By: Michelle M,
on 1/30/2013
This is a book surrounded by a lot of hype, but fortunately, it is also one that lives up to it. O'Donnell tells the story of two young sisters forced to grow up long before their actual childhood ends. Though each handles it differently, their alternating toughness and determined ignorance both paint a picture of [...]
By: Alice,
on 1/29/2013
On 28 January 1813, Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen was published. Originally titled ‘First Impressions’, Austen was forced to re-title it with a phrase from Frances Burney’s Cecilia after the publication of Margaret Holford’s First Impressions. We’ve paired an extract from the book with a scene from the most recent dramatization to see how Austen’s words have survived the centuries.
While settling this point, she was suddenly roused by the sound of the door bell, and her spirits were a little fluttered by the idea of its being Colonel Fitzwilliam himself, who had once before called late in the evening, and might now come to enquire particularly after her.
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But this idea was soon banished, and her spirits were very differently affected, when, to her utter amazement, she saw Mr. Darcy walk into the room. In an hurried manner he immediately began an enquiry after her health, imputing his visit to a wish of hearing that she were better. She answered him with cold civility. He sat down for a few moments, and then getting up walked about the room. Elizabeth was surprised, but said not a word. After a silence of several minutes he came towards her in an agitated manner, and thus began,
‘In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.’
Elizabeth’s astonishment was beyond expression. She stared, coloured, doubted, and was silent. This he considered sufficient encouragement, and the avowal of all that he felt and had long felt for her, immediately followed. He spoke well, but there were feelings besides those of the heart to be detailed, and he was not more eloquent on the subject of tenderness than of pride. His sense of her inferiority––of its being a degradation––of the family obstacles which judgment had always opposed to inclination, were dwelt on with a warmth which seemed due to the consequence he was wounding, but was very unlikely to recommend his suit.
In spite of her deeply-rooted dislike, she could not be insensible to the compliment of such a man’s affection, and though her intentions did not vary for an instant, she was at first sorry for the pain he was to receive; till, roused to resentment by his subsequent language, she lost all compassion in anger. She tried, however, to compose herself to answer him with patience, when he should have done. He concluded with representing to her the strength of that attachment which, in spite of all his endeavours, he had found impossible to conquer; and with expressing his hope that it would now be rewarded by her acceptance of his hand. As he said this, she could easily see that he had no doubt of a favourable answer. He spoke of apprehension and anxiety, but his countenance expressed real security. Such a circumstance could only exasperate farther, and when he ceased, the colour rose into her cheeks, and she said,
‘In such cases as this, it is, I believe, the established mode to express a sense of obligation for the sentiments avowed, however unequally they may be returned. It is natural that obligation should be felt, and if I could feel gratitude, I would now thank you. But I cannot––I have never desired your good opinion, and you have certainly bestowed it most unwillingly. I am sorry to have occasioned pain to any one. It has been most unconsciously done, however, and I hope will be of short duration. The feelings which, you tell me, have long prevented the acknowledgment of your regard, can have little difficulty in overcoming it after this explanation.’
Mr. Darcy, who was leaning against the mantle-piece with his eyes fixed on her face, seemed to catch her words with no less resentment than surprise. His complexion became pale with anger, and the disturbance of his mind was visible in every feature. He was struggling for the appearance of composure, and would not open his lips, till he believed himself to have attained it. The pause was to Elizabeth’s feelings dreadful. At length, in a voice of forced calmness, he said,
‘And this is all the reply which I am to have the honour of expecting! I might, perhaps, wish to be informed why, with so little endeavour at civility, I am thus rejected. But it is of small importance.’
‘I might as well enquire,’ replied she, ‘why with so evident a design of offending and insulting me, you chose to tell me that you liked me against your will, against your reason, and even against your character? Was not this some excuse for incivility, if I was uncivil? But I have other provocations. You know I have. Had not my own feelings decided against you, had they been indifferent, or had they even been favourable, do you think that any consideration would tempt me to accept the man, who has been the means of ruining, perhaps for ever, the happiness of a most beloved sister?’
As she pronounced these words, Mr. Darcy changed colour; but the emotion was short, and he listened without attempting to interrupt her while she continued.
‘I have every reason in the world to think ill of you. No motive can excuse the unjust and ungenerous part you acted there. You dare not, you cannot deny that you have been the principal, if not the only means of dividing them from each other, of exposing one to the censure of the world for caprice and instability, the other to its derision for disappointed hopes, and involving them both in misery of the acutest kind.’
She paused, and saw with no slight indignation that he was listening with an air which proved him wholly unmoved by any feeling of remorse. He even looked at her with a smile of affected incredulity.
‘Can you deny that you have done it?’ she repeated.
With assumed tranquillity he then replied, ‘I have no wish of denying that I did every thing in my power to separate my friend from your sister, or that I rejoice in my success. Towards him I have been kinder than towards myself.’
Elizabeth disdained the appearance of noticing this civil reflection, but its meaning did not escape, nor was it likely to conciliate her.
‘But it is not merely this affair,’ she continued, ‘on which my dislike is founded. Long before it had taken place, my opinion of you was decided. Your character was unfolded in the recital which I received many months ago from Mr. Wickham. On this subject, what can you have to say? In what imaginary act of friendship can you here defend yourself? or under what misrepresentation, can you here impose upon others?’
‘You take an eager interest in that gentleman’s concerns,’ said Darcy in a less tranquil tone, and with a heightened colour.
‘Who that knows what his misfortunes have been, can help feeling an interest in him?’
‘His misfortunes!’ repeated Darcy contemptuously, ‘yes, his misfortunes have been great indeed.’
‘And of your infliction,’ cried Elizabeth with energy. ‘You have reduced him to his present state of poverty, comparative poverty. You have withheld the advantages, which you must know to have been designed for him. You have deprived the best years of his life, of that independence which was no less his due than his desert. You have done all this! and yet you can treat the mention of his misfortunes with contempt and ridicule.’
‘And this,’ cried Darcy, as he walked with quick steps across the room, ‘is your opinion of me! This is the estimation in which you hold me! I thank you for explaining it so fully. My faults, according to this calculation, are heavy indeed! But perhaps,’ added he, stopping in his walk, and turning towards her, ‘these offences might have been overlooked, had not your pride been hurt by my honest confession of the scruples that had long prevented my forming any serious design. These bitter accusations might have been suppressed, had I with greater policy concealed my struggles, and flattered you into the belief of my being impelled by unqualified, unalloyed inclination; by reason, by reflection, by every thing. But disguise of every sort is my abhorrence. Nor am I ashamed of the feelings I related. They were natural and just. Could you expect me to rejoice in the inferiority of your connections? To congratulate myself on the hope of relations, whose condition in life is so decidedly beneath my own?’
Elizabeth felt herself growing more angry every moment; yet she tried to the utmost to speak with composure when she said,
‘You are mistaken, Mr. Darcy, if you suppose that the mode of your declaration affected me in any other way, than as it spared me the concern which I might have felt in refusing you, had you behaved in a more gentleman-like manner.’
She saw him start at this, but he said nothing, and she continued, ‘You could not have made me the offer of your hand in any possible way that would have tempted me to accept it.’
Again his astonishment was obvious; and he looked at her with an expression of mingled incredulity and mortification. She went on.
‘From the very beginning, from the first moment I may almost say, of my acquaintance with you, your manners impressing me with the fullest belief of your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain of the feelings of others, were such as to form that ground-work of disapprobation, on which succeeding events have built so immoveable a dislike; and I had not known you a month before I felt that you were the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed on to marry.’
