This Is Shakespeare

By: Emma Smith

Narrated by: Emma Smith

An electrifying new study that investigates the challenges of the Bard's inconsistencies and flaws, and focuses on revealing - not resolving - the ambiguities of the plays and their changing topicality

A genius and prophet whose timeless works encapsulate the human condition like no other. A writer who surpassed his contemporaries in vision, originality, and literary mastery. A man who wrote like an angel, putting it all so much better than anyone else. Is this Shakespeare? Well, sort of. But it doesn't tell us the whole truth. So much of what we say about Shakespeare is either not true, or just not relevant.

In This Is Shakespeare, Emma Smith - an intellectually, theatrically, and ethically exciting writer - takes us into a world of politicking and copycatting, as we watch Shakespeare emulating the blockbusters of Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Kyd (the Spielberg and Tarantino of their day), flirting with and skirting around the cutthroat issues of succession politics, religious upheaval, and technological change. Smith writes in strikingly modern ways about individual agency, privacy, politics, celebrity, and sex. Instead of offering the answers, the Shakespeare she reveals poses awkward questions, always inviting the reader to ponder ambiguities.

©2020 Emma Smith (P)2020 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

"I admire the freshness and attack of her writing, the passion and curiosity that light up the page." (Hilary Mantel, author of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies)

"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)

"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)

A pentimento approach

Challenging, entertaining, revelatory, there author first dazzled us with a dazzling review of the opus, including hundreds of ideas and thoughts that never visited my limited gray matter; then, explicitly, she invites us to do what she has been doing all along, muddle through the place as best we can to challenge, not only ourselves, but the works. It isn’t so much that she says they are living, breathing things, but that they can be read under a multitude of influences that bend and reflect their meaning in such a way that we will find ourselves and our current situation at least touched on in the texts. She is a marvelous combination of writer, professor, comic, And mentor. Should you read this book, you will find matter you have not encountered before. If it strikes you, as it did me, you will find it, intriguing and delightful.

Excellent and accessible listen

Really nice collection of essentially stand-alone essays on many Shakespeare plays. Accessible and insightful. Geared towards an intellectually curious general audience, but refreshing for the more specialized reader as well.

--

Listening to this as someone not normally exposed to literary criticism, I found this very useful, though I do have mixed feelings about some of the discussion. It's insightful, gives brief surveys of what other critics have thought, and is written in an occasionally colloquial way, to good effect.

As for the mixed feelings, the following kind of thing is a sore point for me, and while I'll give it a disproportionate amount of space here, I don't mean to take away from an excellent book.

Emma Smith works in references to Freud, to the idea of shame versus guilt cultures, and even to what she calls the God particle. I don't think any of this belongs in the discussion, and it leads to what I think are the shakiest parts of her analysis. What Freud wrote in 1900 is not the state of the art today, and it didn't do any useful work here. As Smith herself acknowledges, the shame versus guilt culture distinction is not well supported, and while I can see how it suggested itself, I don't think it added anything to understanding Anthony and Cleopatra. The "God particle" stuff got in as a humorous aside, so I don't want to make too much of it, but it was clear that Smith didn't actually know anything about Higgs bosons, or how really irritating physicists find that term for them.

Punching up the conversation that way is pretty common these days, and not just in literary criticism. You need to be very careful about this if you're doing it in support of a serious argument, since you're introducing a dependency on ongoing research. Scientific ideas get disproven all the time, which, after all, is the way science is supposed to work.

Which isn't to say that scientists themselves are always scrupulous about this. A lot of papers that have been retracted continue to be cited. It's the same problem in both cases. There are a lot of zombies walking around.