Meet Peter Grundy and Tilly Northedge, the creative collaborators behind Grundini. Working with bold colors and simple shapes they create informative illustrations that perfectly marry form and function.
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Radio - Cape Town
Czech Tourist Map
Lotta Nieminen
Meet Paul Belford, a creative agency out of London who focuses on advertising and branding. Their approach to design is admirably simple, resulting in pieces that are clean and easy to appreciate. Check out their work here.
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Nathan Godding
Studio Patten
Heartwork 2011
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By: Jerry Beck,
on 5/12/2013
Our semi-regular roundup of interesting, creative and original animated music videos.
Music video for Alphabets Heaven.
Music video for Spencer Day.
Music video for Fit
Music video for Binary.
Lead Animators (2D & 3D): Blanca Martinez de Rituerto & Joe Sparrow
Secondary 2D Animation: Andy Baker, Tom Bunker, Nicos Livesey
Music video for Iron and Wine
Behind-the-scenes video HERE
Director/Animator: Hayley Morris
Fabricators: Hayley Morris, Denise Hauser and Randy Bretzin
Color Correction: Evan Kultangwatana
Model for watercolor animation: Louise Sheldon
Several years ago we featured the Philographics poster series by UK based Genis Carreras. We just received word that the popular series will soon be available as a book as well as a postcard set. Currently Genis is raising funds to being print production. You can support this effort here.
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Also worth viewing…
Lotta Nieminen
Recently Received Books
Irving Harper:Works in Paper
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Featured Book: Irving Harper: Works in Paper.
Two Times Elliot is a London-based studio, whose focus centers around print, identity and web. Their style is a mix of typographic elements, clean lines and bold color palettes, bringing each design to life with its own personality. I’m also impressed by their ability to incorporate mixed media into their work without disrupting the flow of the design.
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Typographische Monatsblatter
Visual Language of Herbert Matter
Hans Hartmann
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Featured Book: Irving Harper: Works in Paper.
Flying Eye Books is the latest branch in Nobrow’s budding empire. The imprint will strictly focus on Children’s titles while retaining the same quality and curation that you would come to expect from Nobrow.
For their first release, they worked with award-winning UK-based illustrator Viviane Schwarz to create an awesome robot book - literally. The aptly titled Welcome to Your Awesome Robot provides you with everything you need to design, build and test a robot from cardboard. With instructional comics and Vivienne’s charming sense of humor as your guide, the book is fun to read and makes for an excellent family activity.
Details:
Welcome to Your Awesome Robot
By Viviane Schwarz / Published by Flying Eye Books
32 pages / 12.4″x9.4″
Pick up a copy at Amazon, Nobrow, Flying Eye Books or your local book shop.
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Book Gift Guide
Blex Bolex
Recent Books
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Featured Book: Irving Harper: Works in Paper.
By: Jerry Beck,
on 3/23/2013
Our weekly roundup of the most interesting, creative and original animated music videos.
Music video for The Middle Eight. Go to Matt’s website for a behind-the-scenes photo album.
Music video for Hiatus feat. Shura.
Art Director: John Jobe Reynolds
Cinematographer: Matthias Pilz
Colorist: Danny Atkinson
Compositor: Jonathan Topf
Editor:Robert Mila
Music video for Quantic & Alice Russell.
Music video for Stan Lee Cole.
By: Jerry Beck,
on 3/11/2013
The weekend is almost over, but it’s not too late to check out these quality animated music videos that have recently come to my attention.
Music video for Shugo Tokumaru. Watch the making-of video.
Music video for Ten Minute Turns. Song written and recorded by Alan Foreman and Roger Paul Mason
Music video for Mat Zo and Porter Robinson. Credits:
Directed By Louis & McCourt
Art Direction by Bjorn Aschim
Animators: Jonathan ‘Djob’ Nkondo, James Duveen, Sam Taylor, Wesley Louis, Tim McCourt
Backgrounds and Layouts: Bjorn Aschim, Mike Shorten
Compositing: Sam Taylor, Jonathan Topf
3D VFX Directing by Jonathan Topf
Graphic Design by Hisako Nakagawa
Producers: Jack Newman, Drew O’Neill
Produced by Bullion
Music video for Wax Tailor produced by Oh Yeah Wow. Credits:
Animators: Sam Lewis, Mike Greaney, Seamus Spilsbury, Darcy Prendergast
VFX supervisor: Josh Thomas
Assistant animators: Alexandra Calisto de Carvalho, Joel Williams
Compositors: Josh Thomas, Jeremy Blode, James Bailey, Alexandra Calisto de Carvalho, Keith Crawford, Dan Steen
Crotchet sculptor: Julie Ramsden
Colour grade: Dan Stonehouse, Crayon
Work hard and have fun. That’s the motto of Stoëmp, a Brussels based design studio focused on multi-disciplinary branding and web solutions. Their work for Pairi Daiza includes whimsical illustrations, font design and icons and signage.