‘You have said quite enough, madam. I perfectly comprehend your feelings, and have now only to be ashamed of what my own have been. Forgive me for having taken up so much of your time, and accept my best wishes for your health and happiness.’
And with these words he hastily left the room, and Elizabeth heard him the next moment open the front door and quit the house. The tumult of her mind was now painfully great. She knew not how to support herself, and from actual weakness sat down and cried for half an hour. Her astonishment, as she reflected on what had passed, was increased by every review of it. That she should receive an offer of marriage from Mr. Darcy! that he should have been in love with her for so many months! so much in love as to wish to marry her in spite of all the objections which had made him prevent his friend’s marrying her sister, and which must appear at least with equal force in his own case, was almost incredible! it was gratifying to have inspired unconsciously so strong an affection. But his pride, his abominable pride, his shameless avowal of what he had done with respect to Jane, his unpardonable assurance in acknowledging, though he could not justify it, and the unfeeling manner in which he had mentioned Mr. Wickham, his cruelty towards whom he had not attempted to deny, soon overcame the pity which the consideration of his attachment had for a moment excited…
Pride and Prejudice has delighted generations of readers with its unforgettable cast of characters, carefully choreographed plot, and a hugely entertaining view of the world and its absurdities. With the arrival of eligible young men in their neighborhood, the lives of Mr. and Mrs. Bennet and their five daughters are turned inside out and upside down. Pride encounters prejudice, upward-mobility confronts social disdain, and quick-wittedness challenges sagacity, as misconceptions and hasty judgements lead to heartache and scandal, but eventually to true understanding, self-knowledge, and love. In this supremely satisfying story, Jane Austen balances comedy with seriousness, and witty observation with profound insight.
For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics onTwitter and Facebook.
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The post How ardently I admire and love you… appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Alice,
on 1/28/2013
Two hundred years after the initial publication of Pride and Prejudice, commodities marketed to Janeites overwhelmingly emphasize Jane Austen’s powers as an advisor. Shoppers can choose among volumes called Finding Mr. Darcy: Jane Austen’s Rules for Love or Dating Mr. Darcy: The Smart Girl’s Guide to Sensible Romance; The Jane Austen Guide to Life, Happily Ever After, Modern Life’s Dilemmas, Dating, Good Manners, and coming soon, Thrift; older miniatures such as Jane Austen’s Little Advice Book, Jane Austen’s Little Instruction Book, Jane Austen’s Universal Truths; books called The Jane Austen Companion to Love and to Life but also the 2013 Jane Austen Companion to Life mini wall calendar; and works of fiction masquerading as advice, with titles such as The Jane Austen Marriage Manual, Dear Jane: A Heroine’s Guide to Life and Love, What Would Jane Austen Do?, and even Jane Austen Ruined My Life: a novel. This visibility of her so-called guidance helps to reveal how attractively Austen perfected the didactic tradition of the eighteenth-century novel. Austen’s predecessor Samuel Richardson aspired to be a guide for his readers on matters of romance and conduct, but no one today looks for counsel in A Collection of such of the Moral and Instructive Sentiments, Cautions, Aphorisms, Reflections, and Observations contained in the History, as are presumed to be of general Use and Service or any of the other volumes of extracts he compiled from his novels. Meanwhile, a drawback of Austen’s marketability as an advisor is that it risks branding Austen’s admirers as sexually and socially desperate. So at least my students tell me. Far from the companion who guarantees one’s literary distinction, Austen the mentor can be a style-cramper for young women in just the way that Mrs. Bennet is for Elizabeth Bennet: association with her suggests that one lacks a romantic partner and is willing to make an unseemly effort to get one.
What I find remarkable in this latest twist to Austen’s reception is how precisely yet incompletely it follows cues set up in the opening sentence of Austen’s best-loved novel. There, Austen takes Richardson’s notion that reading can turn things around for your romantic life and gives it a utopian dimension, offering up a narrator who can help readers not just with counsel but with limitless powers for active intervention in the world. When Pride and Prejudice’s narrator adopts what initially seems to be the tone of an advising aunt to give the reader’s implicit antecedent question, “will my beloved ever propose to me?” the coy but distinctly encouraging answer, “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife,” she offers to write us the love story we want through the sheer force of her magical thinking and ours: her control over the fictional world will extend into our world and dictate the behavior of that particular man whose name we have mentally substituted for the general term, “single man.” By an entirely different logic, the words “universally acknowledged” hint that the narrator is prepared to extort a proposal for the reader from the man in question by using group pressure against him. In a society ruled by the gentleman’s code requiring that if it is generally supposed that a man will marry a particular, willing woman, he is honor-bound to propose to her, power to make matches goes to anyone who can persuasively articulate universal opinion, as the narrator here proves that she can do. The reader’s romantic hopes get an additional boost from the sanguine expectations of others—how could the narrator and a whole universe of acknowledgers be mistaken?—and from the sense that, since she herself acknowledges her beloved’s want of a wife, she belongs to a prestigious group, one whose alliance with herself can only further her chances with her beloved.
Of course, the trap laid for that straight, nubile woman and every reader willing to identify with her soon appears. The next sentences of the novel oblige the reader to recognize that the universe whose apparent prestige was the basis for her romantic optimism has boundaries: standing outside it are the single man himself, whose “feelings or views” may, the narrator warns, be “little known”; the intelligent Mr. Bennet, who sarcastically asks whether marrying a Bennet daughter was Mr. Bingley’s “design in coming here”; and indeed the narrator, who abruptly revokes her opening promises, prepares to draw a mustache on her once-flattering portrait of the reader, and transforms her own persona. Suddenly, the advisory figure to whom the reader confessed the name of her beloved no longer looks like that comfortable confidante, benign and wise, who was ready to grant the reader’s desire and testify to the dignity of that desire, but rather like Mrs. Bennet: liable to misjudge the desires of eligible men, unable to tell the difference between a vulgar local community and the world, abjectly desperate to find her protégée a husband, likely to sink rather than raise the reader’s social status and marriageability. Having unwarily accepted the matchmaking services of this Mrs. Bennet-like figure, the reader now seems to stand condemned before the new, Mr. Bennet-like narrator coming into view, who articulated that opening sentence not to endorse its assurances but to ridicule them.
By taking Austen as fairy godmother or pathetic yenta, the Janeite and anti-Janeite camps ignore this last transformation in the narrator. Perhaps their doing so represents an insight: after all, the narrator soon eases the pressure of her threatened scorn by offering up for our identification the magnificent Elizabeth Bennet, who demolishes the law that desire for a husband makes a woman contemptible. That Pride and Prejudice, with its wealth of generalizations about love, inspires so many readers with the hopeful, even euphoric eagerness for rules that it sends up in Mary Bennet, Mr. Collins, and the reader of its opening sentences suggests that Austen retained a fundamental allegiance to advice-book tradition she knew so well how to mock.
Sarah Raff is Associate Professor of English at Pomona College. She served as the foreign fiction correspondent for Publishers Weekly from 1997 to 1998. Her upcoming book about Jane Austin’s erotic evolution will be published by Oxford in September 2013.
