So my name's Emma Smith, I'm at Hertford College in Oxford,
and the research I'm doing at the moment is actually research into Shakespeare via a particular book.
It's the first collected edition of Shakespeare's plays, The First Folio, which was published after Shakespeare's death in 1623.
And what I'm interested in, I'm actually less interested in things that people have been interested in about this book before.
So previously, people have wanted to know how did this book get printed?
How far does it represent Shakespeare's intentions for his plays?
How far can it tell us about how the plays were performed in the Elizabethan and Jacobean period?
They're really interesting questions, but I I'm more interested in is what do people do with this book after it was printed?
I'm interested in a history of reception and the way we understand Shakespeare at different historical times in light of the recent year project.
Why is it so important that Shakespeare becomes digital? And why should we study the First Folio?
We've just done a project to digitise the Bodleian copy of the First Folio,
and we wanted to do that because actually the first of all is not a particularly rare book.
There are more than 200 copies, but it's such an important book.
We wanted to make it available. The Bodleian copy is very damaged.
It's been read a lot. And one of the interesting things about it is you can sort of see which players were popular
and which plays have been because some bits of it are very worn out and some bits aren't.
But we wanted to make that available for people to look at because partly
because the Bodleian got a duty to make books available to people to look at.
But if a book is so damaged and so valuable that it's it's hard for people to have access to it,
it seems a great way to do it, to have this digital copy instead.
So we've got a really high quality digital copy freely available for people to reuse the images and stuff.
And that enables you to look at all kinds of stuff. I mean, both the text, the plays, what's actually being said, but also what the binding is like,
what you can learn about the way books were put together by the sort of physical copy of the book.
And the reason the First Folio is interesting is for most of the half of the plays.
But this is the only copy. All other copies come from this one. So this is the one copy we've got.
We've got no manuscripts by Shakespeare. We've got a certain number of plays in print, in individual copies during his lifetime.
But the first of all, it gives us plays like Macbeth, like Twelfth Night, like The Tempest, which you wouldn't have if you didn't have that book.
So most of the plays from this whole period have been lost and we would have lost all these ones if they hadn't been gathered together in this book.
So that's important. And the other thing that's really important about it is this is a copy of the plays before editors have got hold of them.
And editors do really useful job in our modern editions of Shakespeare in that they make things clearer, they make certain things easier.
They put in stage directions, they standardise what characters are called.
And so they give us an easier experience. And it's very hard for anybody to read the First Folio as their first introduction to a play now.
But if people are studying the play,
sometimes stepping back into the First Folio and looking at a version which doesn't have lots of explanatory stage directions,
you realise what the editor has done has made an interpretation that it's not a fact that something happens at a certain point.
And you can think, well, what if that character hasn't left the stage, if they're still there?
That is a great example. At the beginning of King Lear, there's no exit for Edmund, the [INAUDIBLE] character,
to leave the stage while King Lear and his daughters are talking and doing the love test and dividing the kingdom.
And most editors will say, well, he's left. But it's actually really interesting for the rest of the play if he's just there completely
quiet watching this going on and then using it as he plots later on in the play.
So just just more things, small things like that. The Folio, Romeo and Juliet has no prologue.
So all that two households, both alike in dignity in Fair Verona where we lay, are seen.
That's not in the folios to all the things about the kind of fated or predestined aspect of the tragedy.
You don't actually get in that text. So if you read it like that, it's completely it's completely different.
You don't necessarily know. The prologue is a great spoiler, and that's that's interesting in itself.
But if you don't have that spoiler, there are lots of ways this is a play which seems a bit like a comedy in certain ways.
Maybe it could turn out comically. And that's more possible, I think, in the Folio than it is in most modern text.
So there's loads of stuff to find out. It's a very, really refreshing way of looking at Shakespeare,
which is why I think I'm really pleased that it's available for people to look at and browse through your research into the First Folio.
Do you think that that brings you closer then to the Elizabethan original?
Some of the research I've done on the Folio certainly has brought me closer to the first people who read the book.
So there are lots of copies which have annotations and marks in them which help us understand.
If you read this book, if you if you're one of the first buyers, first an early adopter of Shakespeare's First Folio,
if you bought it in the sixteen twenties, what did you make of it? What did you think?
Why were you reading it? What did you get out of it? Some of the annotations give us a sense what people are getting out of it.
And some people are getting, as you would expect, lots of people, people get different things out of it.
Some people are going through for almost a kind of private.