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Mark Weaver
Ken Leung Interview
Carl DeTorres
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Featured Book: Matte Stephens: Selected Works.
By: Mark Miller,
on 3/2/2013
Over the next several weeks, I have the pleasure and privilege of being the launch blog for a few talented authors on their latest blog tours. To kick things off, here is my friend from across the sea: Kate Tenbeth.
Inspired by vintage airline baggage tags, UK illustrator Neil Stevens (aka crayonefire) created these stunning posters. If they prove popular he will make them available in his online shop this Spring. Lets make that happen! Drop Neil a note here.
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Also worth viewing:
Tad Carpenter Interview
Asatte
Design Books
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Featured Book: Matte Stephens: Selected Works.
By: Nicola,
on 2/25/2013
“My captain, my leader, my right-hand man. He was the spirit and the heartbeat of the team. A cool, calculating footballer I could trust with my life. He was the supreme professional, the best I ever worked with. Without him England would never have won the World Cup.” –Sir Alf Ramsey
Bobby Moore is an icon. He earned his place in football’s pantheon by captaining England to their only World Cup triumph in 1966 and his rightful place amongst the football greats is immortalised in bronze outside Wembley Stadium. He represented West Ham United over 500 times and was described by Pele as ‘the most accomplished defender [he has] ever played against’.
From the iconic image of Bobby Moore holding the World Cup trophy aloft to the famous embrace between him and Pele during the 1970 World Cup, from his loyalty to West Ham United Football Club to his brave struggle against bowel cancer in his later years, Bobby Moore represents a significant chapter in the history of world football. But what about the man behind the bronze? To mark the twentieth anniversary of his death (February 24), here are five things you might not have known about the man known as Mooro:
.jpg "Bobby Moore")
(1) Bobby Moore was a good footballer as a schoolboy but he wasn’t exceptional. In fact, he was a better cricketer than he was a footballer and for a while it seemed he was more likely to make it as a professional cricketer. He represented Tom Hood Grammar School in Leyton at both cricket and football, and played county cricket for the Essex Youth team. It was only after a few years did his football ability begin to shine.
(2) The England team that arrived in Mexico to defend the World Cup in 1970 were high in confidence. However, Bobby Moore was nowhere to be seen. He wasn’t with the squad as they arrived in Mexico. Instead he was being held in Bogota, Columbia, arrested and facing charges of stealing an emerald-studded gold bracelet valued at over £600. The ordeal Moore went through before joining up with his England team-mates is common knowledge. What is less widely known, however, is that he still faced those charges when he went to Mexico to captain his country at the World Cup. He arguably even played the greatest game he had ever played for England against Brazil in the quarter-finals, despite not knowing whether he would be found innocent or guilty by the Columbian police. He was later found innocent.
(3) Despite his fabled heroics with England, Moore’s club form never reached the same heights as his performances for the national team. West Ham had three England regulars in their side throughout the 1960s but they never finished higher than eighth in the league. It was suggested by his manager at the time, Ron Greenwood, that Moore concentrated harder on his performances for England than he did for West Ham. Although West Ham did win the FA Cup in 1964 and the European cup winners’ trophy in 1965, their star players, including Bobby Moore, were criticised for being ‘as erratic as dock work’.
(4) After his playing career Bobby Moore part-owned pubs and clubs across east London. Many of these were successful business ventures, notably Mooro’s, and his status in London’s east end helped these businesses flourish. However, he also was part of the failed sports marketing and promotion company Challenge. After only a few years, in the early 1990s, Challenge went into liquidation, an illustration that leading a nation on the football pitch perhaps came more naturally to Moore than leading a business.
(5) Bobby Moore’s last appearance in an FA Cup final wasn’t for his beloved West Ham United but against them. The season after Moore transferred from West Ham to Fulham, he guided Fulham to an FA Cup Final in 1975. Having led West Ham to FA Cup glory in 1964, it is ironic that Moore’s last club game in England in 1975 came against the side that he represented 544 times. West Ham ended up winning in a game that provoked mixed emotions for Moore. Also, not only did Moore play for Fulham, one of Moore’s middle names is Chelsea. It’s unlikely that many Hammers would hold this against him though.
To read more about the life of Bobby Frederick Chelsea Moore, please visit his biography page on the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Moore’s life story is also available as an episode in the ODNB’s free biography podcast.
Daniel Parker is Publicity Assistant for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is the national record of men and women who have shaped British history and culture, worldwide, from the Romans to the 21st century. In addition to 58,500 life stories, the ODNB offers a free, twice monthly biography podcastwith over 175 life stories now available. You can also sign up for Life of the Day, a topical biography delivered to your inbox, or follow @odnb on Twitter for people in the news. The Oxford DNB is freely available via public libraries across the UK. Libraries offer ‘remote access’ allowing members to log-on to the complete dictionary, for free, from home (or any other computer) twenty-four hours a day.
