This is the fourth of five blog posts where we interviewed each member of the Binding the Bard bookbinding competition panel of judges to hear about their thoughts on Shakespeare, the First Folio, books, art, and inspiration.
Professor Emma Smith
Tell us a little about yourself and how you find yourself involved in the Binding the Bard bookbinding competition.
I’ve come to this via work on Shakespeare’s 1623 First Folio – including the copy at Durham. I’m always interested in new ways to make Shakespeare inspire creativity in the present and this seems a great opportunity.
If you could travel backwards in time and give Bishop John Cosin one book from today to add to his library, what would it be?
I think it would need to be something genuinely popular from our own day: a Harry Potter book, or something by Terry Pratchett.
If you could invite three characters from Shakespeare to dinner, who would you invite and why?
I’m interested in the women characters and what they might say after a couple of glasses of wine. So Gertrude, Hamlet’s much-maligned mum, and Beatrice, sassy heroine of Much Ado About Nothing, and perhaps Portia, the wife of Brutus, who gets cut out of the boys’ political conversations.
When considering the Durham Folio, what do you personally feel makes it special?
This book has two distinct lives: one, a long-term relationship with a library and a place; the second, a disrupted, injured status as part-book, part-object. It makes us ask really difficult questions about what a book is for, and how we show that we value both its history and its contents.