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Image credits: (1) The submissive reader by Rene Magritte, 1928 via wikipaintings.org. (2) Altered version of Dear Abby star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Original photo by Ben McCune, 2006. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
The post Happy Birthday, Pride and Prejudice! Would you find me a date? appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Alice,
on 1/27/2013
The recent appearance of Fifty Shades of Alice, which is (I am told) about a girl who follows a vibrating white rabbit down a hole, made me reflect, not for the first time, that children’s literature is full of mysteries.
For example, how did a satire on literary fashions in the early 1900s, centred on the retreatist, misogynistic fears of middle-aged men ever become a cosy national icon?* How did a series of novels satirising the British middle-class, and closely based on the 19th-century mores of the public-school system (which scarcely exists elsewhere) become the world’s biggest seller?** Or how did an anti-heroic, anti-empire broadside, whose narrator is corrupt and whose most memorable (and most admired) character is a brutal multi-murderer, become a classic for boys?*** Perhaps most curious of all, how did an intensely personal present from an eccentric bachelor to a little girl, packed with intimate in-jokes, ever come to be translated into most of the languages on earth?
Since its first translation in 1869, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has become, in Ireland Eibhlís i dTír na Niongantas, in Denmark, Maries haendelser I vidunderlandet, in Finland, Liisan seikkailut ihmemaailmassa, in Iceland, Lísa í undralandi, and in Wales Anturiaethau Alys yng Ngwlad Hud and Alys yn nhir swyn. Alis, Alisa, Alicja, Alicji, Alenka, Elenkine, Elisi, Elsje, or Else, has her adventures im Wunderland, du pays des merveilles, nel paese delle meraviglie, csodaországban, I eventyrland, w krainie czarów, ülkesinde, or, in Slovak, divotvornej krajine (literally, the mad country). And, perhaps most improbably, the native peoples of northern South Australia, whose lands include Uluru, or Ayer’s Rock, and whose language is Pitjantjatjara, can read about Alitjinja ngura tjukurtjarangka (Alitji in the Dreamtime). The book was translated into Russian by Vladimir Nabokov, a link that has not escaped critics; an Italian edition in 1962, La meravigliosa Alice was subtitled Una lucida invenzione, la creazione poetica di una ‘lolita’ vittoriana.
Like other great pieces of popular culture, it has proved to be highly adaptable: Alice has appeared in Blufferland, Dairyland, Cookery-land, Blunderland, Virusland, Orchestralia, Police Court Land, Plunderland, Puzzle-land, Jurisprudencia, Debitland, Llechweddland (near Blaenau Ffestiniog in Wales) and even in Stitches (a book of patterns). And the title or the structure or the characters of the book have been used for political satire (Edward Hope’s Alice in the Delighted States (1928)), for propaganda (James Dyrenforth’s Adolf in Blunderland (1940)) and as a reference in conspiracy theory (David Icke’s Alice in Wonderland and the World Trade Center Disaster. Why the Official Story of 9/11 is a Monumental Lie (2002)).
A dress in the style of that worn in the 1972 film ‘Alice in Wonderland’ featuring Fiona Fullerton in the title role. Dress designed, owned and photographed by Birgit Compton. Public domain.
Of course, some of this can be accounted for by the literary snowball effect – once a book is famous, it stays famous, with the help of royalty-free publishing and marketing – but how did it become famous in the first place? And even more mystifying, how did it become internationally famous?
Conventional wisdom attributes the initial success of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to the historical moment. For the child readers of 1865 it must have made a liberating change from the moralising tone of almost all the children’s books that preceded it. Carroll was, rather anarchically, slyly supporting the rebellious but frustrated nature of a real little girl. All the characters that Alice meets are adult (and mad), and the book is full of parodies of the pious verses that children were obliged to learn. And perhaps he was also slyly supporting rebellious but frustrated adults (who, after all bought the book for their children): to them it must have appeared as a refreshingly sceptical take on life in an age of increasing scepticism.
Its international success is more difficult to explain; it is, after all, an unmistakably British, or English book — a characteristic perhaps as likely to alienate as attract overseas readers. It is a world revolving around endless tea-parties, garden parties, a savage game of croquet (the All England Croquet Club was established in 1868), river-bank picnics, and comfortable, kitten-filled nurseries. Then there are the perhaps quintessentially English eccentrics: the Mad Hatter, the Cheshire Cat, the Mock Turtle, the homicidal Queen, the arrogantly ignorant Duchess, the servile courtiers, the mad jurymen — do these ingredients add up to something that could not but be English? And most of all, passing unscathed through all the lunacy, is the figure of Alice, polite, well-bred, ladylike. No Pinocchio or Jo March is she!
The answer, if there is an answer, may lie in the fact that for any reader, of any generation in any place, Alice’s Adventure’s in Wonderland is disturbing. It is a seemingly endless series of semantic Chinese boxes, emotional and intellectual, of precise and general application. It is never quite what it seems — it is anything but nonsense — and why it ever became to be considered as such is perhaps the biggest mystery of all.
Peter Hunt was the first specialist in Children’s Literature to be appointed full Professor of English in a British university. Peter Hunt has written or edited eighteen books on the subject of children’s literature, including An Introduction to Children’s Literature (OUP, 1994) and has edited Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Wind in the Willows, Treasure Island and The Secret Garden for Oxford World’s Classics. 27 January 2013 is the 181st birthday of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (strictly speaking, Lewis Carroll will be 157 on 1 March, the day in 1856 when the name of Dodgson‘s alter ego was agreed upon).
For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics on Twitter and Facebook.
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*The Wind in the Willows
**Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone and series
***Treasure Island
The post The curious appeal of Alice appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Kirsty,
on 1/26/2013
There had been rumours for months. When Dublin’s Abbey Theatre announced that John Millington Synge’s new play The Playboy of the Western World would be produced on Saturday, 26 January 1907, all were on alert. Controversy had followed Synge since the production of his first Wicklow play, The Shadow of the Glen, in which a bold, young, and lonely woman leaves a loveless May/December marriage to go off with a fine-talking Tramp who rhapsodizes over the freedom of the roads. Irish women wouldn’t do that!
In The Playboy the action takes place in a public house on the wild coast of Mayo, when a travel-stained stranger enters and is persuaded to tell his story. Impressed, the admiring on-stage audience thinks he must be very brave indeed to have killed his father, and in turn the young tramp blossoms into the daring rollicking hero they believe him to be – winning all the prizes at the races and the love of the publican’s daughter. But then his father, with a bandaged head, turns up seeking his worthless son who is not the courageous father-slayer after all. Disillusioned and angry at the loss of their hero, the onstage crowd turns brutally on Christy, who tries to prove that he is indeed capable of savage deeds, even attempting unsuccessfully to kill his father a third time. The play ends with father and son leaving together, dismissing the onstage audience with the words “Shut yer yelling for if you’re after making a mighty man of me this day by the power of a lie, you’re setting me now to think if it’s a poor thing to be lonesome, it’s worse maybe to go mixing with the fools of earth”.
Irish actors Sara Allgood (“Pegeen Mike”) and J. M. Kerrigan (“Shawn Keogh”), in ‘The Playboy of the Western World’, Plymouth Theatre, Boston, 1911.
Yet the playwright does not seem to have been aware of the response his play would cause, insisting that it was merely a comedy, an “extravaganza”, meant to entertain, and that “the story — in its ESSENCE — is probable, given the psychic state of the locality.” Not to this audience, who charged him with immorality, obscenity and blasphemy, “a sordid, squalid and repulsive picture of Irish life and character”, making a hero of “a foul-mouthed scoundrel and parricide”.
