Spectator Books: what makes Shakespeare special?

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4.4 • 785 Ratings

🗓️ 22 May 2019

⏱️ 38 minutes

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Summary

In this week’s Spectator Books, Sam's guest is Emma Smith, Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Hertford College, Oxford, who’s talking about her new book This Is Shakespeare. What is it that makes Shakespeare special — and is it defensible that, as even in university curricula, we talk about Shakespeare apart from and above the whole of the rest of literature? How did he think about genre? Why is Act Four always a bit boring? Is the Tempest an autumnal masterpiece or the thin work of a writer of dwindling powers? And how filthy is A Midsummer Night’s Dream?

Presented by Sam Leith.

Spectator Books is a series of literary interviews and discussions on the latest releases in the world of publishing, from poetry through to physics. Presented by Sam Leith, The Spectator's Literary Editor. Hear past episodes of Spectator Books here.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Spectator Radio. If you'd like to subscribe to The Spectator, you can get 12 issues for £12
0:05.2	£12, as well as a £20 £20,000, Amazon Voucher. Just go to spectator.com.com. Hello and welcome to the
0:19.5	Spectator Books podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary edge of The Spectator,
0:23.1	and this week I'm very pleased to be joined by Emma Smith, who is the Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Oxford,
0:29.4	and has written a new book called This Is Shakespeare, which is out imminently from Pelican Books.
0:35.1	Emma, welcome. Now, there seems to be a sort of very Shakespearean paradox
0:40.2	almost immediately, because you've given your book this extremely indicative title,
0:43.7	This Is Shakespeare. And yet it's a book actually about the indeterminacy of Shakespeare,
0:48.3	isn't it? That's absolutely right. And in fact, I try to have a go at saying,
0:53.6	maybe we should turn Shakespeare
0:54.9	from a noun into a verb and to think that this is Shakespeare of my title is actually about
1:00.5	an approach to the works rather than the works as monumental. But you're absolutely right. There
1:04.5	is a kind of paradox in there. And I'm sort of trying to undo that sense that Shakespeare's
1:10.5	on a pedestal.
1:11.6	Yeah, I mean, you use the word gapiness to describe the kind of distinctive quality of Shakespeare.
1:18.8	Could you say what do you mean by gapiness?
1:21.7	So by gapiness, I mean all kinds of indeterminacy in Shakespeare,
1:25.6	and that goes from relatively small-scale texture,
1:30.2	plays, all plays of this period, but Shakespeare particularly are not telling us anything other
1:36.2	than what the characters say. So we don't know anything about how they say it that isn't
1:40.8	encoded in the speech. We don't know anything about the actions they're taking. So there are
1:44.1	relatively few stage directions in Shakespeare, and there are no descriptive stage directions at all.
	...

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