Jackie Reviews: Thinking about Shakespeare
Many of the books I have been reading recently, including Hamnet, by Maggie O’Farrell, which I loved, have set me on a path towards re-exploring the works of Shakespeare. Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood is a clever ‘retelling’ of The Tempest and was one of our book club choices, while Ali Smith acknowledges the influence of Shakespeare’s four last plays (The Tempest, Cymbeline, Pericles and The Winter’s Tale) in her Seasonal Quartet, the last of which, Summer, was published this year.
A book which I have really enjoyed, and which has been so helpful to read alongside these books, is This is Shakespeare: How to Read the World’s Greatest Playwright, by Emma Smith, an Oxford Professor of Shakespeare Studies. Bringing the reader reflections on twenty of Shakespeare’s plays (which began life as a series of podcasts, Approaching Shakespeare, still available to listen to), she hopes that, if we have ever felt any sense of ‘obligation’ when faced with a Shakespeare play (whether as a school set text or on the stage), or even ‘a terrible and particular weariness that can strike us sitting in the theatre at around 9.30 p.m., when we are becalmed in Act 4 and there’s still an hour to go (admit it – we’ve all been there)’, the book ‘might open out to you a less dogmatic, less complete, more enjoyable Shakespeare’.
Emma Smith stresses that it is the plays’ ‘gappiness’ – their incompleteness and instability – which makes it possible to interpret them in a never-ending number of ways as a modern audience and it is the reason why Shakespeare’s works can still be so ‘relevant’ to us: ‘This Shakespeare knows about intersectionality as much as about Ovid.’ From the idea that we might try some ‘fantasy casting’ of our own, imagining a particular actor playing a role, to the possibility of reading a self-contained chapter before going to see one of the plays, I love this book’s approach and can highly recommend it for its readability and its insight – as she says, dip into it or read it from cover to cover but above all experience the plays for yourself and find ‘your’ Shakespeare.