of Venice is about commerce when it comes to Shylock and Antonio, but Smith goes on to point out how much it also reflects on the plots of other characters engaged in things that are probably not intended to be like commerce like courtship and marriage. Likewise, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see Richard III dominates the play named after him, but Smith takes it a little further to discuss what that means for the potential reader.
Now, all things being equal, books like this are written more for the Shakespeare enthusiast, professional or otherwise. At least a little knowledge on Shakespeare’s work before reading This is Shakespeare is probably a good idea, but for someone like me, even if I found some of Smith’s ideas on the plays nothing new, I did like the way she wrote them up and the detail she put into her work. This is the sort of book you pick up and read at your own pace, with one chapter at a time at the reader’s leisure, skipping around at will. I dug it, but again, I think it will depend on the reader’s personal interest.
Grade: B+
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