For three years Synge had painstakingly developed his original idea, producing more than a thousand typescript pages, drafts and scenarios, all the way to draft “K” before he finally hit on the brilliantly ambiguous final form. For a “playboy” may be an athlete, performer, seducer, trickster, manipulator, creator, hero, or all of the above; while “the western world” might refer to County Mayo, to the United States, or to this world as contrasted with that “eastern world” of folk and fairy tales — or to all. “What a blessing you did not go to version L, if Version K had such a disastrous effect!” a friend commented in the turbulent months that followed.
Like Christy’s own tale of slaying his Da, the story of his injuries to Ireland’s good name continued to grow with the years. When the Abbey theatre took the play on tour to the United States, the clash between the idea of a pure nationhood cherished by Irish immigrants and what they saw on stage was even more pronounced. In New York missiles were thrown on the stage, and a hundred police attempted to keep order. Lady Gregory, who led the tour, received death threats; Theodore Roosevelt’s presence at the second performance ensured a more sedate reception. But when the company arrived in Philadelphia all hell broke loose, and the players were hauled into court by an Irish-American patriot who accused the company and the play of indecency. The case was dismissed when the judge learned that the accusers had not read the text.
In the theatre individual response to what is clearly not real can quickly become an excuse for objecting to what is perceived to be real. Audiences have always felt justified in expressing their disapproval of what is staged, or attempted to be staged. In 18th century London theatre managers petitioned the King for a guard of soldiers; one manager engaged thirty prize-fighters as well. Destruction of scenery, benches and even musical instruments was all too common when the audience felt cheated; often foreign performers were pelted with rotten fruit and other missiles (and told to go home).
Patriotism was perhaps the most frequent cause, especially in Ireland where the stage Irishman, created by English dramatists, was a subject of mockery and ridicule, and where class, nationalism, and religion were inextricably entwined. In 1907 however the disturbance was premeditated, with members of the audience carrying in stink bombs, rotten vegetables, trumpets, whistles, and other paraphernalia. There was clearly an organized cabal determined to silence a work which is now considered a masterpiece of comedy, performed throughout the world and recently the centrepiece of a world tour.
Would such events happen today? We are much more accustomed to onstage violence; but censorship is still very much with us. Synge suggests that to hold a dream is better than to live with caution; the outsider serves to perpetuate the myth-making process while at the same time challenging it, introducing a heightened self-awareness which embraces community on both sides of the footlights. Thus the audience is caught off-guard, encouraged to enter the world of fantasy, then betrayed by a reality of a different sort — the dream itself can threaten if fulfilled; we are briefly dangled above two worlds at once.
Ann Saddlemyer has published extensively on Irish and Canadian theatre and edited the plays of Lady Gregory and the letters between the founding Directors of the Abbey Theatre. Her book Becoming George: The Life of Mrs W.B. Yeats was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography. She has most recently edited W.B. Yeats and George Yeats: The Letters. She is the editor of the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World and Other Plays.
For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics on Twitter and Facebook.
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Image credit: From the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Archive, Boston [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
The post The Playboy Riots of 1907 appeared first on OUPblog.
By: John Kenney,
on 1/25/2013
I didn't get the job. You probably saw it in the New York Times yesterday. The job was director of dance at the Paris Opera Ballet. It went, instead, to Benjamin Millepied, the choreographer and a former principal at New York City Ballet. And the star of Black Swan. And Natalie Portman's husband. Is it [...]
By: Dianah,
on 1/25/2013
How to describe Beautiful Ruins? It's such an odd yet enchanting book. The characters are a quirky mix of the commonplace and the extraordinary: a befuddled innkeeper from a tiny Italian town, a haunted ex-military wannabe novelist, a beautiful but sick young starlet, a hideously nipped-and-tucked aging movie producer, a stranded, strung-out musician, a screenwriter [...]
By: ChloeF,
on 1/25/2013
As we sit down to enjoy our Burns Suppers on Friday, it is worth pausing to ask ourselves just how well we know some of the songs and poems that are a feature of the occasion. Editing and presenting a selection of his texts in the order in which they were published, taking as my copy-text the version of the poem or song published on that occasion, has given me many new insights into the original contexts of Burns’s work. The advantage of this procedure is that it invites the modern reader to think about the Burns encountered by his first readers, the public Burns of the 1780s, 1790s and later, helping us (I hope) to bypass some of the cultural baggage that has accumulated around the poet and to come at his work afresh.
The results of this can occasionally be surprising. Let me take one example: ‘Bruce’s Address to his troops at Bannockburn’, often known as ‘Scots, wha hae’. This song was first published, anonymously, in the London daily Morning Chronicle for 8 May 1794. Under the owner-editorship of James Perry (born Pirie, in Aberdeen) this was the widely-read national journal of the Charles James Fox’s party in the Commons, bitterly opposed to the government of William Pitt and sympathetic to the French Revolution. Simply putting it in this context directs the reader to its original meaning, as a song celebrating not medieval Scottish resistance to English overlordship, but the contemporary mobilisation of the French people in the levée en masse in response to the new coalition ranged against their new republic. But the poem we find in the Morning Chronicle is not the one we think we know. It begins:
Scots, wha hae wi’ Wallace bled,
Scots, wham BRUCE has aften led,
Welcome to your gory bed,
Or to glorious victorie!
That word ‘glorious’ is not in the version of the song we sing today. Where did it come from? Well, Burns added two syllables to the last line of each of his verses to make them fit a different tune, one suggested by his publisher, George Thomson. Burns liked this revised version, and sent it in manuscript to some of his friends. This was the song that found its way to the Morning Chronicle; it was also republished from that source in cheap pamphlets later in the decade. So if we are interested in the Burns that radical or working-class readers were reading in the 1790s, we need to read this version of the song, with the longer line ending its stanzas, and sung to a different tune, rather than the version that has come down to us from Burns’s first draft.
Or take the democratic anthem ‘A man’s a man for a’ that’, sung so movingly by Sheena Wellington at the reconvening of the Scottish Parliament in 1999. This was first published, again anonymously, in the Glasgow Magazine for August 1795, like the Morning Chronicle a radical publication. Its famous opening stanza is as follows:
Is there, for honest poverty
That hangs his head, and a’ that;
The coward-slave, we pass him by,
We dare be poor for a’ that!
For a’ that, and a’ that.
Our toils obscure, and a’ that,
The rank is but the guinea’s stamp,
The man’s the gowd for a’ that.
Yet this stanza is missing from the poem in the Glasgow Magazine. Why should this be? We have no manuscript evidence that Burns ever wrote a version of this poem without this stanza, on which the magazine might have based their copy. But a clue as to the reason for its omission might lie in that phrase, ‘coward-slave’. Burns here, as elsewhere, uses the term ‘slave’ to mean ‘one who submits to tyranny’, who does not fight for his political liberty: a meaning familiar from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century political rhetoric. But the late eighteenth century had seen the rise of a campaign against slavery in quite different sense: the slavery endured by Africans in Britain’s West Indian colonies. The radicalism of the Glasgow Magazine included adherence to such modern causes. The same issue that includes Burns’s poem comments on recent complaints about the disruption that war with France was causing colonial trade; but, asks the magazine, ‘of what consequence are the present disappointments of the West India merchants, compared with the miseries of millions of Africans, whom their infamous trafic has reduced to slavery […]?’ It is possible that, in this context, Burns’s reference to ‘coward-slaves’, culpable in their own subjection, looked out-of-place, perhaps out-of-touch with current radical priorities, and the editors decided simply to cut the stanza that contained it.
