Speaking of Shakespeare

SoS #23 | Emma Smith: This Is Shakespeare

November 23, 2021 Thomas Dabbs Season 2 Episode 4
Speaking of Shakespeare
SoS #23 | Emma Smith: This Is Shakespeare
Show Notes Transcript

[See SEGMENTS below]. Audio podcast at: https://speakingofshakespeare.buzzsprout.com.
 Thomas Dabbs speaks with Emma Smith of Hertford College, Oxford, speaks about her book, 'This is Shakespeare', and her work as a scholar and theatre consultant.

00:00:00 - Intro
00:01:20 - Emma’s book: ‘This is Shakespeare’
00:13:06 - The humanities and public outreach
00:15:34 - Why the humanities?
00:19:35 - Upcoming projects: Nashe, Merry Wives, Books as Portable Magic
00:27:05 - Book history and the future of the book.
00:31:09 - The Elizabethan Top Ten
00:34:00 - First Folio of Shakespeare
00:43:22 - Approaching Shakespeare: Outreach and RSC theatre work
00:47:28 - Christopher Marlowe
00:52:45 - ‘Twelfth Night’
00:57:36 - Background: love of literature vs professional literary studies 
01:02:32 - Closing remarks

[Disclaimer: This is an AI transcription generated by a machine to make this audio podcast text searchable by other machines and thus bring it to the attention of more real human beings. It is in no way meant to be a formal publication or even to be read by humans. Therefore the errors herein should not reflect poorly upon the speakers in this podcast.]

Thomas Dabbs  0:05  
This is speaking of Shakespeare, conversations about things Shakespearean. I'm Thomas dabbs, broadcasting from Aoyama Gakuin University in central Tokyo. This talk is with Emma Smith, professor of English at Hertford College, Oxford, and will focus on her many contributions to Shakespearean scholarship and education. If you are joining us via a podcast and wish to watch this program, we are available on YouTube under the search term speaking of Shakespeare. This series is funded with institutional support from Aoyama Gakuin University. And with the help of a generous grant from the Japan Society for the Promotion of science.

Hello, Emma Smith, how are you? 

Emma Smith  1:01  
I'm really well, Tom, how are you? 

Thomas Dabbs
I'm doing great. There's so much I want to lead with but I, I noticed in other programs that sometimes I get a little bit too chummy at first and sometimes people want to hear what you're doing right off the bat. So let's do that. And most recently for you is "This is Shakespeare." That's your most recent book out there. And I'm going to ask you about that in just a moment. But what what I want to start with is where I see you going, one of the elements of your career, is what I want to call reflexivity. And in all the best ways in the sense that you look at the Shakespearean period, you're very interested in consumer culture and things that were popular and what Shakespeare did for outreach, how Shakespeare marketed himself, you see them as actively  working in a company a real company, and then it reflects back on to your own work and other work that you've done, where you do your own outreach, to spread the word to people beyond the halls of academia. And so you have this combination of rigorous scholarship, the most rigorous type of scholarship: archival, and then you will turn around. And I'm a little jealous of this, actually, because this is excellent the way you do it, and speak, I don't want to call it, you know, to people outside the halls of academia who are not been trained in the critical language. And I just wanted to express my appreciation for the your, your ability to do that it's an art. But let's move on to "This is Shakespeare," and what readers could expect from that book.

Emma Smith
Well, thanks. thanks, Tom. Yeah, so this is Shakespeare is probably the book that's most, you know, fulfills that kind of summary. It's actually based on my undergraduate lectures. And it's got 20 shortish chapters each on a single play. And overall, I'm trying to say something which is completely standard actually, in the in academic discourse, which is that there are multiple interpretations always available, that none of us knows or should even try to look for, you know, what Shakespeare meant, or, you know, a single meaning to pin down these plays, what we should be enjoying and looking for, and sort of introducing other people to is the kind of permissiveness the openness, the openess to different interpretations. And that that helps with some contemporary discussions about things like casting of Shakespeare's plays, which is quite controversial. I think it can help with those discussions, if we get away from a sense that there was an original sort of fixed version that we are somehow spoiling or straying away from. So that's what the book does. I tried to write in accessibly without being patronizing, partly because I'm saying, one of the things academics tend to do and of course, we do this is to suggest, really, to understand these things you need to know a lot, you know, you really you need to do your, you know, you need to do your time, you need to you know, have the chops to do it. You need to know this complicated stuff about textual transmission, or about the kind of religious upheavals of Shakespeare's time or something. And of course, that's all illuminating and it's sort of vital material, but it can be a kind of gatekeeping and I've tried to sort of push push beyond that a bit, a bit in the book, and it's drawn a lot from I suppose the thing that I have most enjoyed about Shakespeare in my career is the fact that there are Shakespeareans outside the academy in a way that there aren't really, I don't know, students of, let's think, well, you know, you can even think what the alternative would be. But there are, you know, deeply knowledgeable or engaged experience, particularly in the theater, but in school in schools, you know, the lots of teachers of Shakespeare, there's a an international as we, as we see from this conversation as an international interest in Shakespeare. The this is an enormously generative and generous conversation, because there's so many people in it, and it's, it's great to have a toe in it really? Yeah, I've never been the kind of academic who would be the world expert in one thing. Yeah. Because I probably if I were that I would just, I would just make it up. Who would know? And I don't know who I would talk who I would talk with. If you're the world's expert, you're always in, you're always broadcasting and and helping other people understand what you understand. But you're not really can't really be so much in conversation. And conversation seems to me the heart of the discipline that we're in, as I understand it. 

Thomas Dabbs  6:16  
Yeah. Well, I'm thinking of many examples, but one that comes to the forefront right now being in Stratford on Ontario, not in Stratford upon Avon. But in Ontario, where they have a very big Shakespeare sort of, I wouldn't call it a cottage industry, they have theaters in the town, and I was there for a conference and I was at a restaurant and spoke to this couple. Were at a cafe, and they had driven in from Detroit, which is not that far away. And he was the owner of a car dealership, and had no real formal training in Shakespeare, but he and his wife, they admitted that they come frequently. And this is, you know, it's a beautiful town into summer, and so forth. And those are the types of people you do want to reach. And there's so many of them out there. And in your book, you talk about gappyness, and you did a podcast with Barbara Bowgave in for the Folger library. So I don't want to spend too much time on that because you go into some depth about that concept. But the gappyness, in Shakespeare, where we're not, we're Shakespeare, Shakespearean plays are not finished, in a sense that there are things that we can bring to them to complete. And if you could give us a couple of examples of, of gappyness in Shakespeare. 