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Image credit: Bobby Moore statue by John Dobson [Creative Commons License via Wikimedia Commons].
The post Five things you might not know about Bobby Moore appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Alice,
on 12/24/2012
In recent years German Christmas markets have been promoted to the English as the epitome of a traditional and authentic Christmas. As germany-christmas-market.org.uk suggests, “if you’re tired of commercialism taking over this holiday period and would like to get right away for a real traditional and romantic Christmas market you might want to consider heading to Germany.” If a trip to Germany is impossible, a visit to a German Christmas market nearer to home is more feasible. Beginning with Lincoln in 1982, German Christmas markets have appeared in a number of British towns and cities.
The Queen’s Christmas tree at Windsor Castle published in the Illustrated London News, 1848, and republished in Godey’s Lady’s Book, Philadelphia in December 1850. via Wikimedia Commons.
Pinpointing the precise moment when a ritual practice appears in a new culture for the first time is often difficult. One way of examining the cultural transfer of customs is to look at the activities of artistic and literary elites. The first reference to German Christmas customs to appear in England was Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s account of the Christmas he spent in the German town of Ratzeburg in 1798. He described a Christmas Eve custom according to which children decorated the parlour with a yew bough, secured to a table, fastened little tapers to it, and then laid out presents for their parents (the children received their presents on Christmas Day). This account was published in the periodical The Friend in 1809, and was regularly reprinted during the first half of the nineteenth century. Reaction to it varied. Whilst Thomas de Quincey dismissed the “stage sentimentality” of a description which emphasized the potential of Christmas to promote much “weeping aloud for joy” on the part of parents touched by their children’s conduct, the poet Felicia Hemans took a great interest in German customs and attempted to imitate the tree ritual.
From 1840 a number of German Christmas stories for children were translated and published in England. These books emphasized the Christmas tree as being at the heart of a family-centred celebration, though by this time children were now the main recipients of seasonal gifts. The stories served as a reminder of the German origins of the Christmas tree, a fact which was often repeated when the tree was discussed in the popular press. For example, in his periodical Household Words, Charles Dickens described the tree as “that pretty German toy.” The majority of references to the German Christmas customs were not followed by any commentary of the significance of these origins. More occasionally, writers would eulogise the Germans as a simple, domestic and sentimental people, precisely the characteristics which were increasingly ascribed the festive English hearth. Consequently, the English were able to quickly adopt and naturalize the Christmas tree by making it palatable to the national story.
Despite growing Anglo-German rivalry in the years leading up to the First World War, the English view of the German Christmas persisted at the beginning of the twentieth century. It was played out in the press coverage of the famous Christmas truce of 1914, when British and German troops exchanged cigarettes and food, showed one another pictures of their families, and organised football matches. The best known image of the ceasefire appeared in the Illustrated London News in 1915, featuring a German soldier holding aloft a miniature tree as he approached two British soldiers; this was not only a symbol of peace but also of the values of domesticity and indulgence of childhood.
Whilst the Christmas truce has claimed a prominent place in the mythology of the Great War, it was followed by an abrupt change in Anglo-German relations, which were subsequently defined by anti-German propaganda, the legacy of Nazism, and post-war football rivalry. It is perhaps surprising then, that Germany should re-emerge as a spiritual home of the authentic and traditional Christmas in the English imagination. However, this is testimony to the inherent dynamic of nostalgia embedded in the festival. As I argue in Christmas in Nineteenth-Century England, laments for the loss of Christmases past have been present in festive discourse since the early seventeenth century.
German customs play an important role in the development of the English Christmas, but this argument can only be taken so far. After all, in the nineteenth century the English were no strangers to domesticity and the romanticization of childhood. Furthermore, Christmas is a transnational festival, and all modern Christmases are the product of a multiplicity of cultural transfers.
Neil Armstrong is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Gloucestershire. He is the author of “England and German Christmas Festlichkeit, c.1800–1914″ in German History, which is available to read for free for a limited time.
German History is renowned for its extensive range, covering all periods of German history and all German-speaking areas. Every issue contains refereed articles and book reviews on various aspects the history of the German-speaking world, as well as news items and conference reports. It is an essential journal for German historians and of major value for all non-specialists interested in the field.
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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: 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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By: ChloeF,
on 1/25/2013
The Duke of Wellington always has a traffic cone on his head. At least, he does when he is in Glasgow. Let me explain: outside the city’s Gallery of Modern Art on Queen Street, there is an equestrian statue of the celebrated general of the Napoleonic Wars. It was sculpted in 1840-4 by the Franco-Italian artist, Carlo Marochetti (1805-1867), who in his day was a dominant figure in the world of commemorative sculpture. Amongst his works is the statue of Richard the Lionheart, who has sat on his mount and held aloft his sword outside the Houses of Parliament since 1860.