The Glasgow Magazine version is also the origin of a variant in the opening line of the third (or fourth) stanza, which in all other versions reads, ‘A prince can make a belted knight’. In the magazine, this is ‘The king can make a belted knight.’ Again, this matters if we are interested in the song being read by its first readers, in this case Scottish radicals in the 1790s. But this song is clearly the product of a radicalism that cannot simply be identified with Robert Burns. It is likely that the editors substituted ‘The king’ for ‘A prince’ to make the song more pointedly sceptical towards the British monarchy in particular, rather than monarchy in general, than the version which came to them. We are familiar with the pressure from the government under which Burns worked as soon as he became an employee of the crown. But here is an instance where Burns’s work seems to have censored not by the state, but by his political allies, for whom ‘A man’s a man for a’ that’ as Burns wrote it was perhaps not quite radical enough, or radical in a slightly old-fashioned way. In this case as in so many others, returning Burn’s poems and songs to the versions and context of their first publication can help us qualify and complicate the simplifying versions of his work that have gained currency over the years.
Robert P. Irvine has written on Jane Austen and is the editor of The Edinburgh Anthology of Scottish Literature, 2 vols. (Kennedy and Boyd, 2009), R.L. Stevenson’s Prince Otto for the New Edinburgh Edition of the Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (forthcoming), and Selected Poems and Songs (OUP, 2013).
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Image Credit: By William Hole R.S.A. (The Poetry of Burns, Centenary Edition) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
The post A fresh look at the work of Robert Burns appeared first on OUPblog.
By: John Kenney,
on 1/24/2013
Here's something I've noticed in my incredibly short time as a published author: how frequently people — in interviews, at readings — ask how I write. Do you write in the morning or the afternoon? Do you write in longhand or on a computer, and if it is a computer, is it a Mac, and [...]
By: lstahl,
on 1/24/2013
One of the reasons that the master heister Parker is still with us fifty years after pulling his first job is that he’s very good at keeping quiet. He knows better than to plan a job in the town where he’s going to pull it, and he certainly doesn’t encourage advance attention.
That’s too bad, because the job he’s pulling this weekend is getting a lot of publicity. Tomorrow night sees the premiere of Parker, a new movie starring Jason Statham and Jennifer Lopez—the first adaptation to actually use Parker’s name—and that’s brought a spate of attention to Parker in all his incarnations.
In the Village Voice, Nick Pinkerton runs through the long (and, let’s be honest, checkered) history of adaptations of Parker. Statham’s English accent is a first for Parker, but Pinkerton points out that the movies have always found him mutable:
[H]e has been black—Jim Brown, too gentle in 1968′s wasted opportunity The Split [based on The Seventh]—and (sort of) a 25-year-old Danish girl. Made in U.S.A. (1966), with a trench-coated Anna Karina in the lead, is ostensibly based on Stark’s The Jugger, though it’s really but one element in Jean-Luc Godard’s mulligan stew of American pulp references.
Donald Westlake loved pointing out the variety of the movie Parkers. He liked to joke,
A friend of mine said, “So far, Parker’s been played by a white guy, a black guy and a woman. I think the character lacks definition.”
You can find that line, along with insight from some of Westlake’s fans and peers (including Elmore Leonard and Otto Penzler) in an article from the Los Angeles Times from 2009, just after Westlake’s death, that looked at the difficulties filmmakers have faced bringing his books to the screen.
This time around, things seem more promising—if for no other reason than that the director himself is the one acknowledging Westlake’s importance and writing about the challenges of adapting Parker. Last week’s Los Angeles Times featured a piece by Taylor Hackford that nodded to the film’s forebears and wrestled with the question of “why should audiences want to spend time with this sociopath?”—as well as the tough job of finding an actor who can embody Parker’s quiet, capable menace.
Parker’s ferocious work ethic has infected us here at Chicago, too, and this week we’re proud to debut a new site for Parker fans, in honor of the fiftieth anniversary and the film. We’ve totted up the take (in dollars and blood) from each book, assembled a list of Parker’s Rules to Heist By, and, biggest and best of all, built a sortable character guide that covers every single one of the 498 people to cross Parker’s path in the twenty-four novels. Who lives? Who dies? Who gets away with the swag? We’ve got it all for you at www.parkerseries.com.
The Internet loves lists, so we’ll close with one that seems like it might be of a bit more practical value than Parker’s maxims. After all, while we’re not all heisters, we might all be targets. So herewith, our advice to you on how not to get robbed by Parker:
1 Get a custom burglar alarm. Oh, Parker and his guys will get through it regardless, but a custom one rather than an off-the-shelf number will be the difference between them getting in like, say, a hot knife through butter and a knife through cheese. Semi-soft cheese.
2 Make sure your staff is happy. Disgruntled employees complain to their girlfriends and boyfriends, talk to strangers, and even sell their inside knowledge to heisters. You keep your people satisfied, you keep Parker away.
3 Don’t run your business as a front for the Outfit. If you do, Parker will likely stay away—until, that is, he has a beef with the Outfit. And you really don’t want to be the middleman there.
4 Don’t have anything he wants. We recommend possessing only books. He’s not much of a reader, that Parker.
5 Finally, and most important: don’t try to cheat him out of his share. Just don’t. Look up regret in the dictionary and you’ll find a stipple portrait of Parker, silently staring you down.
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By: Alice,
on 1/24/2013
The twenty-fifth of January is the annual celebration of the Scottish poet Robert Burns. Legend has it that in 1801 a group of men who had known Burns gathered together to mark the fifth anniversary of his death and celebrate his life and work. The event proved a great success, so they agreed to meet again the following January on the poet’s birthday, and thus the tradition of Burns Night Supper was born. Today the celebration still features a haggis and recitation or singing of Burns’s work, in a tradition reaching back to the very first Burns Night celebration.
As Scots the world-over prepare to celebrate Burns Night we are pleased to be able to present an extract from the new book Robert Burns’s Selected Poems and Songs. It presents all the selected songs and poems in their original version, with the original melody printed alongside the text for the songs. Our extract, A Red Red Rose, is one of Burns’s most famous songs, originally published in Volume V of The Scots Musical Museum (1796), and the text of the poem has been set by many composers over the years.
A Red Red Rose
O my Luve’s like a red, red rose,
That’s newly sprung in June;
O my Luve’s like the melodie
That’s sweetly play’d in tune.
As fair art thou, my bonie lass,
So deep in luve am I;
And I will luve thee still, my Dear,
Till a’ the seas gang dry.
Till a’ the seas gang dry, my Dear,
And the rocks melt wi’ the sun:
O I will love thee still my dear,
While the sands o’ life shall run.
And fare thee weel, my only Luve!
And fare thee weel, a while!
And I will come again, my Luve,
Tho’ it were ten thousand mile!
There are numerous different versions of this famous and evocative song. Here at Oxford University Press one of our favourites is John Gardner’s setting of A Red Red Rose in his choral work, A Burns Sequence. Gardner composed a new melody instead of using the traditional melody Robert Burns chose, and it makes a beautiful song. Take a listen to The National Youth Choir of Scotland’s recording with soloist Ross Buddie.
[See post to listen to audio]
Audio courtesy of the National Youth Choir of Scotland
Enjoy your Burns Night celebrations!