Of quotations, which we call commonplaces, which is the way that you pull out beautiful or poetic or pithy sentences or phrases,
probably with the idea that you might be able to use them in your own writing some later points,
or some people are really going through commonplaces and we can see that they're doing that because they're writing in the margin,
the heading love or kingship or something that they're going to put it under.
They're sort of extracting and cataloguing.
At the same time, some people are going through and getting a sense of how plots work and kind of what's happening.
And some people are going through quite carefully changing errors or slightly reworking or improving bits and pieces.
So I definitely feel that you can be closer to readers of Shakespeare.
I think it's a bit of a myth, although it's a very attractive myth to think you get closer to Shakespeare in some way.
I mean, this is a sort of the whole raison d'être of the Folio is that Shakespeare is
dead and that in some ways it's quite an elegiac or definitely posthumous,
literary, posthumous, but sort of metaphorically more elegiac kind of a form than that.
So you think that some of the plays are influenced by commonplace books?
Is that why Shakespeare is so quotable? I think people have always found Shakespeare to be quotable.
And certainly when people read in the 16th, the 17th century, that was their main way of reading to pull out quotations,
not necessarily to read synthetically or not necessarily to read for the plot or to read for themes and characters in the way that we might do now.
So certainly Shakespeare's always been quotable in some ways. He's been quotable in different ways at different times.
So, for instance, if you look at an early reading of Richard the third,
which is underlining the phrases that are going to be taken out into a commonplace book, probably the most well-known quotation from Richard.
The third now is a horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse now no commonplace of the First Folio that I have seen underlines that phrase.
And presumably that's because it's really hard to think of any context in your own life in which you would ever use that phrase.
So the reason it's quotable for us is quite why it's something about the quotations are always both about the sound of them,
I think, and the content and something about the rhythm of that.
But early readers didn't find that quotable because they were looking for things which wouldn't really necessarily stand out.
They were looking for things which could be taken from their context and put into different contexts rather
than things that were so brilliantly on paraphrase a Bible that you would never do them differently.
So I think quotations have been different at different points. But yeah, I think Shakespeare's always been quotable.
So you suggested that 16th century readers weren't so interested in characters and themes,
whereas nowadays that is what a lot of readers understand by Shakespeare.
So why should we study Shakespeare?
I think there are lots of reasons to study Shakespeare, and I think those reasons are not necessarily all the same for everybody.
So I think there is a reason to study Shakespeare because one of the things modern actors have told us with their particular
kind of psychological training into acting techniques is that Shakespeare writes characters who the modern period,
the 21st century can understand as people with hidden motives and certain things that they don't articulate to themselves,
but that you can sort of intuit from the way they are. So to characters like sort of like real people.
So actors have told us about how you can put Shakespeare's plays on the stage.
And that in itself is is interesting. I guess we can study Shakespeare to understand not so much to understand ourselves,
which I guess is the model that lots of productions go for, but to understand something which is very different from us, very far away.
So you can think about Shakespeare more historically, sometimes quite refreshing to think of Shakespeare as a 16th or 17th century writer,
rather than to put the pressure on him of being a 21st century writer.
And in some ways, that makes certain things about The Taming of the Shrew side, which is a play about gender politics, which is very problematic.
Now, it takes a bit of the pressure off that play if you try and look at it historically
rather than as a kind of timeless piece which tells of something ongoing.
The reason I'm most interested in Shakespeare is because for a whole variety of reasons,
some of which I think we don't even know, Shakespeare has become the kind of symbol of literature in English.
And if you trace what people have said about Shakespeare,
you can sort of understand you can use that to articulate quite an interesting sort of sense of intellectual history,
how people have how people's aesthetic tastes have changed, how what they're looking for in what they read has changed over time,
how the things they want to believe about a figure like Shakespeare have changed.
So actually, as my work on the First Folio is a good example of this, I'm less interested in Shakespeare, the man and Shakespeare the creative genius,
and I'm more interested in Shakespeare, the product of the book,
or the idea that people took far away from Shakespeare's own period and did their own thing with.
And why did they do that?
What was it about those texts which allowed them to feel that they could rework them or live within them in certain kinds of ways?
For some people cite Shakespeare, sheer productivity as a reason to study him alone.
Yeah, that wouldn't be if you looked at Shakespeare in his historical context. He's.
Writing for a theatre which has a big appetite for new plays, lots of writers,
Thomas Middleton would be a good example, rights as much or perhaps more than Shakespeare.