Yet Glasgow’s lofty monument has been a magnet for pranksters – ever since the 1980s, according to the BBC – who regularly scale the pedestal, Copenhagen’s (the horse’s) flanks and then, clinging onto the Iron Duke himself, crown him with an orange traffic cone. This has caused some controversy: the police warn that the acts of intrepid, late-night climbers (who, to be frank, may also have enjoyed the hospitality of the local hostelries) is an act of vandalism and is downright dangerous. The government-funded agency that oversees the care of the country’s historic buildings, Historic Scotland, acknowledges that embellishing Wellington with a modern piece of traffic paraphernalia is now a ‘longstanding tradition’, but emphasises that the statue is A-listed and so needs to be protected from damage – and there has indeed been damage: on different occasions, the general has lost a spur and his sword. Others argue that the ‘coning’ of Wellington is a worthy expression of the people’s sense of humour and that it is as much a part of the cityscape as its historic buildings and monuments. And indeed the statue has become iconic – not because it is a likeness of the Duke of Wellington, but because the general has a cone on his head: postcards proudly depicting this symbol of Glaswegian humour are easy to find.
This controversy sprang to mind when I was first putting together a proposal for writing a Very Short Introduction on the Napoleonic Wars. One of the reviewers very helpfully suggested that the book might consider a chapter on the conflict in historical memory and commemoration. When I came to write this, the final chapter, I considered opening it with an account of the ‘coning’ of the Duke of Wellington, but in the end I felt that such irreverence and jocularity sat rather uneasily with the content of the rest of the book, which tells a tale of aggression, international collapse, and human suffering. Yet the fact that the Duke still sits, as ever, with a garish point on his head – gravity making it lean at a jaunty angle – did make me wonder about how far the Napoleonic Wars (including, by extension, the French Revolutionary Wars from which they emerged – collectively the wars lasted from 1792 to 1815) have left a legacy that is embedded, visibly or otherwise, in our European cityscapes.
This might well be more obvious on the continent than in the British Isles, since there was a direct impact as armies rampaged across Europe – and there were therefore more sites clearly associated with Napoleonic conquest, European resistance to it, and later commemoration of the conflict. In Paris, the very same Marochetti was responsible for one of the reliefs on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, the one depicting the Battle of Jemappes (one of the French Revolution’s early victories over the Austrians in 1792). The Arc was completed under the July Monarchy (1830-48), which worked hard to appropriate the Napoleonic legacy for its own political purposes. The same regime nearly awarded Marochetti the commission to create Napoleon’s tomb in the Church of the Invalides when his body was repatriated from Saint Helena. The sculptor, in fact, was producing models for this work as he was busy on Glasgow’s Wellington statue (giving the latter a pedigree that surely reinforces Historic Scotland’s mild-mannered point). Yet British towns and cities are also embedded with places that are connected with the French Wars – as barracks, as headquarters, as places of exile and refuge, as naval dockyards, as depots for PoWs, as sites of popular mobilization. Sometimes the associations are long-forgotten, sometimes they are commemorated. The conflict is remembered in the monuments that ask us not to forget the carnage and in the individuals who are commemorated in stone and bronze. These may, like Glasgow’s Iron Duke, have become so much part of our urban environment that they are almost unnoticed unless they have a cone on their head, but the traces and memory of the French Wars in Britain’s towns and cities… now there’s a project!
Dr Mike Rapport is Senior Lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Stirling. He is the author of Nationality and Citizenship in Revolutionary France: The Treatment of Foreigners 1789-1799 (OUP, 2000), The Shape of the World: Britain, France and the Struggle for Empire (Atlantic, 2006), 1848, Year of Revolution (Little, Brown, 2008), and The Napoleonic Wars: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2013).
The Very Short Introductions (VSI) series combines a small format with authoritative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written by our expert authors, these books can change the way you think about the things that interest you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about. Grow your knowledge with OUPblog and the VSI series every Friday!
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Image credit: Statue of Wellington, mounted. Outside the Gallery of Modern Art, Queen Street, Glasgow, Scotland [Author: Green Lane, Creative Commons Licence via Wikimedia Commons]
The post The legacy of the Napoleonic Wars appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Alice,
on 2/3/2013
This week marks the 400th anniversary of the death of Sir Thomas Bodley, diplomat and founder of the Bodleian Library. After retiring from public life in 1597, Bodley decided to “set up my staff at the library door in Oxon; being thoroughly persuaded, that in my solitude, and surcease from the Commonwealth affairs, I could not busy myself to better purpose, than by reducing that place (which then in every part lay ruined and waste) to the public use of students.” Thanks to his work, the Bodleian Library opened to readers in 1602.
On the anniversary of his death, we thought we’d share five facts about the Bodley and the Bodleian that you may not have known:
For more information on the life of Thomas Bodley, read the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography article. For information on the Bodleian Libraries, see www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk.
Liz McCarthy is the Communications & Social Media Officer for the Bodleian Libraries, as well as an assistant in the Library’s Conservative Party Archive. When not tweeting or writing about archives, she can be found researching digital humanities & 17th-century bookbindings, working on the Journal of Information Literacy or teaching Irish dance. Follow her on Twitter at @mccarthy_liz.
