bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Allusion
Authors: Newlyn Lucy
Published: November 2023

Spelt out thus baldly, m the language of economic exchange, Emon’s post-lapsanan vis10n must strike the reader as one of the bleakest of Its kind: more chillingly familiar, for instance,, because more laconically presented, than Michael’s forecast of the ‘ghastly spasm, racking torture, qualms I Ofheart-s1ck agony’ which are the consequence of Adam and Eve‘s fall (PL x1. 481-2); more objectively conceived than the personal hell of Wordsworth’s London, with its ‘tnvial objects,, melted and reduced I To one 1dent1ty by differences I That have no law, no meaning, and no end’;and more inclusive than the nightmare world of Colendge’s Ancient Manner”, ‘Alone on a wide wide sea’ Yet, for all its extremity, it is not despairing.
Secret Committees
Authors: Barrell John
Published: November 2023

The SCI was the first of the London societies to comment publicly on what had passed in Edinburgh, at a general meeting held on I? January I794 Three days earlier Margarot had been convicted and sentenced, but the SCI seems not yet to have heard this, for the resolutions that issued from the meeting named only Skirving among those sentenced to be transported following the suppression of the convention.
The Pop-Gun Plot: A Tragicomedy by Thomas Upton
Authors: Barrell John
Published: November 2023

On 29 September 1794, many of the daily newspapers carried lengthy accounts of what the Oracle in its headline described as a ‘Horrible Project to Assassinate the King of this Country’. Two days earlier, two men had been arrested: Peter Lemaitre, a watch-case maker of Denmark Street, and George Higgins, shopman to a chemist in Fleet Market. Both were members of the General Committee of the LCS, and Higgins was already known to the Government: he had been a member of the Loyal Lambeth Association, and had been reported by the spy Sanderson as wishing that his uncle, a king’s messenger, might be hanged.2 On 28 September Lemaitre and Higgins had been interrogated by the Privy Council about their part in a plot which had been revealed to the Government by one of their accomplices whose name could not yet be published.
Traitor or Lunatic: The Arrest of Richard Brothers
Authors: Barrell John
Published: November 2023

In the early months of 1795 the Government appeared at a loss as to how to control the popular radical movement. Anxious to avoid further defeats in the courts, the law officers were unusually reticent in prosecuting publications in which the Government’s conduct alike of the state trials and the war with France was being ever more extravagantly ridiculed. They were unwilling to risk using the law of treason against Smith, Higgins, and Lemaitre, yet equally unwilling to lose the thin propaganda advantage offered by their continuing detention. Determined above all to insist that the nation was still threatened by a treasonable plot, the Government was stung by the charge that the king’s death had been imagined not by Hardy, Tooke, and Thelwall but by the secret committees, the Privy Council, and the Crown lawyers.
King Killing
Authors: Barrell John
Published: November 2023

At the same time as the Treasonable Practices Bill was being debated in Parliament, the House of Commons became caught up in a parallel debate about the relation between regicidal fancies and regicidal imaginings, and about metaphor and intention in descriptions and discussions of the monarchy and constitution. It developed out of the Government’s attempt to justify the bill, which by evident implication was directed at the LCS, by insisting that the attack on the king’s coach had originated in the society.
The Beginning of the Aeneid
Authors: Nuttall A D
Published: November 2023

Arms and the man I sing’; the voice of Virgil breaks suddenly from the silence, to begin the song of Aeneas. Before these words there is nothing; after them, the story of a journey from dubiety to imperial glory, from burning Troy, through spectral cities, turbulent seas, ruined pastoral, human love trodden underfoot, through the slaughter of the young to the marble clarity of Rome, to certainty and power. We think today of Virgil as the silver-tongued poet, smooth in his cadences, yet these opening words are strangely abrupt. There are signs, as we shall see, that contemporaries found them uncomfortably bald, were disconcerted by their sudden loudness. Yet they work. As we listen or read, we are instantly subdued by a larger-than-human voice. The lyric poet Propertius felt this in Virgil’s own century. There is, I think, no irony in the famous line of homage.
The Prelude: Ille ego qui quondam ...
Authors: Nuttall A D
Published: November 2023

Oh, yet a few short years of useful life, And all will be complete-thy race be run, Thy monument of glory will be raised.

