Class News
Nick Danforth ’64 recommends Stephen Greenblatt’s Book Club interview
April 4, 2021
Nick Danforth ’64 circulated an announcement of a Virtual Book Talk sponsored by the Boston Athenaeum and featuring Emma Smith in conversation with Stephen Greenblatt, our own Shakespeare expert.
“Venture into a world of politicking and copycatting! Writing in strikingly modern ways about individual agency, privacy, politics, celebrity, and sex, Emma Smith delves into the life of Shakespeare and examines its ambiguities.”
The event takes place on Tuesday, April 13 at 12:00pm EDT. You must register for this event here. The occasion is the publication of This Is Shakespeare by Emma Smith, a professor at Oxford. She will be talking about her new book, which is a series of short, lively pieces about some of the most famous of Shakespeare's plays.
Virtual Event
Book Talk: This is Shakespeare
Emma Smith in conversation with Stephen Greenblatt
Tuesday, April 13, 2021 — 12:00pm to 1:00pm
Registration is necessary, here.
A genius and prophet whose timeless works encapsulate the human condition like no other. A writer who surpassed his contemporaries in vision, originality, and literary mastery. A man who wrote like an angel, putting it all so much better than anyone else. Is this Shakespeare? Well, sort of. But it doesn’t tell us the whole truth. So much of what we say about Shakespeare is either not true, or just not relevant.
In This Is Shakespeare, Emma Smith takes us into a world of politicking and copycatting, as we watch Shakespeare emulating the blockbusters of Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Kyd (the Spielberg and Tarantino of their day), flirting with and skirting around the cutthroat issues of succession politics, religious upheaval, and technological change. Smith writes in strikingly modern ways about individual agency, privacy, politics, celebrity, and sex. Instead of offering the answers, the Shakespeare she reveals poses awkward questions, always inviting the reader to ponder ambiguities.
Emma Smith is professor of Shakespeare Studies at Oxford University. She has published widely on Shakespeare and other early dramatists, and lectured to audiences from the Queen Mary to the Royal Shakespeare Company. She has been a historical consultant to film and television, and worked with theatre companies and productions. She is an expert on Shakespeare's First Folio, one of the world's most iconic books, and discovered a previously unknown copy in Scotland in 2016. She lives in Oxford, England, where she enjoys birdwatching, silent cinema, fast cars, and a — currently rather disobedient — springer spaniel puppy.
Stephen Greenblatt is Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. He is the author of fourteen books, including Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics; The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve; Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare; and Renaissance Self-Fashioning. He is General Editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature and of The Norton Shakespeare, has edited seven collections of criticism, and is a founding editor of the journal Representations. His honors include the 2016 Holberg Prize from the Norwegian Parliament, the 2012 Pulitzer Prize and the 2011 National Book Award for The Swerve, MLA’s James Russell Lowell Prize (twice), Harvard University’s Cabot Fellowship, the Distinguished Humanist Award from the Mellon Foundation, Yale’s Wilbur Cross Medal, the William Shakespeare Award for Classical Theatre, the Erasmus Institute Prize, two Guggenheim Fellowships and the Distinguished Teaching Award from the University of California, Berkeley.