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Image credit: Thomas Bodley, public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
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By: Jerry Beck,
on 2/3/2013
Music Video for Hem. Animated by Greg Lytle and Jordan Bruner.
By: Nicola,
on 2/4/2013
There is a tendency to complain about policies when writing blogs, but I think it is time to commend the British campaigns and innovations in treatment. They have proven to be some of the best in the world and have had a major impact in the fight against cancer.
One of the best British campaigns is against cervical cancer. Getting personally posted invitations to attend your next PAP screening, supported by pamphlets of information, is something few women ignore. Those who try to ignore these invitations are rightly and relentlessly bombarded with regular reminders.
And, with the knowledge that a sexually transmitted virus, Human Papilloma Virus (HPV), is responsible for all cases of cervical cancer, the UK implemented a national school-based HPV vaccination programme that has proven to yield high uptake. By 2009, 70 percent of 12-13 year olds in the UK were fully vaccinated. These results are admirable compared to the results of alternative on-demand provisions offered by other countries including the USA. Note that the vaccine is recommended for early teens as it is a preventative vaccine and not a therapeutic vaccine, and must be administered before the initiation of sexual activity for it to be effective. The vaccine prevents about 70% of cervical cancers caused by two specific strains of HPV. PAP screening is still important to catch cases that are not prevented by the vaccine. An added bonus of this campaign is that the same vaccine also protects against some head, neck, and anal cancers caused by HPV infections.
Another great British effort is towards the prevention of lung cancer. The anti-smoking adverts have been haunting, especially the most recent one released by the UK Department of Health that shows a tumor growing on a cigarette. It is brilliant. I wish I had designed it. The advert strikingly conveys the message that if you saw the damage smoking causes, you would not smoke. The percentage of male cigarette smokers have fallen from 55% in 1970 to 21% in 2010 and a decreasing number of deaths due to lung cancer has followed this trend.
Click here to view the embedded video.
The UK is also a model of good practice in that it is the only country in the world which has a network of free ‘stop-smoking’ services, recently supported by specialized training for National Health Service Stop Smoking practitioners.
We can help the national campaign at a personal level by being more opinionated and outspoken when it comes to letting those around us know that smoking is harmful and “uncool”- especially among the young. We must ensure the message is passed down to new generations.
Finally, the UK is at the leading edge in using stem cells to help replace organs damaged by cancer. Tracheal transplants using tracheal scaffolds from cadavers seeded with the patient’s own stem cells have been used to replace damaged tissue for patients with tracheal cancer. Currently scientists at University College London are developing very similar procedures to grow a new nose for a patient who had lost their nose to cancer. These innovative approaches are the result of a continuously open, well-supported but regulated stem cell research policy, not yet seen in the USA.
Well done Great Britain!
Lauren Pecorino received her PhD from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in Cell and Developmental Biology. She crossed the Atlantic to carry out a postdoctoral tenure at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, London. She is a Principal Lecturer at the University of Greenwich where teaches Cancer Biology and Therapeutics. The teaching of this course motivated her to write The Molecular Biology of Cancer: Mechanisms, Targets, and Therapeutics, now in its second edition. Feedback on the textbook posted on Amazon from a cancer patient drove her to write a book on cancer for a wider audience: Why Millions Survive Cancer: the Successes of Science.
Read a World Cancer Day Q&A with Lauren Pecorino.
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The post World Cancer Day 2013: The Best of British appeared first on OUPblog.
Hannah Waldron is an artist and designer that shuffles her time between Stockholm and London. Her work is clean, bright, and filled with geometric forms juxtaposed against loose lines, and varied patterns and textures. The print above is just a taste of her work, and was commissioned by the Victoria and Albert museum in London.
To see more of Hannah’s work, visit her site. Also be sure to pick up one of her beautifully designed Furoshiki (a type of traditional Japanese wrapping cloth that were frequently used to transport clothes, gifts, or other goods) through her Editions page and Link Collective.
By: Alice,
on 2/10/2013
Dictionaries never simply spring into being, but represent the work and research of many. Only a select few of the people who have helped create the Oxford English Dictionary, however, can lay claim to the coveted title ‘Editor’. In the first of an occasional series for the OxfordWords blog on the Editors of the OED, Peter Gilliver introduces the most celebrated, Sir James A. H. Murray.
If ever a lexicographer merited the adjective iconic, it must surely be James Augustus Henry Murray, the first Editor of the Oxford English Dictionary; although what he would have thought about the word being applied to him—in a sense which only came into being long after his death—can only be guessed at, though it seems likely that he would disapprove, given his strongly expressed dislike of the public interest shown in him as a person, rather than in his work. The photograph of him in his Scriptorium in Oxford, wearing his John Knox cap and holding a book and a Dictionary quotation slip, is almost certainly the best-known image of any lexicographer. But there is a lot more to this prodigious man.