Then, though too weak to tread the ways of truth, This age fall back to old idolatry,

Though men return to servitude as fast As the tide ebbs, to ignominy and shame By nations sink together, we shall still

Find solace in the knowledge which we have, Blessed with true happiness if we may be United helpers forward of a day

Of firmer trust, joint labourers in the work Should Providence such grace to us vouchsafe Of their redemption, surely yet to come.
Tristram Shandy
Authors: Nuttall A D
Published: November 2023

Drunkenness is always improper, except at the festivals of the God who gave wine; and particularly dangerous, when a man is engaged in the business of marriage; for at such a crisis of their lives a bride and bridegroom ought to have all their wits about them . . . wherefore, also, the drunken man is bad and unsteady in sowing the seed of increase, and is likely to beget offspring who will be unstable and untrustworthy, and cannot be expected to walk straight either in body or mind . . . For the beginning, like a god, . . . preserves all.
David and Pip
Authors: Nuttall A D
Published: November 2023

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o’clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously.
The Sense of a Beginning
Authors: Nuttall A D
Published: November 2023

In Frank Kermode’s sense of an ending is my sense of a beginning: his Mary Flexner Lectures delivered at Bryn Mawr in 1965 set a wholly new standard. Thereafter we had all either to think or else, in a manner, to declare ourselves enemies of thought. The Sense of an Ending (the title given to the lectures in their published form) exposes the problematic ontology of literary form. It caused my mind to race, even at first reading, between the seemingly antithetical poles of a natural end and a formal ending. At the same time I was obscurely uneasy lest, by some trick of an unperceived conceptual hyposhere, the polarity itself might be resolved into an identity.
Our Life Journeys in Beckett s Theatre: An Introduction
Authors: Worth Katharine
Published: November 2023

There arc as many ways in to Samuel Beckett’s art as individual imaginations to respond to it. The route I aim to follow is that de scribed by Coleridge as ‘the high road of human feelings’. It is, I believe, the way travelled by Beckett’s characters. Though so strange and rare, it is still recognizable at every step and stumble as the road we arc all taking through life towards that almost unimaginable ‘end’. Since starting on this book some years ago I have changed my approach to the extent of allowing in a little of my personal experience, including meetings with Beckett from the mid-1970s onward. It seems fitting now as it would n’t have been while we were still talking. The popular idea of Beckett as reclusive and remote has some obvious truth in it. No one who met him could fail to sense the deep re serves he had, and the capacity for withdrawal. But neither could be missed the interest in others, the courteous considerateness, the humorous or reflective observations on people and things which gave a strong impression of understanding and sympathy. In the theatre it is well known that he tended to disappear from the scene once the play was ready for performance. Such retreats, and his uncompromising pursuit of his vision, un deflected by critical reactions, may have suggested to some that he cared little about the response of audiences or readers.
Lifelines: Humour and Homely Sayings
Authors: Worth Katharine
Published: November 2023

PEOPLE have got used by now to the idea of Beckett’s being funny as well as formidable. Donald Davie’s idea might once have been right: ‘So black is this comedy that most English readers and theatre-goers cannot see it as comic at all’ (Independent, 27 December 1989). But it has been many times contradicted, as it was by the theatre-goers who flocked to Peter Hall’s new production of Godot in 1997. At the per formances I saw there was a palpable sense of general enjoyment as well as a frisson among aficionados looking forward to comic high lights like the battle of insults.
Taking the Life Journey and Telling It
Authors: Worth Katharine
Published: November 2023

IN the earlier plays the journey through the mysterious space we all inhabit is still felt in part as physical and actual, taken in present time. Later, as the travellers’ movements are frozen it becomes more obviously a journey of the mind. Old tracks are gone over again; there is a pressure, sometimes resisted, to ‘see’ it truly (‘As you could not at the time’, says the voice in Company). Whole lifetimes are revealed, in forms increasingly elliptical and compressed; only sixteen minutes of stage time is needed for Not I, three or four for Come and Go.
Magnetic Beckett
Authors: Worth Katharine
Published: November 2023

Beckett was a magnet for performers and artists-actors, musicians, painters, dancers-before criticism caught up with the idea of the work’s immense capacity for performance (the fiction as well as the plays proper). Reviewers were often more than a step behind. Jack Mac Gowran impressed them in Dublin with his one-man Beckett programme, End of Day (Gaiety Theatre, 5 October 1962), but Happy Days at the Eblana Theatre the following year drew some confused and unhappy responses.
Epitaphs for Louis: Early Writings
Authors: McDonald Peter
Published: November 2023

