The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare

Cambridge Introductions to Literature

by Emma Smith

This lively and innovative introduction to Shakespeare promotes active engagement with the plays, rather than recycling factual information. Covering a range of texts, it is divided into seven subject-based chapters: Character; Performance; Texts; Language; Structure; Sources and History, and it does not assume any prior knowledge. Instead, it develops ways of thinking and provides the reader with resources for independent research through the 'Where next?' sections at the end of each chapter. The book draws on scholarship without being overwhelmed by it, and unlike other introductory guides to Shakespeare it emphasizes that there is space for new and fresh thinking by students and readers, even on the most-studied and familiar plays.

Genres: Shakespeare, Nonfiction, Reference, Criticism

178 pages, Hardcover

First published March 8, 2007

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

Emma Smith is Professor of Shakespeare Studies at the University of Oxford. She has lectured widely in the UK and beyond on the First Folio and on Shakespeare and early modern drama. Her research interests include the methodology of writing about theatre, and developing analogies between cinema, film theory and early modern performance. Her recent publications include Macbeth: Language and Writing (2013), The Cambridge Shakespeare Guide (Cambridge, 2012) and Shakespeare's First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book (2016).

Reviews

[Hannah]

doing a quick brushup on the primary sources and handbooks/companions/guides before pre-phd summer draws to a close lol

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

Emma Smith's Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare (2007) provides a subject-based analysis of key issues in Shakespeare studies:

> Character
> Performance
> Texts
> Language
> Structure
> Sources
> History.

Smith's approach is discursive, at times informal, and therefore an easy read. By taking a subject-based approach, Smith deploys several perspectives of literary criticism, from character criticism, psychoanalysis, performance theory and adaptation studies, textual theory, structuralism (structural linguistics), and genre studies, as well as bringing in perspectives on gender theory and feminism.

Rather than review the entirety of the book (which deserves more space than is allowed), a look in detail of two or three examples of Smith's analysis gives an idea of her style and content.

🔍 Example: Character Criticism in Action

Smith, in her opening chapter on ‘Character’, seeks different approaches to the analysis of character in Hamlet (1600–1) and Othello (1604). Progressively, she moves through a feature seen in the Morality plays of Renaissance Drama (1500–75). Remarking that many of Shakespeare’s characters have an afterlife that canonises them, like Juliet and her balcony in Verona, she notes that Shakespeare uses short snippets of conversation to provide backstory to some character which does not serve to advance plot but fills out character into something fuller we can recognize.

Alexander Pope’s assertion that ‘every single character in Shakespeare is as much an individual, as those in life itself’ expresses the claims for psychological verisimilitude often made for Shakespeare’s powers of characterisation. [...] Using the language of emotional empathy—identification, sympathy, recognition—literary criticism has often seemed to teach that fully to engage with the plays we have to reach out a hand to their characters.

— Smith, Emma, The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), ‘Chapter 1: Character: Shakespeare’s realism?’, p.3.

This ‘filling in’ of character is part of the playwright’s scheme to evoke ‘reader response’, or audience response. A few incidental comments are all that is needed. Lady Macbeth’s reference to her childlessness (I.vii.54–9) is such a random comment, which has garnered much attention in literary criticism of Macbeth (1605–6). Such incidental snippets, seemingly at odds with the action at the time, serve to round out character realism.

Equally there are characters in plays which are hardly charactered and serve merely as plot devices. Such is Mariana in Measure for Measure (1604), whose role is to fulfil a bed-trick, the device staged by the ‘absent’ Duke of Vienna, disguised as a friar, to consummate a marriage already sealed by private vows with Angelo, his temporary proxy, whom he is testing in his ‘absence’, who denies the marriage. Mariana, with hardly any lines and a late entrance into the action, is not filled out as a character except by circumstances. Similarly, though a little more rounded—partly because he is a twin, partly by an earlier scene with his friend—Sebastian in Twelfth Night (1601), lost brother of Viola, whom we have been following since the beginning in her disguised role as Cesario, page, or man-servant to the lady Olivia, is brought on in the final act to substitute for his sister in a meeting with Olivia, where she has fallen in love with ‘him’. In a rapid pairing up at the resolution, Sebastian is revealed for what he is, twin to his sister Viola, in order to resolve the marriage plot. Not quite a caricature, not quite the archetype lover (he has hardly known the lady he is marrying for more than a few minutes), Sebastian is as much a plot device as he is a character.