Anwen Greenaway is a Promotion Manager in Sheet Music at Oxford University Press and she would like to thank from Judith Luna, Senior Commissioning Editor, and Jenni Crosskey, Production Editor, for their assistance with this blog post. Read her previous blog posts.
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The post A song for Burns Night 2013 appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Jeremy,
on 1/24/2013
The only prose work from Martín Adán, The Cardboard House was originally published in 1928 when the Peruvian poet was 20 years young. Set in the Barranco district of Lima, The Cardboard House came to be an influential work preceding the Latin American Boom. Nearly plotless, the story follows a young narrator around the city's [...]
By: John Kenney,
on 1/23/2013
May I ask you an asinine question? If you were a brand, what would you be? Are you a Lexus or a Volvo? Nike or Adidas? McDonald's or Burger King? I spent 17 years working as a copywriter. These are the kinds of questions often bandied about in ad agencies and focus groups. We also [...]
By: John Kenney,
on 1/22/2013
Well, it's January 22 and you know what that means. It's time for the World Economic Forum at Davos! What fun! Have you been? Neither have I. But then, it's not ideally suited to freelance writers and first-time novelists for a number of reasons. One, I don't own a plane. Two, I'm not the CEO [...]
By: Renee Pemberton,
on 1/22/2013
I admit it: I have trouble retaining the details of books. Most texts eventually get relegated to a dark corner of my mind, slowly accumulating dust until they're barely visible at all. The only thing I can remember about DeLillo's White Noise is that the narrator's wife is named Babette, The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen [...]
By: Alice,
on 1/22/2013
Are you an Athena when it comes to literary allusions, or are they your kryptonite? Either way, the Oxford Dictionary of Reference and Allusion can be your Henry Higgins, providing fascinating information on the literary and pop culture references that make reading and entertainment so rich. Take this quiz, Zorro, and leave your calling card.
Andrew Delahunty and Sheila Dignen are freelance lexicographers who have extensive experience compiling dictionaries. From classical mythology to modern movies and TV shows, the revised and updated Oxford Dictionary of Reference and Allusion, third edition explains the meanings of more than 2,000 allusions in use in modern English, from Abaddon to Zorro, Tartarus to Tarzan, and Rambo to Rubens.
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The post Do you know your references and allusions? appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Jeremy,
on 1/21/2013
Despite being nearly half a millennium old, The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes remains eminently readable, charming, and more than a little funny. Published anonymously in 1554 (the authorship debate rages ever on), the novella was banned and later censored as part of the Spanish Inquisition for its allegedly heretical content. The Life of Lazarillo [...]
By: Kirsty,
on 1/20/2013
Praeterita, John Ruskin’s incomplete autobiography, was written between periods of serious mental illness at the end of his career, and is an eloquent analysis of the guiding powers of his life, both public and private. An elegy for lost places and people, it recounts Ruskin’s intense childhood, his time as an undergraduate at Oxford, and his journeys across France, the Alps, and northern Italy. Attentive to the human or divine meaning of everything around him, Praeterita is an astonishing account of revelation. In the following excerpt, Ruskin remembers his childhood home.
When I was about four years old my father found himself able to buy the lease of a house on Herne Hill, a rustic eminence four miles south of the ‘Standard in Cornhill’; of which the leafy seclusion remains, in all essential points of character, unchanged to this day: certain Gothic splendours, lately indulged in by our wealthier neighbours, being the only serious innovations; and these are so graciously concealed by the fine trees of their grounds, that the passing viator remains unappalled by them; and I can still walk up and down the piece of road between the Fox tavern and the Herne Hill station, imagining myself four years old.
Our house was the northernmost of a group which stand accurately on the top or dome of the hill, where the ground is for a small space level, as the snows are, (I understand,) on the dome of Mont Blanc; presently falling, however, in what may be, in the London clay formation, considered a precipitous slope, to our valley of Chamouni (or of Dulwich) on the east; and with a softer descent into Cold Harbour-lane on the west: on the south, no less beautifully declining to the dale of the Effra, (doubtless shortened from Effrena, signifying the ‘Unbridled’ river; recently, I regret to say, bricked over for the convenience of Mr Biffin, chemist, and others); while on the north, prolonged indeed with slight depression some half mile or so, and receiving, in the parish of Lambeth, the chivalric title of ‘Champion Hill,’ it plunges down at last to efface itself in the plains of Peckham, and the rural barbarism of Goose Green.
The group, of which our house was the quarter, consisted of two precisely similar partner-couples of houses, gardens and all to match; still the two highest blocks of buildings seen from Norwood on the crest of the ridge; so that the house itself, three-storied, with garrets above, commanded, in those comparatively smokeless days, a very notable view from its garret windows, of the Norwood hills on one side, and the winter sunrise over them; and of the valley of the Thames on the other, with Windsor telescopically clear in the distance, and Harrow, conspicuous always in fine weather to open vision against the summer sunset. It had front and back garden in sufficient proportion to its size; the front, richly set with old evergreens, and well-grown lilac and laburnum; the back, seventy yards long by twenty wide, renowned over all the hill for its pears and apples, which had been chosen with extreme care by our predecessor, (shame on me to forget the name of a man to whom I owe so much!) — and possessing also a strong old mulberry tree, a tall whiteheart cherry tree, a black Kentish one, and an almost unbroken hedge, all round, of alternate gooseberry and currant bush; decked, in due season, (for the ground was wholly benefi cent,) with magical splendor of abundant fruit: fresh green, soft amber, and rough-bristled crimson bending the spinous branches; clustered pearl and pendant ruby joyfully discoverable under the large leaves that looked like vine.
The differences of primal importance which I observed between the nature of this garden, and that of Eden, as I had imagined it, were, that, in this one, all the fruit was forbidden; and there were no companionable beasts: in other respects the little domain answered every purpose of Paradise to me; and the climate, in that cycle of our years, allowed me to pass most of my life in it. My mother never gave me more to learn than she knew I could easily get learnt, if I set myself honestly to work, by twelve o’clock. She never allowed anything to disturb me when my task was set; if it was not said rightly by twelve o’clock, I was kept in till I knew it, and in general, even when Latin Grammar came to supplement the Psalms, I was my own master for at least an hour before half-past one dinner, and for the rest of the afternoon.
My mother, herself finding her chief personal pleasure in her flowers, was often planting or pruning beside me, at least if I chose to stay beside her. I never thought of doing anything behind her back which I would not have done before her face; and her presence was therefore no restraint to me; but, also, no particular pleasure, for, from having always been left so much alone, I had generally my own little affairs to see after; and, on the whole, by the time I was seven years old, was already getting too independent, mentally, even of my father and mother; and, having nobody else to be dependent upon, began to lead a very small, perky, contented, conceited, Cock-Robinson-Crusoe sort of life, in the central point which it appeared to me, (as it must naturally appear to geometrical animals,) that I occupied in the universe.