When it is read in the literary context of the mid-193os, MacNeice’s Poems begins to seem something of a public document. Yet the central images and ideas of the volume-of time, flux, petrifaction, and stasis, which in 19 35 took on topical associations-have their origin in distinctly private areas of the poet’s thought. The process of literary development towards Poems has a bearing on MacNeice’s development away from that volume. In order to bring the lines of continuity in the work into focus, it is necessary to start early, with the kind of writing that is often forgotten as ‘juvenilia’. No poet would ever wish to be judged on his earliest work; given that, the actual significance of juvenilia varies considerably from writer to writer. If some poets prefer such work to be given a quiet burial, there are others who find youthful productions, and mistakes, serviceable in the context of their mature careers. MacNeice belongs to this second category: the poetry of his early years, though for the most part dropped from the collected editions, has distinct relevance for his writings from the 1930s onwards. Indeed, MacNeice gave public burials to his early work with some regularity in his personal and discursive critical essays. The reasons for this have largely failed to engage the poet’s critics, but the juvenilia has enough inherent value to beof interest beyond the small circle of MacNeice’s scholars; this largely forgotten body of work casts a revealing light on the experience of the poetic ‘1930s generation’, the first ‘modern’ poets in England whose encounter with Modernism was, to use Eliot’s phrase for his generation’s reading of Shelley, ‘an affair of adolescence’.
The Falling Castle: 1936-1939
Authors: McDonald Peter
Published: November 2023

However inconvenient for literary historians, MacNeice’s relation to the rest of the poets of the 1930s was hardly straightforward. Poems, written during the years when the drive towards ‘committed’ poetry was at its strongest, seemed in 193 5 something of an aggressively neutral book; MacNeice’s writing of 1936-9, and in particular Autumn Journal, was his most obviously ‘political’ work of the decade, at a time when Auden, Spender, and even Day-Lewis were edging away from the public contexts of their poetry. Samuel Hynes has shown that, by 19 36, ‘the tide of political literature was ebbing’, even going so far as to claim that by then ‘a return to the main stream of modernism had begun’.1 It is as though MacNeice, in both the first and second halves of the decade, was moving decidedly against the tide. Of course, the term ‘political’ begs a number of questions: that MacNeice’s work in The Earth Compels and Autumn Journal is not propaganda, or even card-carrying New Country writing, is clear enough-in terms of actual political ‘commitment’, MacNeice was no nearer Marxist orthodoxy in 1936 than he had been before (indeed, he was possibly even further away).
Nightmare and Cinders: The Late Poetry
Authors: McDonald Peter
Published: November 2023

Macneice’s last two volumes of poetry, Solstices (1961) and The Burning Perch (1963), mark the climax of his career, containing much of his best and most enduringly influential work. Coming after his sometimes heavy and laboured writing of the late 1940s and mid-195os, these books, along with their immediate predecessor, Visitations (1957), have seemed to critics to represent a surprising late flowering, a ‘lyric return’ for which to be grateful. Indeed, this poetry does seem to have taken MacNeice himself by surprise: writing on Visitations, he noted that ‘When the lyrical impulse did return, this interval of abstention, it seems to me, had caused certain changes in my lyric writing-I naturally hope for the better.’ These changes (‘more concentrated and better organized ... relying more on syntax and bony feature’’) stem partly from an application to the lyric medium of the principles tested in the longer poems, but partly also from a deliberate disciplining of his material on MacNeice’s part which owed much to his ideas of ‘parable’ and ‘dream logic’. Another decisive influence on this late poetry is the poet’s increasing tendency to examine his own life and the life of his time retrospectively, so that the ‘dream logic’ of the poems is a kind of Last Judgement on the poetry written in the 1930s and after.
Elegies On The Death Of Prince Henry
Authors: Kay Dennis
Published: November 2023

Prince Henry’s death on 6 November 1612 provoked an unprecedentedly intense, widespread, and unequivocal outburst of lamentation. The King withdrew to Theobalds, the Queen to Somerset House: Foscarini reported that, even ‘in the midst of the most important discussions’, James would cry ‘Henry is dead, Henry is dead’: a little later Chamberlain noted how ‘on Tewsday I heard the bishop of Ely [Andrewes] preaching at court upon the third verse of the 37th of Esay … pray solemnly for Prince Henry without recalling himself’. All Protestant Europe joined in the mourning. Never before had so many elegies been written on a single occasion, by such a wide range of practitioners: poets of all kinds, all (or most) religious and political persuasions. Those who did, as what follows will show, included William Browne, George Chapman, John Donne, William Drummond, Sir William Alexander, Edward and George Herbert, Henry King, Joshua Sylvester, John Webster, Cyril Tourneur, Thomas Heywood, Sir Arthur Gorges, Sir Walter Ralegh, Thomas Campion, and George Wither.4 The only major writers who did not join in were Jonson, Daniel, Drayton, and Shakespeare.
Birth
Authors: Honan Park
Published: November 2023