Smith covers several aspects of character study:

• Juliet's afterlife—her statue and balcony in Verona;
• Shakespeare's realism of character—Hamlet, Lady Macbeth;
• Shakespeare's 'unreal' characters—uncharacterised character as plot device;
• Reading Shakespeare's characters on the page— Knights versus Bradley;
• Embodying Shakespeare's characters on the stage—character interpretation;
• Doubling on the early modern stage—thematic roles as well as logistical function;
• Writing for particular actors—Burbage and Kempe;
• Falstaff: character as individual or type—both;
• Naming and individuality—a different look at Lear;
• Characters as individuals or as inter-relationships—real characters, or one character and representation of them in other characters—pyschomachia;
• Character: interior or exterior?
• Character: where next—a significant reading list attached on character study.

👥 Hamlet and Other Characters as Aspects of his Personality

Smith’s postulation is that Hamlet, seeker of solitude and prevaricating avenger of his father’s murder, is mirrored in several respects by other characters in the play, of similar age and similar circumstances. Hamlet is dominated by his father’s Ghost, who repeatedly appears to urge on his revenge. Laertes also loses his father—by Hamlet’s hand; an accident, but his fault, nonetheless—and seeks redress. Laertes, in his first scene, is equally dominated by his father, though Polonius’ apostrophe on how to behave appropriately while he is away at university is well-meaning and wise. Fortinbras, likewise of similar age, and likewise with an illustrious father, has to repair his father’s reputation, who has lost Norwegian lands to Denmark in his time.

Thus we might say that the dominance of Hamlet in Hamlet is aided by the fact that Laertes and Fortinbras also represent aspects of Hamlet’s own dilemma, alternative responses to the experience of early manhood and the loss of a parent.

— Ibid. Smith, The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare, ‘Chapter 1: Character: Characters as individuals or as inter-relationships’, p.16.

Are these different aspects of Hamlet’s own persona?

We might think of this as another kind of doubling, psychic rather than actual, in which this time it is the characters who are doubled up. This sense that maybe a number of the characters represent attributes of Hamlet, or echoes of him—or, put another way, that they occupy overlapping psychic space—links Shakespeare’s plays suggestively with the legacy of medieval theatre. (Ibid. p.16).

🎭 The Morality Play and Psychomachia

Plays such as Mankind (c.1470) or Everyman (c.1520) presented characters whose very names clearly indicated that they were not complete and autonomous human beings. When, for example, ‘Everyman’ is abandoned by his fair-weather friends ‘Fellowship’, ‘Kindred’, and ‘Goods’, and only ‘Knowledge’ will accompany him on his final journey to death, we know that these figures are personifications or externalised symbols of an inner struggle rather than ‘real’ characters: the technical term for this is psychomachia.
Certain Shakespearean characters may, then, be in a similar relationship, representing complementary traits or symbolising an internal conflict split into different protagonists. (Ibid. p.16).

👀 Othello and Psychomachia

Smith proceeds to discuss the historically baffling motivation that Iago has for destroying his general’s sanity, marriage and life. Coleridge, she notes, famously suggested that a search for such motivation equated to ‘the motive-hunting of a motiveless malignity’—and this conclusion has occurred to us when we read the play. We adduce—from the lack of evidence—that Iago is a representation of the devil incarnate, perhaps an archetypal villain, or stock character, who needs no motivation expounded within the play because he is not a fully-formed character. He lacks a moral compass; or, at least, suspends any moral barometer to effect his evil plan; or, in Freudian psychoanalytical terms, suspends his super-ego, the conscience, the critical moralising force which is arbitrated by the ego—the conscious mind, the organized, realistic part that mediates between the desires of the id— the unconscious mind, the instinctual drives—and the super-ego. He knows it is immoral, what he does, but he not only does not care, he relishes in it. Or his brain is not fully functioning. He must be the devil, or a psychopath?