Emma Smith  7:36  
I think gappyness was the way I was trying to make a space for us in these in these plays. And I was trying to conceptualize the the opening open endedness. Often, literally, often, it's the endings of Shakespeare's plays, that we're not completely sure what to do with. In the book, I talk a lot about the ending of The Taming of the Shrew, where Catherine, who's past the shrew of the title, she may or may not have been tamed by her husband Petruchio, she delivers a long speech about women's obligation to their husbands. And she ends by saying that she will put her hand under her husband's foot, and there's no stage direction that says, you know, how does she deliver this? How is that ironic is that submissive, and then he has probably one of the most famous lines, thanks to the musical in Shakespeare, come on, and Kiss Me, Kate. And most editors of the play will put in a stage direction that says they kiss. But there's no stage direction in Shakespeare's text. And that just that's the gap that leaves the gap for us to think what what what happens at the end? And what's, how does that make the play? Speak to our own world at this point? Yeah, so often, happiness is a sort of consequence of, of seeing these plays, perhaps a little bit more as a script. Once you start to use the word script, you don't expect that everything every meaning of the play will will will inherent in the words on the page. But we've, we've been a bit reluctant to think of Shakespeare's plays as scripts, because I guess we were trained early on, perhaps by the First Folio in 1623, to think of them as things as literary works to read. 

Thomas Dabbs  9:30  
Yeah. Well, we're going to talk about the First Folio in a bit. The Japanese playwright from the you know, Kabuki era, the famous Zeami, did the great cultural service of writing down precisely how to do every play. And as such, the performance of a no player Kabuki play or whatnot follows some extraordinarily strict guidelines. That's part of the art you cannot deviate from the original production, and Shakespeare, nothing of the sort is absolutely every encounter with Shakespeare. And I don't want to, in any way depreciate the art of zombie, but the, but the opening and what you're calling the gaps between what you get as a script, and then how a creative a director and an actor, and a group can interact with this script and bring their own creative creativity to the fore. And we as readers also can, can do the same thing, we can insert what we want, and that, you know, you really have to be serious to go to a Noh drama, but Shakespearean productions, even in Tokyo, just extremely popular. And, of course, you know, in the UK and throughout North America, all through the world, I'm thinking of I just taught Midsummer Night's Dream and use that film, where and, you know, Bottom gets wind poured on his head in the film version that I used. And that's not in the script, but somebody made that up, and he sort of publicly humiliated. And the director brought that in, and it works, I think, and it reminds me of the Reinisch poured on the head of the grave digger Yorick or whatever back. So it is a sort of, like Shakespearean illusion. But if there's nothing in the script about it, and those things were okay, 

Emma Smith  11:19  
Those things are great, I think, actually, I mean, I think,particularly in performance in film or in theatre directors need to, you know, make make, make the make the script mean, in our own context, that seems to be what they're doing. So I'm a bit of a sort of Shakespeare heretic, I actually very much like things that are cut. I think cutting is a very helpful way to make these plays move. I don't feel horrified by that. Oh, of course, there are things you know, by definition, there are things that you leave out and there are there, you know, there are losses in that, but there is there are gains as well. So, yeah, I think people when I started to work with theatre companies, which is one of the really interesting things that I sometimes get the opportunity to do, I think I go into the rehearsal room, and people think, oh, you know, they think that I'm gonna come in and say this is, you know, the, every single word of this is absolutely vital and meaningful, and you must do it all. And in fact, I'm saying I would, yeah, that leave that, you know, that's fine. You know, we can just cut we can cut that that's absolutely fine. So, I do think that Shakespeare, one of the words I use in the book is permissive. And I think, partly because most of us encounter Shakespeare, first in educational settings where we have to get whatever approximates to the right answer. We don't tend to think of the Shakespeare being permissive. We think of it being actually quite regimented. But I think it really is, and that's where the life that's where the life of it is. 

Thomas Dabbs  12:50  
Yeah. And what a wonderful thing for you to do to, to do the outreach, I guess, is what we call it now the outreach and making contact with the public. This is the it's not a trend, I think it's something that's going to set in, when I think of what you're doing, I think of the wonderful Westin Wing and the newer, newer wing of the Bodleian and I joked with Pipp Willcox, in a prior conversation about the first time me as a 22 year old graduate student, entered the body and feeling incredibly intimidated. Right. And once I got in, everybody was just wonderful. But up front, it was very officious. 

Emma Smith  13:32  
And so we're trying to sort of turn turn those things sort of a bit more.

Turn them a bit, make them a bit more public facing, you know, that the new bit, the new sort of the architecture of the new building in the Bodleian Library and Oxford sort of really tries to embody that, as you're saying, you know, it's got a big open entrance hall with lots of free exhibitions and a cafe. And it's really, you know, trying to say, rather than there's that very wonderful secret sense of being admitted into a secret staircase. But that was only for the initiates, wasn't it? And I think, and certainly in a place like Oxford, I mean, my career has been almost entirely in the University of Oxford. And I've been very fortunate to do that. And Oxford is a wonderful place to be it's a place with a in the, in the British imagination with a very long and some would say, sort of continuing history of sort of elitism that social rather than intellectual. And so, you know, we've got worked, we've got ongoing work to do, which is to, you know, open up the resources of the university to the to a wider world, you know, our universities are all public in the UK, we have to have a kind of public facing mission in a way and we've got to work to get a broader range of, in our case, still mostly young people, it's young people who come to be undergraduates, we don't have a very mixed age range, but getting those people from from different backgrounds in the I'd still rather class stratified British system, a divided education system. Yeah, it's a big job of work. So I do think that that being turned, you know, outward, particularly for the Humanities is a really important. You know, it's really important, you know, my University developed, you know, one of the vaccines, that's wonderful for the university, but it becomes a bit more difficult sometimes in a way to say, Well, why are you fiddling about with Shakespeare? Yeah, that's important stuff to do. But you know that, and I don't know that the this probably goes off topic. But I think some of the really sort of skeptical, properly skeptical work about those old things we used to say about the humanities, you know, they make us better people, they develop empathy and those things, I can see why those were problems. And they were, that was a kind of lazy thinking. But I think in the course of that, we haven't always, certainly, in my context, made a very good case for what the, you know, what the humanities do do. And instead, were sort of trying to say, oh, people who do humanities degrees still get jobs in banking. And that's great. You know, probably some of them do. But that can't be, you know, that can't be the only the only role. So that's a long way of saying, Yeah, you're the car dealer who you met in Stratford. I think that that's a great reminder that people do want to know about the stuff that we are finding out and the ideas that we're developing, and they're, you know, perfectly capable, sometimes we underestimate how, how able they are to sort of get on board with that.