Shakespeare’s life began near the reflecting, gleaming river Avon, which today flows past Stratford’s Church of the Holy Trinity where he lies buried, and past a theatre where his dramas are seen and heard by visitors from all nations. In rare flood times, the river was wild and destructive, sweeping away bridges and much in its path, but normally it was hospitable to truant boys or patient fishermen, and no guttered rocks or congregated sands imperilled any large keel here. The river arises in grassy highland in the east of England near Naseby, and for miles hardly deserves the name Avon, or ‘river’, which has echoes all over Celtic Europe: the Avon or Aven in Brittany, the Avenza in Italy, and the Avona in Spain. This Avon is at first only a runnel and then a willow-bordered stream,
To London—and the Amphitheatre Players
Authors: Honan Park
Published: November 2023

Elizabethan London deeply impressed or astonished its visitors —even if they knew beforehand of its long rows of shops and four-storey houses, thronged suburbs and magnificently built-up London Bridge, or of its fine, painted theatres and rich waterfront palaces. For-eigners praised the city, and some apprentices knew it as bewildering or lethal. More people died in London than were born there —but nothing stopped an influx of workers.
The City in September
Authors: Honan Park
Published: November 2023

viewed from the bankside south of the river, London would have seemed tranquil and beautiful in the late summer of 1592. Then as now, some days brought haze over the Thames. In low-lying southern liberties near the amphitheatres, the air could be hot and humid. Here, though the tenements were sealed off from the Thames by rising embankments, the working lives of people within the river’s floodplain were influenced by the river’s commerce and the city to the north. Above a line of public and private houses on the north bank, steeples and towers rose into the September air. Wherries and barges would have moved on the river deliberately as ever—but watermen did not bring play-goers over to Paris Garden and the Clink.
Hamlet’s Questions
Authors: Honan Park
Published: November 2023

What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god—the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals! And yet to me what is this quintessence of dust? Bitter, icy weather and deluges of snow appear to have helped screen the workers who dismantled the Theater, but for actors intensely cold weather had drawbacks. Thick ice had begun to cover English rivers in December and January. Alpine glaciers soon crushed houses near Chamonix, marking the start of colder spells all over Europe, and winters, as a rule, were to be hard for the rest of Shakespeare’s lifetime. There is no sign that he regretted stark winters, but freezing weather brings no cheer and heralds bleak revelations in his new play: ‘‘Tis bitter cold, I And I am sick at heart’, says Francisco, in its first scene, and later Hamlet remarks: ‘The air bites shrewdly, it is very cold.’
The Role of the Sovereign
Authors: Billington Sandra
Published: November 2023

The king was not above the moral law of God but he was usually considered to be outside his own instituted laws. Augustine argued that if a king erred, retribution was to be left to God: the lack of perfect kingship was another example of the fallen state of the world after Adam. In the troubled years of the mid-sixteenth century, after the well-advertised Henrician changes and the consequences of religious divisions, this argument was nevertheless reasserted by Bishop Latimer and by William Tyndale, who wrote that if the people discovered they were ruled by evil men then it was a sign ‘that God is angry with us’. Others, such as Ponet, considered it lawful to depose the rule of Mary Tudor, and ‘some Catholics like Parsons took a similar line against Elizabeth’. Understandably, all monarchs before and after the Reformation propagated the view that they were primarily responsible to God, and that earthly opposition to their divine authority on earth was treason. The divinity that hedged a king had emanated from the Holy Roman Empire. As J. N. Figgis wrote, the Christian empire on earth had ‘Christ as its King and his two Vicegerents [Pope and Emperor] upon earth’. Conflict was inevitable since, to maintain their individual authority, each needed to claim autonomy, supremacy in relation to the other, and the direct approval of God.
Kings, Princes, and Lords in Shakespeare’s Plantagenet Plays
Authors: Billington Sandra
Published: November 2023

One might ask, how versatile and innovative could popular tradition be? Would not dramatists, particularly Shakespeare, find themselves in a strait-jacket which could only result in cliche? Other dramatists did fall into the trap of strict adherence to formula, and possibly Shakespeare did himself in Timon, but a more discriminating use contributed to creative structures for large-scale works, such as the Henry VI trilogy and the two parts of Henry IV. In Henry VI the midsummer game pattern forms a matrix from one play to the next. Throughout the trilogy one mock government is repeatedly superseded by another in a progressive and enveloping mock king context. The process, established formally at the openings of Parts I and 2, increases in momentum from then on.
Tamburlaine and Timon Paradigm and Parable
Authors: Billington Sandra
Published: November 2023

