Emma Smith > Quotes

“Bibliomania’ was typically characterized by an immoderate, even ruinous attachment to books acquired through purchase or theft, with a strong suggestion that these books were to serve an inert and possessive collection, rather than for reading or other direct use.”
― Emma Smith, Portable Magic: A History of Books and their Readers

“Shakespeare is complex, like living, not technically and crackably difficult, like crosswords or changing the time on the cooker”
― Emma Smith, This Is Shakespeare

“Grief fills the room up of my absent child, Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me, Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words, Remembers me of all his gracious parts, Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form; Then have I reason to be fond of grief. (3.4.93–8)”
― Emma Smith, This Is Shakespeare

“The epilogue is a distinctly Shakespearean genre: a concluding moment when the play is both brought together and dissolved, a paradox of completion and dispersal.”
― Emma Smith, This Is Shakespeare

“You may recall – perhaps you’ve experienced this in the theatre – the bewilderingly oblique way Shakespeare tends to begin his plays, via marginal characters whom we struggle to place as they recount or anticipate some major narrative event in a conversation that begins in the middle, leaving us flailing (beginning Shakespeare’s plays at their beginning is not always the easiest place to start). Not so in Richard III. The opening stage direction in the first printed edition is ‘Enter Richard, Duke of Gloucester, solus’ – meaning alone – making it absolutely clear that not only does he open the play, he does so, uniquely, in soliloquy. He begins, that’s to say, by addressing the audience. From the outset, we are his creatures.”
― Emma Smith, This Is Shakespeare

“The rhetoric of this sequence converges to the third couplet, where the parallel structures and the use of the same word – ‘me’ – as the rhyme enact the same collapse of difference that the play develops elsewhere. Linguistic and rhetorical doubling, through parallel syntax and through the heavy use of rhyme, show us the way that Shakespeare’s language is a microcosm of his wider dramatic art: what happens at the level of a sentence or speech often miniaturizes a wider theme or debate.”
― Emma Smith, This Is Shakespeare

“But Don John merely represents a more general mistrust in the play – he is not its sole source. After all, his is a tiny part (no sniggering at the back): he has only 4 per cent of the play’s lines. He does, however, symbolize something larger than himself. And perhaps this is why he is given the identity of bastard. His own malevolent illegitimacy might be thought a kind of proof that women can – and some do – sleep with men not their husbands. Don John the bastard is himself the very certification to stabilize the play’s paranoia about women’s faithlessness. His status as a bastard thus confirms the play’s worst fears.”
― emma smith, This Is Shakespeare

“The English version of this term, putting the cart before the horse, suggests haste – and there is indeed a kind of premature quality to this play that is so shaped by youthful impatience and hurry, with its adolescent protagonists rushing towards their destiny, heedless of Friar Lawrence’s caution: ‘Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow’ (2.5.15).
Lots of elements of this play are about coming too soon, and the sexual pun is somehow unavoidable: Romeo and Juliet is shaped as the structural equivalent of premature ejaculation. If, as many theorists have conjectured, the pleasure we take in narrative is somehow paced like sexual pleasure – enjoying anticipation, foreplay and climax – then this play needs to learn to take its time.”
― Emma Smith, This Is Shakespeare

“The Comedy of Errors has been consistently under-appreciated, I’d argue, in part because we don’t know how to appreciate plot. Contemporary culture, the study and performance of Shakespeare, and our own intrinsic narcissism tend to encourage the view that character is destiny. Errors challenges this humanistic view of the world by emphasizing, in ways that anticipate the experience of modernity, the alienation of a mechanical universe. Think Charlie Chaplin on the accelerating assembly line in Modern Times (1936), and you have something of the comic terror captured in The Comedy of Errors.”
― Emma Smith, This Is Shakespeare

“Even though – perhaps because – we are in no doubt about his ruthless self-interest, Richard establishes an immediate alliance from the outset. This intimacy with the audience will be carefully managed through a stream of asides and sardonic remarks, where only we know his true meaning, keeping us from forming any real attachment to any other character. The very title of the play seems to have succumbed to his charms and to endorse his ambitions. Richard, Duke of Gloucester, doesn’t actually become King Richard III until Act 4, but his play has no doubt he will get there: from the opening he is the king-in-waiting.”
― Emma Smith, This Is Shakespeare