Thomas Dabbs  16:41  
Yeah, well, some years ago, I and I still am, but some years ago, I wrote on this and if you take the reverse view, right, and you say, Okay, let's just take it out. Let's just not teach Shakespeare at Harvard, let's not teach Shakespeare at the, you know, another university that is at Harvard. Does the status of the university go on? Do people feel better about the university and I think there's always been, it has always been for hundreds of years, public demand for Shakespeare, people want Shakespeare. Now, you can argue, well, we don't need to spend, you know, resources. You know, that's a hobby that's like trout fishing, or, or something of that nature. And you know, people want, the public wants Shakespeare, and they want Shakespeare in the university. And I think that if you took it away, that would be a public outcry.

Emma Smith  17:32  
I think that's right. And it's so interesting to see in lockdown. What did people when people's lives were very stripped down from, you know, some of the sort of stresses of work some of the stresses of commuting, you know, spending time out what what did they what, what did they want to do many of them we don't want it to read. We're interested in you know, poetry that was being you know, read daily, we're looking online at different kinds of entertainment, theater, theatrical, you know, lots lots more people went to theater streamings than probably would have gone to live theater. So, yeah, one of my I always remember one of my colleagues who's the head of our medical sciences division, he, he always used to say to me, yeah, it's our job to it's our job to make lifelong, you no longer and it's your job to fill that up, you know, make that meaningful. Why should be longer? Yeah. And hobbies, you know, it's saying it's just a hobby. I don't think that's such a bad thing, you know, that that's not a bad thing at all. It's, it's so so I'm, I mean, I'm not. I'm not, I think there are some very sort of brilliant defenders of the humanities, and I'm not as articulate about that as I should be. And in some ways, I suppose I'm trying to do my bit of that by doing it, just doing it by Shakespeare, and letting the broader point.

Thomas Dabbs  18:54  
Yeah, well, that's, that's a pretty big platform Shakespeare is a pretty big platform to work from and and I'm so happy you're doing it. I tried. Well, this series and in its way is an attempt to do just that. And, and I think, you know, it's been very well received better than I thought than I thought it was, you know, by people who are not you know, Shakespearean is Shakespeare is proper, you know, there may be other forms and academe but also John in the general public, had some wonderful, wonderful feedback. And, but what I want to do in every one of these podcasts is to and video, YouTube thing is, is to talk about what's upcoming. And I noticed on your website that you have Nash and 12th Night and marry wives and portable magic, and you can choose from that menu. You are into

Emma Smith  20:00  
One of the things that I realized I'm trying not to do in my career is to alternate or to keep both strands going so that if I have the space or the platform or the authority to talk more widely about Shakespeare, for me, it's got to be based on doing new work myself, that's not necessarily of interest of wider interest. But that, you know, keeps me I do, I do enjoy the job of sort of promulgating or kind of broadcasting in a way other other people's ideas, I hope properly, properly, you know, given to them and attributed to them, but I also got to be doing my own work. So, the stuff that you've listed is the three sort of quite intensely scholarly projects. One is with the brilliant, Elizabethan sort of satirist and mostly known as a prose writer, Thomas Nash, Nash we have become interested in because perhaps he collaborated with Shakespeare on the first part of Henry the sixth than perhaps the others, the other parts too. And he's always in the background of other plays. You know, he collaborated with Johnson on a play which was very controversial on which we don't now have he's on the title page of Marlowe's the play we attribute mostly tomorrow Dido queen of Carthage. So his role as a playwright is, it's a bit shadowy, but he does have this one pageant like play called summons, Last Will and Testament, which I'm editing for a complete works are edited by lots of scholars of Thomas Nash's work. So that's a really different kind of rabbit hole kind of scholarship. You know, it's it's following up trying to work out, you know, what, what does he mean here? What's the illusion here, what's been lost, that would have been recognizable to first audiences, how to annotate this and how to present it for, for scholars to use. So that's something that that's a great ongoing project,

Thomas Dabbs  22:13  
you've chosen, you've chosen perhaps, from an annotation standpoint, one of the hardest figures, Nash is impossibly difficult to explain to someone else, you know, the radiation is

Emma Smith  22:25  
impossibly difficult to understand often, the play is a little bit more straightforward, I think, than some of the very, very, very complicated prose prose works. But Nash, it's worth sort of pushing on with that, because I think Nash was so influential. In his in his own time, I think he was really the sort of writers writer, if you like, he's obviously really, I mean, not only does it work with Shakespeare was really influential, I think on Shakespeare. And there's a, you know, an argument that Shakespeare's a lot of Shakespeare's word play is it is NACHA. Nor is it sort of imitating Nash. So it's a completely different activity from the activity of sort of, of at the moment, the the sort of public facing activity. And then I've I remember just talking about my wife's because, because that is an important part of my recent work has been collaborating, most recently and extensively with my colleague, Laurie McGuire. Yeah, yeah, that's a really been a really great, wonderful thing. For me, it's not so common in the humanities, cause it's a completely standard model in the sciences. But the humanities has tended to favor sort of single single author work. And because Laurie and I are working broadly, on ideas about how dramatic authors in our period collaborate. We've been trying to sort of reflect back it's back to that reflexivity. Yeah, so cleverly identified, which I hadn't quite

Thomas Dabbs  23:59  
thought before collaborating about collaboration. Yeah, that's right.