In fact prodigious is another good word for him, for several reasons. He was certainly something of a prodigy as a child, despite his humble background. Born on 7 February 1837 in the Scottish village of Denholm, near Hawick, the son of a tailor, he reputedly knew his alphabet by the time he was eighteen months old, and was soon showing a precocious interest in other languages, including—at the age of 7—Chinese, in the form of a page of the Bible which he laboriously copied out until he could work out the symbols for such words as God and light. Thanks to his voracious appetite for reading, and what he called ‘a sort of mania for learning languages’, he was already a remarkably well-educated boy by the time his formal schooling ended, at the age of 14, with a knowledge of French, German, Italian, Latin, and Greek, and a range of other interests, including botany, geology, and archaeology. After a few years teaching in local schools—he was evidently a born teacher, and was made a headmaster at the age of 21—he moved to London, and took work in a bank. (It was only in 1855, incidentally, that he acquired the full name by which he’s become known: he had been christened plain James Murray, but he adopted two extra initials to stop his correspondence getting mixed up with that of the several other men living in Hawick who shared the name.) He soon began to attend meetings of the London Philological Society, and threw himself into the study of dialect and pronunciation—an interest he had already developed while still in Scotland—and also of the history of English. In 1870 an opening at Mill Hill School, just outside London, enabled him to return to teaching. He began studying for an external London BA degree, which he finished in 1873, the same year as his first big scholarly publication, a study of Scottish dialects which was widely recognized as a pioneering work in its field. Only a year later his linguistic research had earned him his first honorary degree, a doctorate from Edinburgh University: quite an achievement for a self-taught man of 37.
By this time the Philological Society had been trying to collect the materials for a new, and unprecedentedly comprehensive, dictionary of English for over a decade, but the project had gradually lost momentum following the early death of its first Editor, Herbert Coleridge. In 1876 Murray was approached by the London publishers Macmillans about the possibility of editing a dictionary based on the materials collected; the negotiations ultimately came to nothing, but the work which Murray did on this abandoned project was so impressive that when new negotiations were opened with Oxford University Press, and the search for an editor began again, it soon became clear that Murray was the only possible man for the job. After further negotiations, in March 1879 contracts were finally signed, for the compilation of a dictionary that was expected to run to 6,400 pages, in four volumes, and take 10 years to complete—and which Murray planned to edit while continuing to teach at Mill Hill School!
As we now know, the project would end up taking nearly five times as long as originally planned, and the resulting dictionary ran to over 15,000 pages. Murray soon had to give up his schoolteaching, and moved to Oxford in 1885; even then progress was too slow, and eventually three other Editors were appointed, each with responsibility for different parts of the alphabet. Although for more than three-quarters of the time he worked on the OED there were other Editors working alongside him—he eventually died in 1915—and of course from the beginning he had a staff of assistants helping him, it is without question that he was the Editor of the Dictionary. (He soon had no need of those extra initials: a letter addressed simply to ‘Dr. Murray, Oxford’ would reach him without any difficulty, and he even had notepaper printed giving this as his address.) It was Murray who, in 1879, launched the great ‘Appeal to the English-speaking and English-reading public’ which brought most of the millions of quotation slips from which the Dictionary was mainly constructed—slips sent in from all parts of the English-speaking world, recording English as it was and had been used at all times and in all places. And it was during the early years of the project that all the details of its policy and style had to be settled, and that was Murray’s responsibility; the three later Editors matched their work to his as closely as they could. He was also responsible for more of the 15,000-plus pages of the Dictionary’s first edition than anyone else: the whole of the letters A–D, H–K, O, P, and all but the very end of T, amounting to approximately half of the total.
What qualities enabled him to achieve this remarkable feat? It hardly needs to be said that he brought an extraordinary combination of linguistic abilities to the task: not just a knowledge of many languages, but the kind of sensitivity to fine nuances in English which all lexicographers need, in an exceptionally highly-developed form. He was also knowledgeable in a wide range of other fields. But one of his most striking qualities was his capacity for hard work, which once again deserves to be called prodigious. Throughout his time working on the Dictionary it was by no means unusual for him to put in 80 or 90 hours a week; he was often working in the Scriptorium by 6 a.m., and often did not leave until 11 p.m. Such a punishing regime would have destroyed the health of a weaker man, but Murray continued to work at this intensity into his seventies.
Somehow he managed to combine his work with a vigorous family life; another image of him which deserves to be just as well known as the studious portraits in the Scriptorium is the photograph showing him and his wife surrounded by their eleven children, or the one of him astride a huge ‘sand-monster’ constructed on the beach during one of the family’s holidays in North Wales. He also found time to be an active member of his local community: he was a staunch Congregationalist, regularly preaching at Oxford’s George Street chapel, and an active member of many local societies, and frequently gave lectures about the Dictionary. It is just as well that his conviction of the value of hard work was combined with an iron constitution.