But perhaps these alternatives are little better than each other? We remain confounded.

Smith postulates another answer:

There is, however, an alternative way to conceptualise him: less as a self-contained person and more as a sort of inner voice, or a mechanism, an engine of the plot. In prompting Othello to question his wife’s fidelity, Iago functions as the nagging doubt that is part of Othello’s own precarious identity as a black man in a white world. [P]erhaps here [Shakespeare] is showing us a version of psychomachia, as Othello’s trust in Desdemona is battling with his doubts as externalised and represented in Iago. (Ibid., p.17).

Iago is therefore ‘an externalised representation of an interior psychic dynamic’, as Hamlet’s generational cohorts might be.

There is a certain comfort in this interpretation: Iago is not a ‘real’ character at all, and while he might represent the devil, the devil is not a real character, but a symbol of evil personified. This is marginally more reassuring than a convoluted psychoanalytical interpretation. It does, however, raise concerns of race and place as a minority subject in a foreign world, and the spectre of ‘otherness’.

Emma Smith’s character criticism involves historicism (Renaissance morality plays), interpretation of performance (Iago as archetype), and psychoanalysis (aspects of Jungian ‘persona’, ‘archetype’ and ‘collective psyche’)—providing a fresh perspective on the literary theory of character criticism.

Smith also refers to reader response theory in her chapter on character in The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare (2007). Prompted by A.C. Bradley’s discussion of obscure issues in his section on Macbeth (1605–6) in Shakespearean Tragedy (1904), such as Lady Macbeth’s reference to her childlessness (I.vii.54–9), which prompted a response from L.C. Knights in his essay ‘How many children had Lady Macbeth?’, Smith notes:

The play is withholding information which we need to uncover. [...] This again puts the onus on us as readers, performers, or viewers to do that work the play does not do for us — mentally to supply the unwritten scenes in which the answers to our questions are provided. (Ibid. p.6).

This discussion between L.C. Knights in his response to Bradley’s discussion is an example of subjective reader-response theory. Knights concludes that Bradley’s implications of a character history are not pertinent to the analysis of the play, instead seeing the several unnatural comments of characters in the play as part of the linguistic tone which Shakespeare uses in much of the play’s language to emphasize the unnaturalness of the situation in Scotland. (Ibid. pp.6–7).

🔍 Example: Performance Studies in Action

🎬 Directorial Interpretations

One of the most salient moments in drama is Isabella’s silence at the end of Measure for Measure (1604). We are aware that Isabella’s reaction could take multiple forms in performance, since there are no words—dialogic or didascalic, speech or stage instructions—which indicate her response. For this reason, and the general tone of the play towards women, critics have labelled the play a ‘dark comedy’ or ‘problem comedy’.

Emma Smith, who discusses this character’s silence as aporia—a figure of speech in which the speaker expresses or purports to be in doubt about a question, or a point of logical contradiction in a text where reading finds itself at an impasse because the meaning is opaque or undecidable—itemises differing interpretations in productions and the implications for the status of women in Renaissance Vienna:

• Sexual property: RSC, 1978, Barry Kyle (dir.)—Paola Dionisetti as Isabella—did not take the Duke’s proffered hand, instead, her veil fallen to the floor, which she was unable or unwilling to pick up, implied that she could not go back to what she was before, that there was little choice in but accepting his offer, intimating that all the women of the play including her had few choices and were seen as sexual objects;
• Romantic acceptance: BBC, 1979, Desmond Davis (dir.)— Kate Nelligan as Isabella—happily accepts the Duke in a romantic ending;
• Reluctant consent: RSC, 1983, Adrian Noble (dir.)—Juliet Stevenson as Isabella—pauses long, but takes his hand, implying that in the patriarchal world of Vienna, women have few choices;
• Happy acceptance: RSC, 1991, Trevor Nunn (dir.)—set in Freud’s turn-of-the-century Vienna, highlighting the play’s concentration on sex, repression, coercion and punishment, it ends surprisingly with the romantic conclusion of marriage all round;
• Emotional confusion: Cheek by Jowl, 1994, Declan Donnellan (dir.)—Isabella slaps the Duke’s face, then kisses him, then turns sharply away in tears;
• Betrayal: Tobacco Factory Bristol, 2001, Andrew Hilton (dir.)—Lucy Black as Isabella—looks bleakly at the Duke as though she has been betrayed;
• Sexual innuendo: Complicité, 2004, Simon McBurney (dir.)—the Duke indicates a double bed upstage, a sexual threat to Isabella’s self-appointed virginity.