Emma Smith  24:03  
We've been trying to leverage that a bit to think about forms of collaboration. But the work on Merry Wives of Windsor is textual work on the difference between the two texts of the play. So it's quite technical, but it's in the it's in the field of partly, did Shakespeare revise his plays? Because that's the larger question. And the more reflexive version of that is, why have we been so unwilling to think that he did. Or to make a step forward? There was a big move big movement in Shakespeare studies, when it was argued very strongly that the two texts of King Lear represented two authorial stages. Not some problem in the printing house and not some version of a sort of transmission failure, but two distinct stages, both of which had authority but represented different sort of moments in the life of the play. And that was very controversial, but it's become a pretty standard not not entirely agreed but pretty standard view. But we haven't sort of really extended beyond that to think, you know, why would he do it for King Lear? And not for anything else? And we've argued that he does it for my wife. So things

Thomas Dabbs  25:21  
are Yeah, yeah. I mean, the impossible the impossible scenario of putting on a play publicly, and having it performed, and then reviving it in some way, and saying, okay, it was perfect the first time. How could that possibly be?

Emma Smith  25:37  
I mean, anybody who's been anywhere near theatres knows that, you know, you know, there are working scripts for for different productions and different different moments. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Thomas Dabbs  25:48  
So portable magic.

Emma Smith  25:51  
Yeah. So portable. Magic is a different bit of a different direction. And this,

Thomas Dabbs  25:54  
we're coming up on Halloween, as we're talking now. Yeah. So well,

Emma Smith  25:58  
that's interesting. Yeah. So the title comes from a lovely essay memoir that Stephen King the horror writer has about which is called on writing. It's just quite a throwaway remark. He says, books are a uniquely portable magic. And I've taken that as a as, as a title to think about books. And particularly, to think I've just about finished, I've just, I'm just on the last revisions of this of this book. It's about it's really about what the academy calls book history. What does the material book the actual book as an object? How does that influence has that changed over time? But also, how does it influence the reading of the texts within so it's a way of saying, the literary is always the opposite of this is Shakespeare, the literary text is not sort of float free from the material forms in which we encounter it. And so I'm, I'm sort of trying to think about those book history, which, particularly in my university, at back to the wonderful library is a very sort of prominent academic discipline, who could sort of work with the wide array of digital versions digital maximum, online facsimiles of wonderful

Thomas Dabbs  27:23  
to encourage us a wider readership to think about those issues. Yeah. Well, I'm a big believer now, maybe five years ago, I wasn't. But I'm a big believer now that the death of the book was greatly exaggerated. And there's a lot of evidence in Japan among my younger students, and so forth. Now, it may not have the prevalence that it had, it may be something like vinyl records, you know, in the future, recovery, kind of, again, a hobbyist recovery of what used to be called this thing, the book, but I don't think so. And you're in Oxford, you know, next to the Western wing is Blackwell's. And the book is doing just fine. Is doing just fine. And those are there's been a little I've been Yeah, I agree. It's been very, very interesting. The death of the book has been a bit exaggerated, been a little bit of a sort of uptake in ebooks during lockdown. But broadly speaking, they have fallen from the peak that was in about 2014 1314, something like that.

Emma Smith  28:34  
And it's, you know, one of the things I was interested in is how much ebook readers, you know, from Amazon and from other providers, how closely they actually mimic books? Yeah, yeah, so they haven't really given us what's so interesting about that whole technology is I think, we thought in the, perhaps in the 90s, or early 2000s, this is going to absolutely transform the kinds of sort of interactive texts that people will have and will have these sorts of enhanced digital books, which will do so much more than a regular book. And in fact, that has been, you know, the, the attempts to produce this has completely fallen flat. What people want is a lighter, slightly bigger print book that they can take on holiday or read on the tube or you know, enlarge the font and use backlight and not wake their partner up in bed or something, they want those things, but they actually don't want bells and whistles and hyperlinks and older all of that. So they really just want the text of a book, perhaps in a slightly more in some six, six anytime there's a more convenient form. So the ebooks have done nothing for unlike almost all the other technological advances in the book, they've sort of done nothing to the content, which is kind of interesting. They are quite a static form. I'm not I'm not actually against them at all. And I have a Kindle that I take on holiday if I'm very convenient. So I don't Have a sort of I'm not on a crusade against against them. But they are, as you say, they were thought to be the future. And I think they're not. They're actually not really

Thomas Dabbs  30:10  
well, in a conversation with Tiffany Stern. She said, You know, the the Arden in your working with the Arden series also, that they're kind of I don't know if this has been a hard decision, but basically you're not going to try it online to make the book Museum, there's a word she used. And I thought that was good, because you can find things very quickly now, if you need to find, you know, the etymology of a word or that sort of thing. And I thought, well, yeah, I'm okay. If you can give me the click, just like really in Wikipedia, you know, the click from the note to the footnote, and then click back to whatever the text that would, that would help me a lot. And that is basically what happens when these books are digitized now, and I've seen some good examples of that recently. And I think that that's enough. I do like having the notes close at hand. And, and I have

Emma Smith  31:03  
absolutely, absolutely agreed. Yeah, absolutely.

Thomas Dabbs  31:07  
Well, I want to go back a little ways with you. And I wanted to praise you, I've followed you for years now. But I really got on board with the Elizabeth and top 10. The addition you did with Andy caisson I, it was a turning point for me. And I think you know, we have a group from my university that comes over in the summer. And I think I saw you on the street at one point, and I was complimenting you, you were busy. You were on holiday, you know, during that time, and sort of said, Hello, thank you for now I don't have to write whatever, 20 pages on the history of popularity, because you've done it for me. And I can just say go see Emma, and she's done it. Right, that introduction to the book was just wonderful for me was, and you handled that so well. And for our viewers, you know the history of this word popular. It goes back to before Raymond Williams, I think Raymond Williams said, those things that are like, well liked by many people with a quotation doesn't do it. And then this whole conversation over years started about, you know, what's the difference between mass and popularity? What's the you know, what? And you handled that so well. And no, and I don't think you've, you probably have not been given enough credit, because that was just wrestling with a bear there. I mean, it was an you know, and so you did it there. And the articles in that book, are so good and appoints out to Shakespeare as a working playwright who, in some ways, you know, it was not the age of Shakespeare, you know, and that that's comes out very clearly. But the, the, there are analytics in the books, digital analytics, and all all of those things that are they can provide a foundation for people maybe not like me, I'm further along in my career, but younger people who are grappling with these sorts of things. And I thought that you and Andy just did a wonderful job with that. And I've just wanted that to be part of this talk.