In 1587 and 1588, at the same time that political anxieties found expression in The Misfortunes of Arthur and The Troublesome Raigne of King John, the youthful Marlowe turned his back on national issues to create instead a political situation of his own. On leaving Cambridge, he invaded the theatre with the first part of Tamburlaine the Great and, as Harry Levin put it, the confidence of ‘the conqueror whose conquests he [had] chosen to dramatise’. Instead of looking at mythical and historical princes through a reductive, critical lens, Marlowe magnified his hero unashamedly and, for the two-part play to work in its entirety, audiences must retain interest in Tamburlaine’s persistent, soaring ambition which repeatedly defies ‘the accumulated wisdom of the ages’. With consistent boldness Marlowe not only freed English verse from classical inhibition and jigging rhymes but, as I shall argue, he also stretched the mock king tradition into a highly affirmative statement. Tamburlaine was one of the most popular plays in Henslowe’s repertory, despite the unusually simple plot, and was still being played at the Red Bull in the 163os.
Comedy
Authors: Billington Sandra
Published: November 2023

Comedy springs from the festive celebration of disorder, and there are two alternative comic attitudes one might take towards it. Inversion of order might be seen to be morally dangerous and, though entertaining, be finally expelled with a sense of relief, or, as John Stow first suggested regarding midsummer shows, it might be seen as a temporary, necessary relaxation of laws to enable social regeneration. However, perhaps comic disorder is most telling when a mixture of the two. Although, in Shakespeare’s most saturnalian play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the hidebound, legalistic attitude of Hermia’s father is finally overruled by Theseus, and the lovers’ confusion in the forest is a necessary part of their maturation, yet the betrayals and quarrels of the night-time flight are not in themselves the stuff of social improvement. They are only the means of obtaining self-knowledge upon which to build that improvement. The lovers’ own sense of relief on waking in Act rv is palpable, and though it is stressed that the fairies can appear in daylight, and so are not evil, yet the dangerous possibilities of the night-time world they govern give a stronger quality to the eventual comic resolution. Whereas, in The Shoemakers’ Holiday, the actions of the misrule lord, Simon Eyre, are divested of any danger, and it is necessary for him to be elevated into a position of authority in order to intervene and bring about a harmonious ending for the lovers.
Political Dissent and Drama
Authors: Billington Sandra
Published: November 2023

Sixteenth-century drama is redolent with the unease characteristic of Tudor courts, and this was perhaps first translated by John Skelton into the Morality play Vice as an evil alter rex of cosmic proportions. Debate continues as to whether Magnyfycence was intended to represent Wolsey misled by his own material nature, or Henry beguiled by Wolsey. But, as W. G. Glassco says, ‘one cannot escape the impression that the play is an indictment of all the Cardinal represents’. lt might be thought surprising that Wolsey’s sensitivity about such matters, which caused John Roo’s imprisonment after his similar play in Gray’s Inn, at Christmas 1526-7, did not react immediately against Skelton, for it was only at the end of his life that the poet was in real danger from the prelate. In the upheavals of the Reformation, a decade later, further dramatic satires on affairs of state can be detected, through the authorities’ reaction to them. In r 5 37, it was alleged that seditious comment was added to the Suffolk May games, when the mock king was found to be advising how to rule a realm, and, in performance, the actor who played Husbandry ‘said many things against gentlemen more than was in the book of the play’.
Claudian
Authors: Wills W G , Herman Henry
Published: November 2023

The earliest toga drama to attract widespread public interest and to stimulate the divided critical response which attended many toga pieces is Claudian (1883), the product of a collaboration among four men: Henry Herman, who devised the play’s structure and narrative, the poet-dramatist W. G. Wills, who provided the dialogue, E. W. Godwin, who again provided ‘the archaeology of costumes &c.’, and the actor-manager Wilson Barrett,35.
Ben-Hur
Authors: Young William
Published: November 2023

The novel’s author, General Lew Wallace, had left military service (he fought, first in the Mexican War of 1847 and again in the Amer ican Civil War) to serve briefly as emissary to Bolivia and then as Governor of the territory of New Mexico. New Mexico, annexed after the Mexican War, had a mixed population of native Americans, Mexicans, and Anglo-Whites nearing 120,000 in the late r87os. By comparison to life in more settled parts of the nation, creature com forts were minimal; a railroad did not reach the largest settlement, Albuquerque, until I 880.
The Barbarian Ingomar
Authors: Griffith Directed hy D W
Published: November 2023

When, in 1908, the American director D. W. Griffith made The Barbarian Ingomar, he was both extending the life and altering the nature of an early toga play. The Barbarian Ingomar95 is taken from a drama with a long and irregular history, first as a play supporting German culture in the face of French condescension, and later as a parable warning from Griffith about foreign immigration into America. The source for Griffith’s film is Ingomar, the Barbarian, a play first seen in London at Drury Lane and Sadler’s Wells in 1851.
Kate Smith and Manley Hopkins
Authors: White Norman
Published: November 2023