Smith concludes:

Because Isabella’s silence, and the interpretation directors place upon it, is the final image of the play, it has a significant effect on the whole tenor of Measure for Measure. It thus shapes wider critical debates about the play, particularly on the question of its genre. [W]e can see that these different stage interpretations work differently with the notion of what is problematic—i.e. uncomic, uncomfortable, unresolved—about the play.

— Ibid. Smith, The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare, ‘Chapter 2: Performance: Measure for Measure: staging silence’, pp.24–6.

Trevor Nunn’s happy ending erases the categorisation of ‘problem play’, positioning it among the romantic comedies. Declan Donnellan’s ambivalent response accentuates, rather than dissolves, the generic awkwardness.

Approaching Shakespeare’s plays through performance, therefore, can significantly reformulate our notion of the ‘text’ to which we refer and defer. It’s a sacred disciplinary cow of English studies that we support our interpretations with reference to the text: close reading has survived all manner of theoretical developments to remain the corner stone of almost all methodologies in the study of literature. [...] But that these texts are plays [...] challenge this foundational assumption. Reading drama, reading Shakespeare, is different from reading other types of writing, since drama’s first life is arguably not on the page.

— Ibid. p.26.

🔍 Example: Textual Criticism in Action: Editing as Interpretation

🟰 Editorial Decisions: Simple Example

One simple example of the editorial decision process is the debate, for instance, of whether to retain a meaningless word in a speech which may represent the character of the speaker, or gloss it with an interpretation, with a familiar and meaningful word which is faithful to the overall context. The example given by Emma Smith in The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare is the use of the word ‘scamels’ in the speech by Caliban in The Tempest (1612):

I prithee let me bring thee where Crabs grow; and I with my long nayles will digge thee pig-nuts; show thee a Iayes nest, and instruct thee how to snare the nimble Marmazet: I’le bring thee to clustering Philbirts, and sometimes I’le get thee young Scamels from the Rocke: Wilt thou goe with me! (II.ii.164–9).

Smith quotes the above as prose; in the Arden edition (Vaughan and Vaughan, 2011/2019), the text is lineated as verse, without capitals, and with modernised spelling, i.e. ‘nails’ for ‘nayles’, ‘jay’s’ for ‘Iayes’, ‘marmoset’ for ‘Marmazet’, ‘filberts’ for ‘philibirts’. But the word ‘scamels’ is unknown.

One editor changes this otherwise unknown word with unknown meaning to ‘seamews’, meaning a kind of seagull, assuming a compositor or printing error. Another leaves it in place to indicate the obscurity of the language of the speaker whose first language may be different to that of English, perhaps a creole or foreign language. The editorial choice marginally influences our own interpretation of the phrase and speech, reflecting either a normalisation of foreignness concomitant with that of colonialisation, or an acceptance of the strangeness of a native language and culture which has different forms of expression than our own.

— Ibid. Smith, The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare, ‘Chapter 3: Texts: Editing as interpretation’, p.52.

🔍 Example: Structural Linguistics in Action

🪜 Emma Smith notes the linguistic shifts that demarcate the division of genres in such plays where the overall genre (say, history) switches to another genre (say, comedy).