But there is one image which vividly captures another, crucial aspect of this remarkable man, an aspect which arguably underpins his whole approach to life and work. Tellingly, it is not an image of the man himself, but of one of the slips on which the Dictionary was written. The winter of 1896 saw one of Murray’s numerous marathon efforts to complete a section of the Dictionary, in this case the end of the letter D. Very late in the evening of 24 November he was at last able to put the finishing touches to the entry for the word dziggetai (a mule-like mammal found in Mongolia, an animal which Murray would never have seen, and an apt illustration of the Dictionary’s worldwide scope). At 11 o’clock, on the last slip for this word, he wrote: ‘Here endeth Τῷ Θεῷ μόνῳ δόξα.’ The Greek words mean ‘To God alone be the glory’, a phrase which is to be found several times (in various languages) in his writings. For Murray his work on the OED was a God-given vocation. He certainly came to believe that the whole course of his life appeared, in retrospect, to have been designed to prepare him for the work of editing the Dictionary; and perhaps it was only his strong sense of vocation which sustained him through the long years of effort.
A version of this article originally appeared on the OxfordWords blog.
Peter Gilliver is an Associate Editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, and is also writing a history of the OED.
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is widely regarded as the accepted authority on the English language. It is an unsurpassed guide to the meaning, history, and pronunciation of 600,000 words — past and present — from across the English-speaking world. Most UK public libraries offer free access to OED Online from your home computer using just your library card number.
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By: Nicola,
on 2/11/2013
Today, 11 February 2013, marks the 50th anniversary of the death of the poet Sylvia Plath (1932-1963). It is an event that has significantly shaped biographies and critical studies of her work — particularly following the publication of Ariel (1965), her posthumous collection edited and prepared by Ted Hughes. Then, as now, many reviewers regarded these poems as foretelling the circumstances of her death. Plath’s biography in the Oxford DNB offers an alternative perspective. As its authors Sally Brown and Clare Taylor write:
‘Such criticism helped to perpetuate the idea that [Plath’s] death was the most famous thing about her, and encouraged further critics to read the poems as solely charting her increasing mental agitation. But even a cursory reading of the poems reveals the many voices of her work—the amused, hopeful, triumphant, as well as the enraged and vitriolic—and Plath herself, when talking about her work, was amusing and charming, her voice controlled, guttural, and powerful. … A writer and a mother, Plath provided a model for a new generation of poets of the consciousness-raising movement, and she remains enormously popular especially with young female readers. Her lasting triumph will be the power and precision of her poetic voice, and her vision of new possibilities for women writers.’
In addition to Plath’s life in the Oxford DNB, an edited audio version of her biography is also available.
[See post to listen to audio]
Or download the podcast directly.
Philip Carter is Publication Editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Read more about Sylvia Plath on the Oxford DNB website. The Oxford DNB online is freely available via public libraries across the UK. Libraries offer ‘remote access’ allowing members to log-on to the complete dictionary, for free, from home (or any other computer) twenty-four hours a day. In addition to 58,500 life stories, the ODNB offers a free, twice monthly biography podcast with over 175 life stories now available. You can also sign up for Life of the Day, a topical biography delivered to your inbox, or follow @odnb on Twitter for people in the news.
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Image credit: By Jprw [Creative Commons] via Wikimedia Commons
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Belinda Love Lee is a freelance designer out of Cardiff, UK, whose talents span print, web, and branding. Her business cards designed for prop stylist, Christina Yan, feature foiling, gold edging, and embossing that make for a beautiful presentation. Her attention to detail aids her in creating a design that is modern with a touch of whimsy.
Love Lee’s style carries over into another project, wedding invitations that include a map of the couple’s wedding location.
Check out Love Lee on her site and Twitter.
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By: Nicola,
on 2/20/2013
Richard Burbage © Dulwich Picture Gallery.
It was the first performance of Hamlet around 1601 that projected Burbage into the national imagination. The earliest surviving elegy begins by saying that there will be ‘no more young Hamlet’ after the death of the star:
Oft I have seen him leap into a grave
Suiting the person, which he seemed to have,
Of a sad lover, with so true an eye
That there (I would have sworn) he meant to die.
A 1605 pamphlet notes how the ‘one man’ who plays Hamlet stands at the apogee of his profession, with ‘money’, ‘dignity’, and ‘reputation’ that are destined to earn him a ‘lordship in the country’. The play was ‘diverse times acted by his highness’s servants in the City of London as also in the two universities of Cambridge and Oxford and elsewhere’. It functioned as the calling card of its leading man.
Hamlet proved the making of Burbage, but I suggest that Burbage also had a good deal to do with the way Hamlet was made. Three things about the actor were essential. First, his wealth and playhouse investment. Second, his style of performance. Third, competition with the leading man of a rival company, Edward Alleyn.