Emma Smith  33:16  
So kind of you Tom. I mean, it's a really, really interesting topic. And it is a lovely collection. Zach lessor and Alan farmer did an amazing job of segmenting the publishing output of the London publishing industry and sort of trying to, and they would be the first to say in in these categories are sort of difficult to get to, but it as a piece of sort of quantitative analysis. It's really extraordinary. And one of the things it points out is just how tiny the literary marketplace was compared to religious theological sermon books, and law books. That's why everybody's looking at.

Thomas Dabbs  33:58  
I wanted to make sure I know that you have a class to teach. And so I want to make sure I get all the tough night. Yeah, on 12th night, I want to come back to 12 night because I just failed as a teacher. I'm trying to teach that last our last semester, I'll go into that a little bit later, maybe if we get to it, but I don't want to miss the First Folio, because you're a first folio person. And we talked to my colleague over here. He you know, he saw you he got a she and he's just translated blame his book from the folder that came out some years ago, but he just translated that into Japanese making it more widely accessible over here. But you work on the reception and you know, I have a little bit of a background in reception theory. I'm fascinated with the work that you've done, particularly at the you know, in the 1620s at the the initial publication of the First Folio and, and what you found about that The initial reception of the First Folio

Emma Smith  35:04  
your work on on Marlowe has been really, maybe a consult return the compliment has been really formative in how you I think it's how you can think about that kind of reputation changing over over time. I mean, that's, that's really, really important, important work. And we've somehow we lose the sense of that when we would perhaps with a figure like Shakespeare, who we assume has been sort of consistently appreciated and and lauded across across time. Yeah, so I'm not really a sort of technical book historian like like Blaney, I mean, Blaney, has given us so much insight into the way the First Folio was put together. But what I was interested in instead was the way these books carry with them. Enormous evidence about the ways they were they were used, and therefore perhaps about the sort of status or the the approach to them. And it's absolutely the case that sort of in the period before, maybe in the maybe in the long in the 17th century in the rest of the 20th century. Many, many readers have the First Folio, annotate and add marginalia or underline the parts that they that they like. And that gives us a sort of map of the of the hotspots. Also, what's interesting is that in all these studies of marginalia and readers marks, if you have one example, is very, very difficult to make any sense of it. Really, why did somebody do that you can't really reconstruct, but if you've got, what I tried to do was a sort of census approach where I looked at as many copies as I could of this book, and tried to aggregate small bits of data to think, Okay, people do do this, people don't do this, people don't tend to work. This is a big book, the first failure people, a number of people seem to have started it as if they wanted to go all the way through, but given up, which is very recognizable. You know, people don't tend to give the same attention to every part of a play. And it's interesting to think, why why they don't you know, there are lots of ways that that commonplace in tradition, which are so important for early modern culture tends to pull out sort of purple phrases or is in some ways, it anticipates our interest in Shakespeare in quotations, but perhaps, perhaps with some slightly different ones. So for example, I looked at quotations that are very famous to us now, like, from Richard the Third, a horse, a horse, My kingdom for a horse. Now, nobody underlines that in a in a Shakespeare First Folio, presumably, because it's not a phrase you could ever imagine yourself using. And so it's not useful as part of that sort of common placing tradition. Whereas, you know, the Tempest is the first play in the in the book, it gets a lot of attention from eager, eager readers. And one of the scenes that I as a reader of the tempest in the modern period I'd never really looked at was the scene where Ferdinand meets Miranda, and he has these actually rather cheesy chat up lines. He's quite a smooth, urbane young man. And, and these, these lines look enormously useful to early readers, and they're underlining these like mad thinking, you know, this is what I will say, if I meet a kind of island Maiden, and, you know, have to impress her with one of these drop dead remarks, you know, they're kind of chat up lines, they're early chat up lines, that that's quite an interesting form. So I love that the, the opportunity to look at these books, but also to impart of my work to take us back to a time when people didn't put these books in glass cases. And instead, they had them they had their candles or their tobacco, which was making marks they had a wineglass sometimes which they would put on it off, you know, they're eating or a cat might walk across, you know, these were these were real sort of working books rather than museum objects. And that's, that's the sort of that was an important thing to get back. Yeah,

Thomas Dabbs  39:44  
there were used books. And these books weren't rare. Well, what you brought up about the, perhaps the younger men looking for chat up lat lines, as you said, and I Think of Romeo and Juliet. And Romeo and his fellows, you know, out there in the streets, you know, reading books on sword fighting to find out how to do it. And Juliet telling Romeo she kisses he kisses.

Emma Smith  40:16  
Yeah. That means Tom, do you think you can spy the book? Is your really, really good? Is that's a textbook case? Or do you think it means that's a bit of a, you know, sort of bloodless care space that I never I never know which,

Thomas Dabbs  40:33  
which I think in our time, I wouldn't want to be told.

Emma Smith  40:37  
No, that's right. That's a good way. That's a very, very good question to ask.

Thomas Dabbs  40:42  
I'm in favor, and I'm not, you know, I'm not married to this idea. But I'm in favor of it being a compliment, in some ways, because, you know, kind of in other areas, if you say, you know, he goes by the book this as a kind of compliment in it, but then sometimes it means, you know, your, your drink, drink.

