TO paraphrase a line from the promotional material of 'Barbie': If you can't get enough of Shakespeare, this book is for you. If you've had a surfeit of Shakespeare, this book is for you. Emma Smith's approach to Shakespeare, as she writes in her foreword, is to illuminate aspects of the plays that might have escaped your notice, because Shakespeare's approached with so much reverence, that one tends to miss that in his time, he was popular entertainment-not the venerable Bard w( with a Capital B). And she completely succeeds. Smith beings out perspectives that never struck me: for instance, in her essay on The Merchant of Venice, instead of the usual joke about a play being set in Venice not mentioning that it's a city with waterways, she highlights how Shakespeare focuses on something else that made Venice unique and contributed to the success of La Serenissima: its position as a trading and financial metropolis, the London of its time. There are other nuances that she brings out beautifully too, like the strange fairytale section of the play, with Portia's casket challenge to her suitors-I didn't even remember that this scene is pretty much in the opening of the play! Her other essays, too, look at the plays from interesting angles: I loved her series of essays on the Henriad: she writes that the first one of these performed was Richard III, and given its popularity, Shakespeare decided to go further back in history, and write about the wars leading up to the event of RIchard III: a process Smith describes as being similar to George Lucas making prequel movies set before the events of Star Wars, which is such a perfect analogy! She makes you think and engage with familiar work in a very different way, also using the historical context of the times: Shakespeare is so ubiquitous, and easy to adapt to other settings, that you tend to set him out of his time, but that wasn’t the case at all, the events of the time hugely influenced his plays: for instance, it was made illegal to write about the monarchy, leading Shakespeare to shift his history plays from British history to classical history, such as Julius Caesar, Coriolanus and so on. Shakespeare was still writing entertainment where cruel monarchs were being killed though-a luxury not afforded to many right now, in many countries, where thoughtcrime is a reality. Her essays on the famous plays are excellent but so are her pieces on the ones I knew less well, such as Measure for Measure. I can’t recommend this book enough, Prof. Smith is like a dream Professor, the kind you always want to have, who’s funny, contemporary and challenges you to sue your mind. Since we can’t all have the luxury of being taught by her, this is the next best!

This book integrates some of Shakespeare's most prevailing works. It questions what the plays mean, what they meant, and how their cultural relevance changes with society.

This is a great book to put in the hands of students just getting to know Shakespeare. It will provoke thought and help build understanding on the plays.

This book was fascinating! Emma Smith has a novel take on each play she writes about - and she writes in such an engaging style. She has obviously thought deeply about these plays for years. I am only now, at the advanced age of 59, really studying the works of Shakespeare (those handful of plays I was required to read in HS don't count) and books like this help me immensely. I will be reading Shakespeare in a whole new way.

This book is an engaging treatment of the context and creation of much of Shakespeare's work. The reader will not discover summaries of the plays included, but something more helpful, perhaps: an explanation of the source material from which the playwright drew his inspiration, the historical and political context which influenced the plot and characters, and comparisons of various interpretations of these works through time. There is a wealth of good material here for understanding the depth of Shakespeare's impact on his own contemporary culture, and the ways successive generations have wrestled with the themes, interpretations, and conclusions drawn from these plays. The author is a respectable and impressive scholar, an engaging writer, and a helpful guide for journeying deeper into the world and work of one of our greatest writers. Where definitive data is elusive, it is gratifying to see that Emma Smith has chosen to leave many important questions about the author and the material unanswered, preferring to embrace the mystery rather than offering easy solutions to challenging conundrums.

Informative and smart, Emma Smith has proven herself a worthy study of the Bard. This book is accessible and strays far from the realm of dryness.

This Is Shakespeare is an essay collection by Shakespeare scholar and Oxford lecturer Emma Smith, whose work I first encountered on her excellent podcast Approaching Shakespeare. In each lecture-turned-podcast-episode she dissects a different play through the lens of a very specific question (“what is the narrative and thematic role of Antonio in Twelfth Night,” “why does Bassanio choose the lead casket in Merchant of Venice,” “why doesn’t Marcus offer Lavinia first aid in Titus Andronicus“).

This Is Shakespeare is basically just her podcast in book form and slightly condensed, but you certainly don’t need to be familiar with her already (and in fact, it’s probably better if you aren’t–I didn’t mind the repetition between this book and her podcasts, but for someone even marginally less invested, these essays might feel extraneous). An interest in Shakespeare, whether you’ve read all of his plays or only read one, is really the only requirement to picking this up. Smith doesn’t give broad strokes overviews of the plays, but instead she zeroes in on details that stick out to her in each one, which start to tie into one another with the more essays you read. This was an incisive, thoughtful, and ultimately fun read that certainly helped augment my understanding of each of the 20 plays she covers.

Review attached, written by my son after he stole my e-reader out of my hands:

“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.”

As I was reading the chapters in this book, I found it necessary to look up summaries and analyses of the plays being discussed, as Smith assumes some familiarity with Shakespeare's plays, and it's kind of difficult to follow along with her analyses without having this basic understanding. So, I ventured to that savior of desperate and lazy high schoolers everywhere: SparkNotes. Unfortunately, as I was reading through their summaries and analyses before reading Smith's chapters, I found that the SparkNotes insights were far more straightforward and interesting than Smith's.

An important caveat: I don't like Shakespeare. Never have, never will, really. There are some aspects of some plays that I find interesting enough to discuss, but on the whole I find his works mostly nonsensical and banal (as Emma Smith rightly points out, his work is completely plot-driven rather than character-driven, an important factor in why I dislike it). So, in reading work about Shakespeare, I mostly want something that will give me a basic overview and an analyses of the most common interpretations. That is, what do I need to know to have a fundamental understanding of this play and its themes, just so that I'm on the same wavelength as the rest of the Western world?

So, basically, I was looking for SparkNotes.

Emma Smith, however, writes for the Shakespeare fan, even as she denies this. Her essays focus on random, specific aspects of Shakespeare's plays, and her analysis often feels abstract and meandering. Some of these essays were kind of interesting, particularly queer readings of plays (A Midsummer Night's Dream or Twelfth Night), but for the most part, I was very tempted to skim through these chapters, because I just wasn't that interested.

Again, a reminder that I really, really do not appreciate Shakespeare, so take this review with a grain of salt: I have no doubt that for a Shakespeare lover this book will be much more palatable.

Smith's essays are ideal for anyone who finds Shakespeare's plays inherently unapproachable; Smith comments on and highlights the incompleteness of the bard's plays, arguing that there is no right way to read them, through wit and thought-provoking arguments.

This is a must read for serious students of Shakespeare. A helpful tool for teachers as well; this book is meant for a very specific audience. Well written and insightful. Thank you NetGalley for allowing me to review this work.

I received a complimentary copy of this title from the publisher through NetGalley. Opinions expressed are my own.

This Is Shakespeare is a wonderful companion to Shakespeare's works! It's definitely in the vein of Marjorie Garber's Shakespeare After All, in that it looks at different plays with each chapter/essay. However it focuses more on the performance side and reminds us that Shakespeare was a playwright.

This book would be wonderful for teachers--especially high school teachers struggling to make Shakespeare relevant to their students. It reminds us that Shakespeare is still relevant and funny and entertaining, that it asks the same questions we do today, that we are all fallibly human.