This Is Shakespeare, Emma Smith
This Is Shakespeare, Emma Smith
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This Is Shakespeare

Author: Emma Smith

Narrator: Emma Smith

Unabridged: 9 hr 54 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 03/31/2020

Synopsis

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.

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.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Rachel on January 08, 2021

This Is Shakespeare is an essay collection by Shakespeare scholar and Oxford lecturer Emma Smith, whose work I first encountered on her excellent podcast Approaching Shakespeare. In each lecture-turned-podcast-episode she dissects a different play through the lens of a very specific question ("what......more

Goodreads review by Eleanor on May 20, 2019

Smith is probably best known as the academic whose recorded lectures form the podcast series Approaching Shakespeare, which you can get from iTunes. (I went to them live, as an undergrad, which is saying something because no English students went to lectures after about third week.) Her book’s thesi......more

Goodreads review by Joseph on June 21, 2020

When I took English Literature classes at school, studying a Shakespeare play was de rigueur. And I can’t say I disliked that. Quite the contrary. I took a (worryingly?) nerdish pleasure in comparing different editions of Julius Caesar and Macbeth, reading every last footnote, looking up difficult e......more

Goodreads review by Iris on June 16, 2021

The premise that Shakespeare's plays don't convey messages rather they ask questions isn't groundbreaking but here it's clearly articulated and wonderfully narrated by the author. It's definitely not an overview—there are no synopses—instead for about 20 of his plays, though she name checks all of t......more

Goodreads review by Paula on October 11, 2020

Brilliant.A must read.......more

Quotes

Advance Praise from the U.K.:

“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)

“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 Guardian (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 Daily Telegraph (London)

“I like this book very much. It explains accessibly, with learning lightly worn, why Shakespeare retains such a hold in our culture. Smith has done an exemplary job of restoring the greatest of English writers to his own time, and explaining why he then speaks to ours . . . An invigorating examination of the pre-eminence of the most revered figure of English letters.”
—The Times

“Quirky, brilliant . . . what’s most bracing about Smith’s book is the way she sees the plays as almost organic: not only contradictory but alive”
—Spectator

“Intriguing . . . Smith argues that the defining characteristic of Shakespeare’s plays is their ‘permissive gappiness.’ This must also surely be the first book on Shakespeare to use the slang term ‘woke.’”
—Evening Standard

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