Haslemere, Surrey: December 1918. Into the hands of a bedridden lady of nearly ninety-eight, twenty years a widow, was placed one of the first copies of a small edition of poems written by her eldest son, who had been dead for twenty-nine years. The book was delicately produced, considering the austerity of the war years: the white wove leaves unevenly trimmed, and bound in light-blue paper boards, with a cream label on its spine. One of the poems in the book, elegantly penned and illuminated on parchment, had hung in the house since she had first lived there over thirty years before.
Stratford
Authors: White Norman
Published: November 2023

Shortly before the marriage Manley had taken possession of 87 The Grove, Stratford, the village just outside London’s eastern boundary. Almost opposite his father’s old house, it was the left-hand tenement of a pair which had been one mansion; Manley leased it from Mrs Ann Rawes. With three stories and a basement it was a solid, ugly, eighteenth-century brick house, its large front windows emphasized by surrounds of darker bricks. In going back to Stratford and The Grove, ten years after the family had given up living there, Manley was announcing a new start. To emphasize the continuity, his mother, his sister Ann, and his brother Charles came to live with Manley and his wife. Of the other two brothers, Edward was abroad with the Hudson’s Bay Company, and Marsland, aged nineteen, had started as a pensioner at Peterhouse, Cambridge. It may be surprising that Manley could afford to send his younger brother to college and set up a new home before he became self-employed, but the Smith alliance was probably proving useful.
Vital Truths of Nature: Hopkins and Ruskin
Authors: White Norman
Published: November 2023

Hopkins spent the first week of the long vacation at Oak Hill, reading the Georgics with Edward Bond, whom he managed to bring round to his views on Virgil. Then the family and a cousin went to the Isle of Wight. His parents considered that Gerard was not yet sufficiently established at Oxford to join a reading party, but he was able to break away at times from family amusements.
Studies
Authors: White Norman
Published: November 2023

Responsions (or ‘Smalls’), the elementary test for all Oxford undergraduates, which Hopkins had passed in June 1863, was merely the qualification for entry to two sets of examinations which he had to sit in his four-year university career. The emphasis on examinations as a framework for Oxford studies was symptomatic of a general stiffening of education in the second half of the nineteenth century. Competitive examinations, borrowed from the Chinese, provided objective evaluations of a student’s progress for parents and employers. The growth of the modern State demanded competent administrators in vast numbers, which the old upper classes were unable to supply. The system of careful grading fostered the fashionable competitive spirit; the appearance of the class-lists was the climax of each year at Oxford, and success or failure branded a man.
Religion
Authors: White Norman
Published: November 2023

When Hopkins travelled from Torquay to Oak Hill on Monday 28 August, there were six weeks before the Michaelmas term. For the first ten days of this period his diary is split between terse notes on reprehensible actions and fragments of soliloquy, song, and dialogue from Castara Victrix: Neither his heart nor mind were in this writing, filled with faint echoes of verses from another mind and time, without personality or urgency. Characters are indistinguishable, situations not thought out, rhythms dull.
Novitiate: Roehampton:, 1868-1870
Authors: White Norman
Published: November 2023

During the fortnight before Hopkins entered the novitiate1 he said goodbye to friends and relations. Bridges came over to Oak Hill one day,2 and Hopkins presented him with the Aldine edition of the Earl of Surrey’s poems, which his father and mother had given him the previous Christmas. He would not be allowed personal books in the novitiate. It was later said, however, that he ‘expressed surprise at not being allowed to keep by him Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads’ while he was a novice. On the evening of 7 September, a ‘dim, fine, and very hot’ day, he said goodbye at home and set off to Manresa House, arriving late at the Georgian mansion, with its fine Doric-pillared portico.
St Beuno’s
Authors: White Norman
Published: November 2023

Before returning to Roehampton on 21 August, Hopkins spent two days at Bristol, and a further few days at Beaumont. He still had a day or two to spare, in which to indulge for the last time in delights only London could provide. He had arranged to dine with the Jesuit Fathers at Westminster on Tuesday evening, and earlier that day visited Westminster Abbey. He went round the pre-Reformation cloisters, taking in ‘the beautiful paired triforium-arcade with cinqfoiled wheels riding the arches’, and discovering ‘a simplicity of instress in the cinqfoil’. At the National Gallery, he hurried at first from painting to painting, having lost the habit of looking at pictures; then the words ‘studious to eat but not to taste’ occurred to him, and he relaxed, and started making notes.
‘In my salad days, in my Welsh days’
Authors: White Norman
Published: November 2023