Wealth is important because power (just as in modern Hollywood) did not come from talent alone. Before 1599 Burbage had been just one in an acting company of eight equals and his roles in Shakespeare’s plays were commensurate with that stake. But the building of the Globe in 1599 made Richard newly preeminent. He and his brother Cuthbert secured 50% of the venture, with Shakespeare and the four other ‘housekeepers’ having just 10% each. Burbage’s business dominance had immediate implications. Once Burbage was a bigger investor, the company’s playwright wrote him bigger parts. From this point on central characters become more prominent: Henry V, Duke Vincentio, Othello, Lear, Macbeth, Timon, Antony, and Coriolanus (all products of the early Globe years) are not simply longer in their line-counts, they are also grander, more self-defining, roles. Most can be linked with certainty to Burbage and all are very likely to have been played by him. Hamlet (at 1338 lines) is by some measure the largest part in the Shakespeare canon and that statistic connects pretty directly with the actor’s business share.
Of course, Burbage was not just powerful but also gifted. Ben Jonson called him the ‘best actor’ and that reputation was founded, as one elegy put it, on performing ‘so truly to the life’. According to the testimony of Richard Flecknoe:
He was a delightful Proteus, so wholly transforming himself into his part, and putting off himself with his clothes, as he never (not so much as in the tiring house) assumed himself again until the play was done: there being as much difference betwixt him and one of our common actors as between a ballad singer who only mouths it and an excellent singer.
This distance from common actors is vital to Hamlet because it makes possible the Prince’s declaration that ‘forms, moods, shapes of grief’ are merely ‘actions that a man might play’ but that he ‘has that within which passes show’.
Edward Alleyn © Dulwich Picture Gallery.
A final element, though, was the rivalry between Burbage and Alleyn. Exactly like Burbage, Alleyn was an actor who had recently become a big-scale playhouse investor. In 1600 he built the Fortune playhouse to the north of the city, deliberately copying the Globe. To launch his theatre Alleyn revived the roles that had made him famous in the early 1590s: Tamburlaine, Faustus, and other leads in Marlowe plays. Amongst these was Marlowe’s Dido, in which he spoke the following lines:
At last came Pyrrhus, fell and full of ire,
His harness dropping blood, and on his spear
The mangled head of Priam’s youngest son…
In Hamlet (written while Alleyn conducted these revivals) the Prince meets a player and requests an old speech that has a very similar ring:
The rugged Pyrrhus like th’ Hyrcanian beast…
—’Tis not so. It begins with Pyrrhus.
The rugged Pyrrhus, he whose sable arms,
Black as his purpose, did the night resemble…
Burbage, at the Globe, was pretending awkwardly to remember lines that closely resembled those of his rival on the other side of the Thames. The unpopularity of the ‘tragedians of the city’ (which has forced the player to travel to Elsinore) thus becomes a very local affair.
The player’s long speech (which ‘pleased not the million’ and bores Polonius) is partly a dig at Alleyn, but it is also something more complex. Hamlet admires the old player and behind this there is surely also admiration for Alleyn, with whom Burbage had learned his craft as a travelling actor a decade before. His character’s inability to ‘drown the stage with tears, / And cleave the general ear with horrid speech’ is an expression of limitation. But it also announces a new kind of acting in which the feelings of characters are not so easily known. Alleyn had starred as Cutlack the Dane with eyes of ‘lightning’ and words of ‘thunder’; Burbage would command the stage in a different way. ‘To be or not to be’ was a question of acting method. The performer whose death Thomas Middleton would describe as an ‘eclipse of playing’ had an artistic vision of his own.
Bart van Es is Lecturer in English at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St Catherine’s College. He has previously written books on Edmund Spenser and has a special interest in the writing of history in the Renaissance. Shakespeare in Company is his first work on drama and was supported by the award of an AHRC Fellowship.
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Image credit: Portraits of Richard Burbage and Edward Alleyn used with permission of Dulwich Picture Gallery. All rights reserved.
The post Richard Burbage: Shakespeare’s first Hamlet appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Alice,
on 2/22/2013
Winston Churchill is surrounded by many popular and well-entrenched myths. Despite his long and close relationship with the Royal Navy, he is regarded by many as an inept strategist who interfered in naval operations and often overrode his professional advisers with inevitably disastrous results. In his new book, Churchill and Seapower, author Christopher M. Bell gives us the first major study of Winston Churchill’s record as a naval strategist and his impact as the most prominent guardian of Britain’s sea power in the modern era. In the video below, we chatted with Bell, who shed some light on the misconceptions behind the Battle of the Atlantic.
Click here to view the embedded video.
Christopher M. Bell is Associate Professor of History at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He is the author of The Royal Navy, Seapower and Strategy between the Wars (2000), co-editor of Naval Mutinies of the Twentieth Century: An International Perspective (2003), and author of Churchill and Sea Power (2012). Read his previous blog post.
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The post On the Battle of the Atlantic appeared first on OUPblog.