The opening of 1 Henry IV sees King Henry and his lords discussing the troubles which beset the land in the division of the nobles. The ‘ordered linguistic sequence’ between them belies the urgency implied by phrases such as ‘Find we a time for frighted peace to pant’ and ‘breathe short-winded accents’ (I.i.2–3), delivered in measured blank verse. Conversely, as we switch location from court to tavern, the shift of rhythm is enunciated in short, interrupted speeches in prose between Hal and Falstaff, giving a sense of ‘easy-going and boisterous friendship, in which shared wordplay serves to establish the rapport between the characters’. Formal verse figures the formality of court and the seriousness of state; informal prose signifies the relaxed, jovial, intimate company of friends.

The linguistic contrast between the first two scenes of the play conveys the dynamic – between public and private, between political and domestic, between verse and prose – which the Prince must negotiate during the course of the play.

— Ibid. Smith, The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare, ‘Chapter 4: Language: Linguistic shifts: 1 Henry IV, p.83.Ibid. Smith, The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare, ‘Chapter 4: Language: Linguistic shifts: 1 Henry IV, p.83.

Thus, Shakespeare signals the transition from formality to informality, the impersonal to the personal, in the switch between verse and prose.

And thus Emma Smith provides a highly readable and instructive series of subject-based essays on Shakespeare criticism which employs several literary perspectives and critical theories across the genres, with some delightfully salient observations that at times superbly articulate one's own impressions and at others are entirely fresh insights, signals of someone who has read Shakespeare's works in depth as well as intimating a broad appreciation of the wide body and history of Shakespeare criticism.

[Benjamin Fasching-Gray · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not a tour of the plays; an overview of what interests Shakespeare scholars: language, structure... all the lit crit stuff... character, how performance can change the meaning. This was some real escapism for me. Thinking about Shakespeare wrestling with his sources or writing for certain actors took me much further from my day-to-day than any genre fiction could.

[Debbie Baker · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was quite good, but it is misbilled as a "Introduction to Shakespeare."

Emma Smith is very smart and insightful here. Far less will be gotten out of it if the reader doesn't have a familiarity with a broad range of Shakespeare's plays.

Even more unfortunate however is that many who are well past the need of "introductions" will skip it. But it is not the familiar rehash of Shakespeare's life, times, and theater. It is full of fresh insights.

[Marina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Packed full of information and critical analysis but extremely readable too. Scholarly but accessible.

[Salivan · Rating 4 out of 5]

ترجمه‌ی "علمی و فرهنگی" واقعا رو مخ بود.

[Meri Elena · Rating 3 out of 5]

As an into to reading and understanding Shakespeare, this book did a pretty good job. It was a bit too optimistic in its claim that it required no prior knowledge, discussing details of plays as if everybody has read them. There was also a tendency towards long, confusing sentences where the subject got lost in a labyrinth of intervening clauses. For the most part, though, the writing was fairly clear and the ideas were interesting and informative.

[Emylie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I started the book before I had read very many plays so I struggled to keep up with all of the references. I started over at the end of the school year and found it to be a much easier and enjoyable read.

[Michael P. · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good intro for those looking for a lightweight bulk but are not afraid to be intellectually challenged.

[Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

A brilliant read! Short, concise and incredibly interesting. While any Shakespeare enthusiast will know quite a bit of what is mentioned here already, it serves the purpose of an introduction very well. The chapters 'History' and 'Texts' were particularly good. The former chapter was especially useful in reminding you - through focusing on contemporary ideas of gender and race (to name just a few) - just how crucial it is to be aware of other texts surrounding Shakespeare, and not to think of him as some timeless bard, conveying universal ideas inextricable from what was going on around him. 'Texts' is especially worth reading, if only to realise more concretely how much Shakespeare relied on other sources. The examples explored by Smith elicited some 'ummmmm' moments, if you know what I mean... (probably not, try that noise from high pitch to low pitch, then it makes more sense).

Overall, if you're a Shakespeare enthusiast, you'll probably still learn things from this, despite the fact that it's only an introduction. It's full of nuggets. Golden ones, often. Enjoy them. Enjoy the nuggets.