Emma Smith  41:04  
Yeah, you go by the book and rather than sort of seizing the human moment or

Thomas Dabbs  41:09  
something, but it doesn't let it doesn't land is a romantic line in our time. Yeah, that's what I'm just so interested in the way that you looked at the physical, the physical, the book itself, and how it was used. And it just and finding out and seeing how, how people if this is the one of the great arguments for the Humanities, you know, it puts us in touch with us, you know, who we are and where we came from. And that's, this is going to be of eternal interest, you know, you can talk all you want to about kings and queens and battles, and, you know, land, basically borders changing and all of this stuff. But what we're doing here, you know, you can just see somebody who's reading and touching and moving with this text in their house and, and marking, marking it. And it just gives us such a, what is it? Sense of community with those who came before us? It sounds a little bit lofty, but I don't think it really is. And it's just wonderful. Well, you say that you haven't done much outreach, but you are, you know, a working scholar doing you know, Thomas Nash, I mean, you know, the Marfa light controvert controversy, I think I've read about that once a year to try to refresh my memory. And then forget your points. I can't I can't keep it in my head. This so complicated, you know,

Emma Smith  42:44  
get Joe Black. There's a brilliant team doing the Nash and I'm learning such a lot from the meetings that we have. Joe Black is doing the math prelate tracks, and I think the addition will will really have some really interesting things to say about Nash's role in that and also about, you know, the sort of clandestine printing of these, these tracks. So it's it's a very, very interesting world. I am a bit of a spectator in those scholarly discussions. But yeah, learning learning a lot, a lot about it.

Thomas Dabbs  43:20  
Yeah, but do you do quite a lot and just a search on YouTube, you get out there and you do educational? Not not consulting, you have your lectures available, some of your lectures are available.

Emma Smith  43:35  
This is the series is called approaching Shakespeare. Maybe 30 or so lectures on different Shakespeare plays and other smaller series called not Shakespeare, which is on some well known, but not Shakespearean, early modern,

Thomas Dabbs  43:50  
approaching Shakespeare, I want to get that out there. I have colleagues who will want to see what you have to say. And you do theater consulting, also. Yeah, I

Emma Smith  44:01  
do. I just, I've just joined the Royal Shakespeare Company as an associate scholar, which is a great, great privilege and treat. I do a bit of work with them on on productions and on programming, but also on their education work, which is which is interesting. So one of the projects that we have at the moment is a funded project by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation to try to if evaluate the work, the education work that the RSC do in schools, and I'm interested in that, because I mean, it comes back to a theme of this conversation. You know, what, what kinds of value are we able to get sort of social buy in for about about the humanities, where do we think they make a difference? What difference do they make? How can we, how can we quantify that in the terms that seem to matter So which are sort of exam results and so on, but also how can we develop some more qualitative measures that say, you know that in some way, the benefit of this is, is in kind of quality of life points rather than necessarily only, you know, reading age or whatever. Yeah, so I really enjoy, work, work with theater. And I've done also one film, one film script, which was for Mary, Queen of Scots, Jersey rocks production with Sasha Ronan. And Margot Robbie, which was great, great fun reading a modern, very gifted modern playwrights take on a sort of early, early modern English. And I've got one I made one impact only on that script. Apart from well, I just kept saying, I don't think I don't think we can have this. So I had a negative impact saying not It's not this not this, but only had only one positive impact where the wonderful David Tennant is John Knox in a great big beard. And he is delivering a great condemnation of Mary Queen of Scots as a sort of loose woman and the scarlet woman and I had been at a talk which had had a great sort of word cloud. The one that stuck out for me was polecat, polecat polka. Yes. Well, polecat. Yes and David Tennant. John Knox does call Mary Queen of Scots are polecat. That's my one moment in the film. So that's, that's that's the that's the only thing I knew brought that word to into the world. I put that word in the script. It's

Thomas Dabbs  46:45  
an American Southern word. I'm from the southern. But I remember hearing oldsters say things like that when I was young. So it wouldn't be contemporary. It wouldn't be a contemporary word. But I think it survived through throughout. Well, it didn't wonderful to be able to have that conversation and the the John Knox, the, the probably the leader in the top tier of people, you would not want to go have a beer with? Absolutely. What possible, you know, you'd be looking at your watch the entire time trying to get completely Yes. Well, so talking about somebody you might want to have a beer with. That's Christopher Marlowe, you've done quite a lot of work on Christopher Marlowe. And I that's Marlowe, it was Shakespeare, of course. But Marlowe just turned around everything when I was young. And I read Timberlane to great. And I thought I mean, you know, this was during the time when movies, not this not quite this old, but there were a string of movies. So you know, Godfather, deer hunter. And a taxi driver. You know, they're just really pushed the edge of things. And I thought, oh, boy, this is really avant garde. And then I start reading tambor lane to great and I'm calling these guys Scorsese is great, you know. And Coppola is great. But this guy is outrageous. I mean, this, who did this? You know, who did this? And then Edward the second, with those lines of just this purity that Shakespeare does. And Richard the second, of course, and you have some days in both of them extraordinary plays. But what a turnaround moment, I couldn't ride on it, you know, because if I wrote on it, all I would do is try to come up with two or 300 pages worth of wow. Wow, look at this. And it doesn't, it doesn't align it so it didn't then and it doesn't now align itself very well with what we consider to be appropriate behavior, you know, which is kind of the whole point. It's just bad behavior all the way through guns with such an incredible poetic precision. You just, it's not it's really just not of this earth. It doesn't seem to be.

Emma Smith  49:10  
i It's so I mean, I as I said, I think you know, your work on Marlowe, so it was lovely to hear you talk it talk about it. And that comparison actually with those with the sort of male psyche kind of movies, movies is really it's really striking one which I hadn't thought before. Yeah, I mean, Marlo is a genius, isn't he? And what would the there's all that investigation and sort of conspiracy about his death and how that happened. But really, the main thing about that is, you know, the main sort of what if would be you know, what if Marlowe had to continue because all of Marlowe's work I mean, I can't remember who I who who said this, and it may not be new Tom, but all of Muller's work is what if he had lived a sort of normal span of of of yours would be called juvenilia. Yeah. You know, this is all work from, you know, is it so early? So you had such youthful work is it it was extraordinary to think what what he would have done and as long as people have pointed out Shakespeare and Marlowe born in the same year, you know, if it had been Shakespeare who had died in Deptford at that point, I mean, we wouldn't really have looked at that gathering of work, would we instead, what an amazing talent This is, whereas Marloes burns so brightly, it's, you're absolutely right.