So it's not really the volume. I don't think. I think it is the ongoing history of these works so that they are both historical works,
but they're also continuous works in the major players have continued to be written about and performed pretty much constantly.
And therefore there are sort of index of how our culture has literary culture or dramatic culture has changed over that period.
And is there a work of Shakespeare that you find most compelling? Don't think there really is a work of Shakespeare.
I find most compelling. I tend to find once I get into any play, you know, I've become really into it and I can see all kinds of things about it.
So I think my favourite is always the thing I'm reading most hard at that one time.
And what would you say to those who challenge the authorship of Shakespeare's work?
I'd say, well, it doesn't really matter, does it? I think it would build such a thing to get a heads up about.
I think academics get very cross about people who don't believe Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare.
I do think Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. I don't particularly care whether he did or didn't.
And I certainly don't find it quite as much of an affront to everything that I stand for when people challenge that,
even though I think they're wrong.
One thing about people who challenge Shakespeare's authority is often they're extremely knowledgeable about a very, very narrow set of things.
And it's sometimes it's a bit of a shame that they don't put that energy towards something which will be more productive.
But I mean, I could give a long reason why. Shakespeare, why why do we know Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare?
But plenty of that out there on the Internet and the people who don't think he did will never believe that he did whatever you say.
But it's pretty much for the most part, that's a conversation which happens elsewhere.
Part of the work I'm doing on the First Folio is about people who have doubted that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare in.
One of the things that is really important in the 19th century is a lot of
particularly people who think Francis Bacon wrote these plays get preoccupied with
the idea that the folio is a code and that everything about this precise spelling
and punctuation and layout on the page is actually a code to be broken.
And when when you break the code, it will say Francis Bacon wrote me or something.
And there's lots of work to try and do that. And I think as a phenomenon, that's really, really interesting.
And it's not that different from the people who think Shakespeare's work is coded
with references to Catholicism or even more even more mainstream than that,
people who think that it is worth spending ages and ages on the specific detail of Shakespeare's language in any way at all.
I mean, to me that more more on a continuum, I think, than people would like to believe.
I mean, perhaps that's because Shakespeare's work is quite cryptic in many ways.
The sonnets in particular, I think Shakespeare's work is ambiguous.
I suppose the idea that Shakespeare's work is cryptic suggests if only we could bring the code,
we would be able to work out exactly what these things meant.
And I suppose I think poetry generally and Shakespeare specifically is not sending as a code in that way.
So I think sonnets are, - sonnets by lots of writers are quite mysterious because they hover between the apparently personal
and the apparently public and they hover between the conventions of the form and the way individuals might write within it.
That is quite puzzling. And they tend because they're so compressed, they tend to keep hitting one note, like one word or a variation on a word.
And whenever you repeat a word over and over again, you start to think, does this mean anything?
Is this what the word is? And that's one of the real techniques I think Shakespeare uses in his sonnets to draw us into a kind of internal world.
I don't think they refer to things outside themselves. I suppose that's what I mean.
And one question that that I get is about ten such in-depth readings of his work.
I think it's impossible to know what he intended and therefore kind of irrelevant,
because I think the question that brings up a lot to me is an English graduate and there as a teacher is what's the point?
Surely he can't have meant as much as my English teacher is saying that he meant I suppose I don't think
of any writer that what they say about their work is necessarily the most interesting thing about it.
And certainly it's not the total of it. I don't think that writers understand that.
I don't think they have a particularly privileged understanding of their work.
And I would say that even about modern writers that you might hear sometimes if you go and
hear a modern writer at a literary festival or in a bookshop talking about a book they wrote,
which you have read, that the book that they wrote does not quite seem to be the book that you read.
That's the point of reading, really. So even where we know what the authors think that their books are about,
I think as readers we can disagree with that and certainly with Shakespeare when we have no idea what he intended from his writing.
The whole point is if we were tied to what he had intended, even if we could know what that was,
we would have exhausted these plays 400 years ago, wouldn't we?
What's interesting about Shakespeare is really us that we keep changing and therefore we see a
different kind of version of ourselves or a different set of concerns in Shakespeare's work.
And what's amazing about Shakespeare's work, and it's hard to know quite why it does that,
but it's been able to hold up that mirror all kinds of different places.
So I don't think I do think Shakespeare does intend all these meanings. And I think.
In some ways, our ability to interpret them is a measure of the creativity Shakespeare inspires in other people.
That's not all for himself.