This is Shakespeare
By Emma Smith
Pantheon Books, 2020

 “Why should you read a book about Shakespeare?” Emma Smith asks this vital question in her new book, This is Shakespeare, a succinct study of the uncertainties and ambiguities contained in twenty of the bard’s most notable plays. Each chapter tackles the challenges of a single work, moving through the canon in the order that Shakespeare wrote, at least in Smith’s best scholarly guess.

Smith, a professor at Oxford University’s Hertford College, proposes that This is Shakespeare is an antidote to the dogmatic approach to Shakespeare which many readers have been taught in the school room. Smith instead embraces the “gappiness” of the bard’s canon—the ambiguities that allow readers, performers, and audience members to “make his work mean what we want it to mean,” as she says. “His works hold our attention because they are fundamentally incomplete and unstable: they need us, in all our idiosyncratic diversity and with the perspective of our post-Shakespearean world, to make sense.”

 Smith’s previous book, Shakespeare's First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book is a “biography” of the first published collection of Shakespeare. It approaches the history of the plays not with a story of the man himself but with an account of the physical text. In This is Shakespeare, Smith again avoids a biographical approach, focusing on the “changing meanings” of the plays through adaptation and a study of the cultural worlds which fashioned Shakespeare’s canon when it was written and those which continue to shape it now. Smith’s new book builds on her enormously successful podcast adaptation of her Oxford lecture series, in which she melds popular and scholarly perspectives.

 This approach is familiar from cultural-studies colossus Marjorie Garber’s exhaustive take on the canon in Shakespeare After All, another book which resists the biographical approaches followed by scholars such as Stephen Greenblatt and James Shapiro. Like Garber’s one-play-per-chapter structure, Smith claims each entry in This is Shakespeare can be read as standalone interrogation. 

One of Smith’s interests in This is Shakespeare is to demonstrate the delight that can be found in lesser-known plays. She begins her discussion of Richard II, one of Shakespeare’s least performed history plays, by recapitulating the plot—the brash nobleman Bolingbroke challenges his cousin, a potentially sub-par king, for England’s throne. While Bolingbroke eventually claims the crown (becoming Henry IV), whether he ever lays his hands on the physical crown during the play is, as Smith explains, ambiguous. But that is not the biggest issue: “The great unanswered question of the play is whether it was right—historically, politically, ethically, personally, dramatically—for Bolingbroke to take the throne from his cousin Richard.” Smith continues, “This question insinuates itself into the play’s imagery and choreography, and hangs over its stage history and critical reception—and the following sequence of history plays struggle with its unquiet legacy.”

 In order to track the dual political legacy of the play—whether “deeply subversive” or “essentially conservative”—Smith traces Richard II from its unambiguous historical source material all the way to more equivocal modern renditions. One contemporary production Smith considers is John Barton’s 1974 Royal Shakespeare Company adaptation, a version which exaggerated the moral dilemma of the play by each night randomly assigning the roles of Richard and Bolingbroke to the two leading actors.

 During her discussion of Richard II, Smith also refers to other plays of the time, such as Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II, an eerily similar play which correspondingly wrestles with the deposition of a young king. Smith’s connection of the two IIs suggests an interesting difference between the moral centers of the parallel plays. While exciting for readers who know Marlowe’s earlier play, Smith’s reference is not explained or explored. On the next page, when writing about Richard II’s tragic death, Smith makes mention of the final lines of King Lear, “when Edgar (or perhaps it is Albany) tries to say something sententious.” The allusion is only accessible to those who have read both of the published playtexts of Lear, or those who have already read two hundred pages ahead in Smith’s book.

While potentially off-putting to readers new to the landscape of Shakespeare’s plays, these references enable Smith to identify the development of ideas throughout Shakespeare’s career. Her almost obsessively integrative approach offers those more familiar with the bard’s canon further insights. This consolidating tactic can be overwhelming for casual readers, but it makes This is Shakespeare a book worth revisiting over and over, even for those already engrossed in Shakespeare performance and scholarship. This is a book that asks to be wrestled with and returned to, just as Shakespeare’s writing encourages us to engage with his plays again and again. As Smith says, “reading, thinking, questioning, interpreting, animating—this really is Shakespeare.”

—Abraham Joyner-Meyers studies literature and theater at Harvard University and performs folk music in Boston and DC. You can learn more about his love for Shakespeare and hear his music at abejoynermeyers.com.