Thomas Dabbs  50:34  
Yeah, it does. And I, I'm going to make this public, I was recently contacted, I won't name names, but I was recently contacted by a scholar who said, I've done a textual analysis, digital analysis of these works, and just basically said, Marla didn't write Marlowe. And I kind of wanted my approval, and I said, you know, knock yourself out, do what you're doing. And as sort of the mirrored maybe, and then I saw something else and most obscure kind of publication where it someone was saying, I, using my work, he made this point. And I never said that I that was a distance that I had doing reception theory, of course, I'm staying away from the the poetry pop proper, for reasons that you know, that it's very difficult to, to come up with a thesis, you know, the Marlowe, so But um, it's interesting how Marla was remade and that sort of thing. But I never said that. And I do wonder what we would have, you know, it's the kind of thing that you wonder with, with any number, you know, Hendricks or I don't know, I don't think we would have gotten that much more out of Jim Marcin, actually. But we, we, we would have gotten a lot more out of Hendricks I think that's probably a little bit more accurate and that they weren't about to stop. They had, if you can just tell just a world more in in them. But that there was excess with that, that you don't find in Shakespeare. You find the artists. There is excess and Marlowe, that and that that same excess. However, he reached his in, you know, was was part of that, you know, in the wrong place? Wrong place. Wrong time. wrong people. Yeah, yeah. Well, we could talk about Marlowe for forever. And talking about all of these things all day, or ever and ever. I did want to come back to 12 Night, I'm teaching in a second language situation, and I'm teaching advanced English students, you know, third and fourth year and graduate students and their English is good. And we have to approach it, you know, you could do far more material in one of your classes. But if I go slowly, you know, the lights are on and the there's wattage there, but we have to go as you as if you were studying a French novelist, you know, in my case, it would take me quite a long time. And so I can do Midsummer Night's Dream. And I can explain the comedy to the to a degree, but 12th night, just absolutely. I'm flummoxed. I tried to teach it last in our last term. And those exchanges, you know, between the comic characters in their ag cheek and so forth. And then fest egg comes in with these, you know, obtuse of observations and every now and then just nails it with one line. And it's just, it's just hard. It's harder than Hamlet to teach. So I don't know if you've found that to be the case. I've just found it is a absolutely brilliant play.

Emma Smith  54:01  
That's, well, that's interesting. I mean, it's really hard to grind through comic material anyway, isn't it and sort of trying to work out? What's, what's funny? Do any of the do any of the productions help? Does the Trevor none?

Thomas Dabbs  54:17  
It does the Trevor Noah wonderful, it was wonderful. The way that's done, I think it's beautifully done. I love that he's

Emma Smith  54:23  
well done, too, isn't it and it sort of makes that upstairs downstairs element of it, which is quite an important element of the sort of stratification of the human it makes that more legible. I think. And I think more so in the age of Downton Abbey. It's a bit it's a bit sort of clearer. Yes, I do. Sometimes use that use that film too. It's good on the tone, isn't it and that the sort of the tone of the that rather depraved? Sort of exhausted kind of partying that they're doing it because it's very well, it's well captured and sort of works with that, that all that bittersweet sort of feeling of the play that yeah, I'm, I'm with you on that. And I think actually, I think it's the same with teaching here, which needs to go through sort of every scene, you know, that's, that's, that's what you you need to you need to work through to bring out what's going on and help them sort of check in about sort of levels of understanding, and so on. And I suppose I'm in a lucky position that I don't actually do much of that kind of teaching, we sort of take that as read. And then we're able to sort of pick out the bits that are interesting, or the echo with other plays or something. So I don't actually, it's a thing I do more in the rehearsal room, actually, when people tend to me and say, What does this mean? Why is this funny? Quite often? I just, I don't know. I don't

Thomas Dabbs  56:02  
know. Yeah, this is my world. This is my world. And we're with the people who are traditionally very precise, and in wanting and making notes and wanting to translate in some case, you know, try to put frame it in a way that they understand. And of course, the larger dynamics there, the efficiencies, Malvolio is officiousness and so forth. And they say, I have a list of papers I probably will never write, but I wanted to write one at some point about over punishment, and Shakespeare. Were you and Malvolio is one of one of the top, you know, I think, Shylock, because you get a feeling of that was Shylock, certainly, that, that people are, it's overdone. And I think it is purposeful, that, you know, you're left with a feeling of that self loathing. But, you know, I kind of enjoyed that too much.

Emma Smith  56:57  
Yes, yes. I wonder about that, with what you will, you know, is that sort of turning it back on us and saying, Well, you know, you act as on to this, it's, you know, the audience has bear some responsibility for how the play proceeds. Because if you, if you endorse certain kinds of behaviors by laughing, then we'll just do more, we'll do more and more.

Thomas Dabbs  57:20  
That's right. That's right. And we'll put this guy in a, you know, will basically drive him nuts and throw him into what do you know, our little version of Bedlam just hard. Yeah. Well, before I before we get off, I wanted to go a little bit, I like to talk about turning and transformational moments in the in the lives of critics and scholars, like you. And you know, if you're, if you're comfortable with it, you know, when did young MSA, okay, it's probably not going to be a degree in engineering and probably won't be agree in math degree in maths or, or history or whatnot. You know, what point did you say, Okay, I'm gonna do this.