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Image credit: John Ruskin, 1879 by unknown (Hubert von Herkomer?) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
The post John Ruskin’s childhood home appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Alice,
on 1/13/2013
Writing to his friend Dudley Carleton on 17 January 1599, the enthusiastic correspondent John Chamberlain (1553-1628) noted that “Spencer, our principall poet, coming lately out of Ireland, died at Westminster on Satturday last.” Chamberlain’s testimony confirms that Spenser died on 13 January. Chamberlain is a good recorder of court gossip and a barometer of what interested the upper echelons of London society. Edmund Spenser’s death is reported at the end of a letter listing the marriages and deaths of people the two correspondents both knew. We have no idea what led to Spenser’s death. The few accounts we have of his last days, all of which are brief and limited in detail, fail to provide clues of his state of health or mind. The trouble is that different explanations are equally plausible. Spenser’s circumstances might have had an impact on the timing of his death, or he might simply have died of natural causes, being neither especially young nor particularly old to die in an era of relatively primitive medical practice, bad diet, and the absence of comfort when winter weather was extreme. The most striking fact is that he died within three weeks of leaving Ireland, having left in grim circumstances.
By the time of his death Spenser was undoubtedly the most celebrated and important poet writing in English. He had assumed the mantle of Sir Philip Sidney, the most important aristocratic poet before Spenser; William Shakespeare wasn’t really in Spenser’s league as a poet; John Donne and Ben Jonson were yet to emerge as poets of stature. Yet, according to Jonson, talking to William Drummond some years later Spenser “died for lack of bread.” It is unlikely that this is true as Spenser had a generous pension from the queen of £50 per annum, and had carried some letters from the desperate colonists in Ireland to the Privy Council who, surely, had not stood by and let him starve. Perhaps payments were delayed; more likely Jonson’s comments are a reflection on the catastrophic loss that Spenser had suffered when his estate was over-run in Ireland and he was forced to flee. Legend has it that Spenser and his family escaped via a cave beneath his house at Kilcolman, but it is more likely that they had already fled to the safety of Cork city before heading for London. Spenser, it seems, was recognised as an unfortunate writer, one whose talent had taken him from relatively obscure origins to unprecedented heights, only to cheat him at the last.
Cave at Kilcolman. Courtesy of Andrew Hadfield.
But if Spenser was a detested colonist in Ireland and overlooked by the authorities in England, he was celebrated and lauded by his fellow poets in London. He was buried at the end of January in Westminster Abbey. William Camden has provided the best account of what must have been a moving and significant event. Camden, like Jonson, provides evidence in his short sketch of Spenser’s life and death that Spenser was perceived to have been harshly treated in life and that he died in poverty, a belief shared by most who commented on the last months of Spenser’s life in the early seventeenth century. Camden writes:
But by a Fate which still follows Poets, he always wrastled with poverty, though he had been Secretary to the Lord Grey, Lord Deputy of Ireland. For scarce had he there settled himself in a retired Privacy, and got Leisure to write, when he was by the Rebels thrown out of his Dwelling, plundered of his Goods, and returned into England a poor man, where he shortly after died, and was interred at Westminster, near to Chaucer, at the Charge of the earl of Essex; his hearse being attended by Poets, and mournfull Elegies and Poems with the Pens that wrote them thrown into his Tomb.
The area where Spenser was thought to be buried was dug up in the inter-war period but there was no trace of the body, poems or pens.
Many of these elegies would have reappeared in print, such as that by the young Cornish poet, Charles Fitzgeoffrey (1593-1636), who had already praised Spenser as the heir of Homer in his long lament for Sir Francis Drake (1596), and who now cast him as the English Virgil in a series of Latin tributes published in 1601. There were poems from more established writers such as Nicholas Breton, whose “An Epitaph Upon Poet Spencer,” with such memorable lines as, “Sing a dirge on Spencers death, / Till your soules be out of breath,” was published as the last poem in the volume, Melancholike Humours (1600). It is also likely that another elegy written for the occasion was the unpublished Latin epigram by William Alabaster (1567-1640), ‘In Edouardum Spencerum, Britannicae poesios facile principem,’ which does sound as if it were designed for the funeral:
Fors qui sepulchre conditur siquis fuit If who’s buried here,
Quaeris uiator, dignus es qui rescias. you ask passerby, you deserve to hear.
Spencerus istic conditur, siquis fuit Spenser is buried here. If who he is
Rogare pergis, dignus es qui nescias. you go on to ask, you don’t deserve to know.
The decision to bury Spenser near to Chaucer was a first step towards defining the collection of graves of writers in the south transept, Poets’ Corner. The area was not formally designated as the resting place for the nation’s most celebrated writers until the eighteenth century, but Spenser, generally accepted as the natural heir of Chaucer, was buried next to his most illustrious predecessor, a decision that started a trend. By 1723 the site contained the graves and monuments of a number of illustrious poets: Samuel Butler, Abraham Cowley, Michael Drayton, John Dryden, Thomas Shadwell and others. A monument was eventually erected by Lady Anne Clifford. Clifford, who had been taught by Samuel Daniel and was later pictured alongside her books, which included Spenser, was clearly eager to advertise her role as a reader and patron of English poetry. The monument was built by Nicholas Stone (1585/8-1647), who noted in his account book, “I also mad a moument for Mr. Spencer, the pouett and set it up at Westmester for which the contes of Dorsett payed me 40£.” Stone was a distinguished master mason, “the best English sculptor of his generation,” who later designed John Donne’s tomb in St. Paul’s Cathedral, helped build the Banqueting House in Whitehall from Inigo Jones’s designs, as well as Goldsmith’s Hall and a number of other funeral monuments and prominent country houses. The inscription on the now destroyed monument, gave erroneous dates for the poet’s birth and death, although, at least, his Christian name was spelled correctly:
HEARE LYES (EXPECTING THE SECOND
COMMINGE OF OVR SAVIOUR CHRIST
JESVS) THE BODY OF EDMOND SPENCER,
THE PRINCE OF POETS IN HIS TYME;
WHOSE DIVINE SPIRIT NEEDS NOE
OTHIR WITNESSE THEN THE WORKS
WHICH HE LEFT BEHINDE HIM.
HE BORNE IN LONDON IN
THE YEARE 1510. AND
DIED IN THE YEARE
1596.
Spenser monument, Westminster Abbey. Reproduced with kind permission of Westminster Abbey.
According to the antiquarian John Dart (d.1730), it was not an impressive edifice, a pointed contrast to its replacement. Recommending a tour of the poets’ monuments in the South Transept, Dart notes that:
[T]he first Tomb you come at is a rough one, of coarse Marble and looks by the Moisture and Injury of the Weather, and the Nature of the Stone, much older than it is. This, whose Form is here erected to the Memory of Mr. Edmond Spencer, a Man of great Learning and such luxuriant Fancy, that his Works abound with as great Variety of Images (and curious tho’ small Paintings) as either our own or any Language can afford in any Author.
Dart, citing Camden as an authority, reproduces a Latin epitaph that was supposedly on the original tomb, although it is now no longer visible. Dart translates it as:
Here lies Spenser next to Chaucer, next to
him in talent as next to him in death. O Spenser,
here next to Chaucer the poet, as a poet you are
buried; and in your poetry you are more permanent
than in your grave. While you were alive, English
poetry lived and approved you; now you are dead,
it too must die and fears to.
Chesterfield portrait of Edmund Spenser. Reproduced with kind permission of the National Portrait Gallery, London.
Andrew Hadfield is Professor of English at the University of Sussex and the author of Edmund Spenser: A Life (OUP, 2012). He is the author of a number of works on early modern literature, including Shakespeare and Republicanism; Literature, Travel and Colonialism in the English Renaissance, 1540-1625; Spenser’s Irish Experience: Wilde Fruyt and Salvage Soyl; and Literature, Politics and National Identity: Reformation to Renaissance. He was editor of Renaissance Studies (2006-11) and is a regular reviewer for The Times Literary Supplement. Read his previous blog post “10 facts and conjectures about Edmund Spenser” and “Edmund Spenser: ‘Elizabeth’s arse-kissing poet?’”