Emma Smith  58:03  
Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, as always, as probably most of your guests on this, as always a reader and the kind of bookish child, I think I thought I would be a novelist. That's what I really wanted to do. So there was never really a question, I think that I would think that I would take another subject more seriously than I took sort of reading, I must say that when I went to study English at university, I didn't actually really understand what the professional study of literature was, I thought it was just reading a lot. And I thought, you know, what, why, you know, how wonderful I didn't, I didn't, I had never read I know some people do in their, in their school, you know, advanced school years in the English system read, you know, have a sense what scholarly work is or what critical theories there are or methodology, some some of my students come with that. Having done that, you know, in interesting ways, we didn't do that at all I had, I don't think I had a single critical sort of quotation in my study of Antony Cleopatra, which was one of my a level my sort of end of school texts. That wasn't that wasn't the world so so what the sort of professional work of English studies is, was quite was quite a shock to me, I think. And then I thought I had the experience, which I think a lot of students do, and I think my own students have it now of suddenly realizing, okay, it's sort of not what I think that matters. That's not what I'm being asked to do. You know, in some ways, I'm being asked to survey this material and, and weigh it up way up to these different views and come to something and I felt a disappointment about that, I suppose. And I think it's only it's only quite an advanced level of our world is That allows you back to that sense that you can sort of, you know, say what you think. Right? That's right. We don't allow our students so much to do that, that that they're a bit more indebted to other things.

Thomas Dabbs  1:00:13  
Yeah, yeah. Well, very quickly. I mean, when I first got into the professional part of literary study, I didn't know what what to do. And an older friend of mine said, go down to the MLA Bibliography, read back five, five to 10 years, and there will be an argument, there'll be a debate that surfaces just from the titles, and then go to the articles, and then go and deliver both sides, and then take aside yourself or modify both both critiques. And I was fabulously successful, just doing that it was it worked with everybody. And then I got into a class with the American poet and he's a little bit maligned, because he's very, you talking about images of toxic mess masculinity, but James Dickey, and of course, the movie deliverance, which was part of that canon of movies I mentioned earlier, I took a class with him, because he was a Pulitzer Prize winner, you know, nationally known internationally known, and I thought this is going to be wild, because he was known to drink too much. And, you know, the beads kind of big and, and he was fat, fabulous. He was actually. And I wrote, he had his write for papers. And I wrote one, he came back, and he used some bad language, he said, this, you're better than this. He said, Get the poet read the poems, get the poet and read the poems and dig in. And the next time I did, and he taught me how to write, you know, now I can do both, right, I can, I can do the critical stuff, right? Then, you know, coming into contact, genuine contact with and it just, it never entered my mind that I would do anything but read poems from an anthology. But to go to some of these, you know, writers where, you know, just pick up a book, we might do it with Tennyson, but we would never do it with someone who might think an Edgar Lee Masters in America, you know, you just got one or two in just the smatter. And you pick up the book and go through and look at them as poets, as you see the massive amount of work, and how they were, they were just struggling at all times. So I wish we could introduce more of that into the academy, you know, but, but when you have somebody like, Vicki tell you to do something, yeah. You do it. Yeah. Do it, you know. And so, well, you know, I, if there's anything else that you have that come forthcoming that you want to throw out there, or put out there for us to, to consider, please do I want to thank you, you folks at Hartford college for our summer programs, you know, we haven't been able to do do them. For so many of our students. It's a wonderful experience, but then you have the few that it really does break things down, you know, the Japan is, is historically xenophobic, you know, the and provincial and the way that many countries are and the way that I was when I grew up, and I remember my first visit to the UK, and how, you know, eye opening it was, and so I have a student now Shakespeare Institute, and, and that was the door she walked through is that little program for three weeks, you know, to gain the confidence. Oh, I can go there and they won't. They won't eat me.

Emma Smith  1:03:29  
Yes. Fabulous. I'll pass that I'll pass that on. If I can't, I'm because our team who do that work are obviously a bit you know, a bit a bit gloomy about the future. Obviously, after two years, it's hard to know how in what form that will come back. Yeah. So

Thomas Dabbs  1:03:48  
more than one more than one example. And that's just for my university, you know, people that's been a, again, a transformative experience for them.

Emma Smith  1:03:59  
That's great to hear. Really good. Yeah. Well, I very much hope that we'll be welcoming you We will be welcoming you back at some at some point.

Thomas Dabbs  1:04:07  
Well, I do too because I surely do love the love the you know, the environments of the college are just so fabulous. And the libraries right there right yeah. And the walks the wonderful long walks and you know on the beautiful summer days, sometimes it didn't beautiful and then the

Emma Smith  1:04:28  
it's good to be reminded of that it's not a beautiful it's a it's a rather rather pray kind of autumn day here today.

Thomas Dabbs  1:04:37  
We tend to get an idealistic view of Oxford, you know, coming there in August. Yeah, on good. You can

Emma Smith  1:04:43  
put up some ideal idealized pictures with this, this part of our conversation.

Thomas Dabbs  1:04:49  
We will Yeah, we'll show people what

Emma Smith  1:04:51  
we're talking about.

Thomas Dabbs  1:04:52  
Yeah. Wonderful, Emma. Well as things come out, and that we can keep this little series going this star Did I told you a grant for a symposium, and you were shortlisted, in my, in my view to bring over here. And I hope that at some point in the future, you know, we can do something like that we can't now, and we don't know now. And, and then this other thing, now I can talk to a lot more people, not just the shortlist a lot more, and also earlier career scholars who are so important, you know, and so I want to keep this going. But I also am hoping that one, you know, at one point, we can get you over here, and you can well, no,

Emma Smith  1:05:37  
that will be wonderful, but it and it is absolutely wonderful to be able to use, you know, we've been forced into these technologies, haven't we, but they've got hugely beneficial you know, aspects and and I have had I to have had conversations with people or listened in to seminars online that I would never have come to, or never have been able to go to. And so it's good to hold on to that, isn't it? Amid all the things that have been lost over this period, I think this is a real gain, and it's been a real pleasure.

Thomas Dabbs  1:06:07  
Well, we can do both, we can do both. And, and also, if anything comes up and stuff, just please do not hesitate to contact me and say okay, and we don't have to go long form, you know, we can do something short and say, well, Emma's doing this now. And I wanted it out to the you know, the normal people. Well, if you could just stay I want to. I want to thank you again, so much on behalf of me, of course, but on behalf of the JSPs the Japan Society for the Promotion of science helps fund this. And also my colleagues and the university, Aoyama Gakuin University for providing support. I say that at the beginning of every program, but I really want to emphasize it here as we talk with you. And thank you so much for speaking with us today. Emma, thank you

Transcribed by https://otter.ai