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The post The death of Edmund Spenser appeared first on OUPblog.
By: ColleenR,
on 1/12/2013
In 1845 Henry David Thoreau left his home town of Concord, Massachusetts to begin a new life alone, in a rough hut he built himself a mile and a half away on the north-west shore of Walden Pond. Walden is Thoreau’s classic autobiographical account of this experiment in solitary living, his refusal to play by the rules of hard work and the accumulation of wealth and above all the freedom it gave him to adapt his living to the natural world around him.
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.
When we consider what, to use the words of the catechism, is the chief end of man, and what are the true necessaries and means of life, it appears as if men had deliberately chosen the common mode of living because they preferred it to any other. Yet they honestly think there is no choice left. But alert and healthy natures remember that the sun rose clear. It is never too late to give up our prejudices. No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof. What every body echoes or in silence passes by as true to-day may turn out to be falsehood to-morrow, mere smoke of opinion, which some had trusted for a cloud that would sprinkle fertilizing rain on their fields. What old people say you cannot do you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new. Old people did not know enough once, perchance, to fetch fresh fuel to keep the fire a-going; new people put a little dry wood under a pot, and are whirled round the globe with the speed of birds, in a way to kill old people, as the phrase is. Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost. One may almost doubt if the wisest man has learned any thing of absolute value by living. Practically, the old have no very important advice to give the young, their own experience has been so partial, and their lives have been such miserable failures, for private reasons, as they must believe; and it may be that they have some faith left which belies that experience, and they are only less young than they were. I have lived some thirty years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors. They have told me nothing, and probably cannot tell me any thing, to the purpose. Here is life, an experiment to a great extent untried by me; but it does not avail me that they have tried it. If I have any experience which I think valuable, I am sure to reflect that this my Mentors said nothing about.
Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Stephen Fender, Professor of American Studies and Director of the Postgraduate Centre in the Humanities, University of Sussex, this new edition of Walden considers the author in the context of his birthplace and his sense of its history: social, economic and natural. In addition, an ecological appendix provides modern identifications of the myriad plants and animals to which Thoreau gave increasingly close attention as he became acclimatized to his life in the woods by Walden Pond.
For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.
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The post Choice in the true necessaries and means of life appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Kirsty,
on 1/16/2013
At 2.00 pm on Monday 16 January 1928, there took place simultaneously the two funerals of Thomas Hardy, O.M., poet and novelist. His brother Henry and sister Kate, and his second wife Florence, had supposed that he would be buried in Stinsford, close to his parents, and beneath the tombstone he had himself designed for his first wife, Emma, leaving space for his own name to be added. But within hours of his death on 11 January, Sydney Cockerell and James Barrie had established themselves at his home at Max Gate, and determined that he should be laid in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey. Trapped between family pieties and what the men of letters bullyingly assured her were the claims of ‘the nation’, the exhausted Florence agreed to a compromise as grotesque as anything in Hardy’s fiction: his ashes were be buried in the Abbey, together with a spadeful of Dorset earth, and his heart in Stinsford churchyard.
The Dorset funeral was a quiet affair. Kate, who went to the Abbey, while Henry attended in Stinsford, recorded that ‘the good sun shone & the birds sang & everything was done simply, affectionately & well.’ That at the Abbey was a national event. Crowds waited outside in the rain to file past the open grave; Stanley Baldwin and Ramsay MacDonald were among the pall bearers. So too were Rudyard Kipling and George Bernard Shaw, as ill-matched in their height as in their politics; according to Shaw’s secretary, Blanche Patch, Kipling shook hands ‘hurriedly, and turned away as if from the Evil One’. Hardy had once proposed the creation of ‘a heathen annexe’, suitable for non-believers like Swinburne, Meredith and himself, but T. E. Lawrence, absent in Karachi, thought he might have been amused at his belated capture by Church and Establishment: ‘Hardy was too great to be suffered as an enemy to their faith: so he must be redeemed.’
Dorchester is famously Hardy’s ‘Casterbridge’, at the centre of Wessex, and many a biographer has remarked that his heart rightly belongs there. Yet when Hardy began writing, he had no reason to suppose that for more than fifty years his imagination would linger in the southwestern counties of England. Rather than a calculated first step, as he later liked to suggest, the name ‘Wessex’ was introduced casually in Far from the Madding Crowd, in a description of Greenhill Fair as ‘the Nijni Novgorod of Wessex’, when most readers must have been struck as much by the reference to Nijni Novgorod as by the disinterment of the ancient name of Wessex. In a miniature way the sentence is revealing about Hardy’s position as a regional writer. In describing the sheep fair, on ‘the busiest, merriest, noisiest day of the whole statute number’, the narrator associates himself not only with its regular visitors but also with those outsiders for whom Greenhill and Nijni Novgorod, since 1817 the site of the annual Makaryev Fair, are equally places to read about rather than to visit. He is at once a participant in local life and custom, and an educated observer of it.
Perhaps it is only just that the town has a slightly uneasy relation with Hardy and his legacy. It is at least a profitable one. Tourists began using his fiction as a guide to the area as early as the 1890s, and Hardy was canny enough to identify his work with the Wessex ‘brand’; his first volume of short stories was titled Wessex Tales, his first collection of verse Wessex Poems. ‘Wessex’ was not only what he knew; it was what he brought to the literary market-place. The brand remains: contemporary visitors can stay at the Wessex Royale hotel, travel by Wessex taxis, or have their used cars broken up by Wessex Metals. But the visitor who asks in the town centre for directions to Max Gate, or to Hardy’s birthplace at Higher Bockhampton, is likely to ask in vain. When in 1999 Prince Edward was created Earl of Wessex (an earldom defunct since the eleventh century), it was the film Shakespeare in Love, not Hardy’s work, which suggested the title.
Divided in life, then, as divided in death? The trope is obviously tempting. Hardy’s fiction is full of characters caught between two ways of life, of natives who return to find that rather than ‘native’ they have become harbingers of a wider and typically newer way of life. But the simple metaphor of division does less than justice to Hardy’s constant negotiation with the class stratification of Victorian society. Part of what Hardy took from his Wessex background, and his family ties, was the strength and will to leave, but the struggle to return imaginatively, and to recreate a past informed by the sense of its own passing, marks all his fiction and most of his verse. It is not division for which Hardy should be remembered, still less in lazy terms of a ‘snob’ trying to disown his roots, or a ‘self-educated peasant’ who could never disguise them, but the search for connection, between social groups, modes of speech, aspiration and memory, the complex sense of participancy and the still more complex right of individuals to be themselves. If the double funerals have an element of the grotesque, easily attached to the marginalising adjective ‘Hardyan’, his achievement as a poet and novelist makes him central to the ‘great tradition’ of English writing.
Phillip Mallett teaches English Literature at the University of St Andrews. He is editor of the Thomas Hardy Journal and Vice-Preseident of both the Thomas Hardy Society and the Thomas Hardy Association. His edition of Hardy’s Under the Greenwood Tree for Oxford World’s Classics is forthcoming in May 2013.
For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics on Twitter and Facebook.
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Image credit: Thomas Hardy’s Grave by Caroline Tandy [CC-BY-SA-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons.
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