In April 1877 the architect William Butterfield had sent, in reply to a request from Hopkins, a complete list of his buildings, and in a letter of thanks Hopkins expressed his affinity with Butterfield’s work, though he disliked some of its oddnesses:

... yr beautiful and original style. I do not think this generation will ever much admire it. They do not understand how to look at a Pointed building as a whole having a single form governing it throughout, which they would perhaps see in a Greek temple: they like it to be a sort of farmyard and medley of ricks and roofs and dovecots. And very few people seem to care for pure beauty of line, at least till they are taught to. It is tempting to think that by ‘a sort of farmyard and medley of ricks and roofs and dovecots’ Hopkins was referring to the lazily higgledy piggledy groupings of Joseph Hansom’s St Beuno’s buildings, and contrasting them with the secretive, scholarly, centripetal unity of Butterfield’s works, which people found so difficult to understand.
‘Cobweb, soapsud, and frost-feather permanence’: Mount St Mary’s, Stonyhurst, Farm Street., Oxford, 1877-1879
Authors: White Norman
Published: November 2023

Although its postal address was Chesterfield, in Derbyshire, Mount St Mary’s College’ was nearer to Sheffield in Yorkshire, on the edge of a remote country village, Spinkhill, with coalmines nearby. Mount St Mary’s had been opened as a school in 1842, in buildings adapted from Park Hall, residence of the old Catholic family, the Poles, one of whose ancestors, St Margaret Pole, had been executed by Henry VIII. A Gothic church, designed by Alfred Hansom, who had converted Park Hall, was seventy yards away, perched on the edge of the hill. When Hopkins arrived new college buildings were being put up. The plan for the block included school-rooms, areas for recreation and for private study, and a dormitory at the south side of a quadrangle; the front of the college was to overlook the valley towards Eckington. The new block stood stark in a miry field between the college and the church, with a long covered way of corrugated iron, known as ‘the Tin Gallery’. Hopkins’s room was on the ground floor of a brick block built on to the house in 1859.
‘So fagged, so harried and gallied up and down’: Bedford Leighd Liverpool. Glasgowd 1879-1881
Authors: White Norman
Published: November 2023

In October 1879, after ten months in Oxford, Hopkins was appointed to Liverpool. First he had to go on supply to St Joseph’s, Bedford Leigh,1 possibly to take the place of Fr Charles Karslake, brother of his schoolfriend Lewis Karslake. One bad aspect of the posting was its stopgap nature; he did not know what work faced him in Liverpool and came to doubt whether he should ever get there. There was no constancy even about his work in Leigh-he was liable to be sent for the odd day or week to nearby parishes, such as St John’s, Wigan, or the town of St Helens. St Helens he found ‘probably the most repulsive place in Lancashire or out of the Black Country. The stench of sulphuretted hydrogen rolls in the air and films of the same gas form on railing and pavement.’ Leigh itself was not much better, ‘a darksome place, with pits and mills and foundries’ . It was smaller and less dignified than nearby Rochdale, where Bridges’s mother lived: ‘the houses red, mean, and two storied; there are a dozen mills or so, and coalpits also; the air is charged with smoke as well as damp’.
‘Surely one vocation cannot destroy another?’: Roehampton Tertianship and Stonyhurst.,1881-1883
Authors: White Norman
Published: November 2023

Hopkins came to Manresa House on 8 October. As he explained to Canon Dixon, the tertianship was not a noviceship. At the end of the noviceship proper, before he had left Manresa in 1870, he had taken vows which were perpetually binding, and renewed them every six months after that until he was professed or took the final degree he was to hold in the Society. The tertianship prepared for these last vows, which would be pronounced at its close. At this stage Hopkins considered he still had a chance of making up his lost fourth year of theology and becoming a professed father, the only rank eligible for the major Jesuit offices.
‘Dapple at end’
Authors: White Norman
Published: November 2023

The lost now lying in hell are Devils without bodies and disembodied souls, they suffer nevertheless a torment as of bodily fire. Though burning and other pains afflict us through our bodies yet it is the soul that they afflict, the mind: if the mind can be deadened, as by chloroform, no pain is felt at all: God can then if he chooses bodily afflict the mind that is out of or never had a body to suffer in. No one in the body can suffer fire for very long, the frame is destroyed and the pain comes to an end; not so, unhappily, the pain that afflicts the indestructible mind.... Let all consider this: we are our own tormentors.
Sanctuaries
Authors: White Norman
Published: November 2023

Writing to Bridges in September 1885, Hopkins made the connection between his creativity and his need for change:

So with me, if I could but get on, if I could but produce work I should not mind its being buried, silenced, and going no further; but it kills me to be time’s eunuch and never to beget Now because I have had a holiday though not strong I have some buoyancy; soon I am afraid I shall be ground down to a state like this last spring’s and summer’s, when my spirits were so crushed that madness seemed to be making approaches—and nobody was to blame, except myself partly for not managing myself better and contriving a change
‘Practical’ Prose
Authors: Gray Douglas
Published: November 2023

This period is notable for the richness, variety, and distinction of its prose. This has too often been ignored or has been obscured by a narrow obsession with ‘continuity’ (often a rather loosely defined word), encouraged by a very eloquent essay of R. W. Chambers, who, protesting rightly against the view that there were no connections between English prose of pre-Conquest times and that of the later Middle Ages, found a ‘continuity’ embodied in the tradition of religious, devotional, and mystical prose. This tradition, although it produced much excellent writing, is only one strand among several. Chambers did not allow much scope for the importance of French (or Latin) example.
Religious Prose I: Introduction: Lollards and Answers to Them; Sermons and Books of Religious Instruction
Authors: Gray Douglas
Published: November 2023

The large surviving body of religious prose contains some of the most brilliant and most attractive writing in English in this period. Religion was still omnipresent in England, but even before the great shock of the Reformation and the ‘stripping of the altars’ it was confronted by a variety of challenges. With many of these the inherited orthodox tradition could cope: indeed, it proved to be enduring and, in spite of persecution, a surprisingly long-lived one. In this period of ferment and strain, the Christian, traditionally seen as an exile and a pilgrim in a sinful world, found much to disturb, distract, or destroy the restless heart that would find no peace until it rested in God.
Lyrics
Authors: Gray Douglas
Published: November 2023

The lyrics and shorter poems are in many ways the glory of late medieval English literature. This is a view that will seem strange to those fresh from reading some older studies: indeed, of all the genres in English literature in this period, the lyric has perhaps suffered most from once fashionable conventional patterns of thought—the idea of the cultural decay of the Middle Ages in general, and the notion that individual literary genres must necessarily follow a pattern of a gradual rise to a high point of excellence and then decline and become degenerate.
Robert Henryson: Narratives and Romances in Verse
Authors: Gray Douglas
Published: November 2023

The delights of The Buke of the Howlat are not always fused into a totally coherent whole, but they are real enough to make us wish that more of Holland’s poetry had survived. We may well feel the same about his great successor, Robert Henryson, perhaps the finest poet of this period, who can match his variety of tone, and surpasses him in imaginative coherence. Sir Francis Kynaston (1587–1642) who translated The Testament of Cresseid (and Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde) into Latin in a little anecdote about Henryson’s death expressed a similar wish: ‘this Mr Robert Henderson he was questionles a learned and a witty man, and it is pitty we have no more of his workes’.
William Dunbar and Gavin Douglas
Authors: Gray Douglas
Published: November 2023

At the end of this period two of the greatest Scottish poets flourished—William Dunbar (?c.1460–?1513) and his younger near-contemporary, Gavin Douglas (?1475–1522). Their careers were very different, and their work is in some ways also different, not to say contrasting. Yet there are similarities, and to read them in association is probably more rewarding than the traditional comparing and contrasting of Dunbar and Henryson. One obvious area of shared endeavour has to do with a stylistic concern to make full use of (and perhaps to develop) the resources of the Scottish vernacular in poetry which is strong and energetic, and also elaborate and flamboyant.
Shakespeare and the Exorcists
Authors: Greenblatt Stephen
Published: November 2023

Between the spring of 1585 and the summer of 1586, a group of English Catholic priests led by the Jesuit William Weston, alias Father Edmunds, conducted a series of spectacular exorcisms, principally in the house of a recusant gentleman, Sir George Peckham of Denham, Buckinghamshire. The priests were outlaws-by an act of 1585 the mere presence in England of a Jesuit or seminary priest constituted high treason-and those who sheltered them were guilty of a felony, punishable by death. Yet the exorcisms, though clandestine, drew large crowds, almost certainly in the hundreds, and must have been common knowledge to hundreds more. In 16o3, long after the arrest and punishment of those involved, Samuel Harsnett, then chaplain to the bishop of London, wrote a detailed account of the cases, based on sworn statements taken from four of the demoniacs and one of the priests. It has been recognized since the eighteenth century that Shakespeare was reading Harsnett’s book, A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures, as he was writing King Lear.
Pastoral and Comedy
Authors: Bennett J A W
Published: November 2023

As the story of Anglo-Saxon literature opens with a masterpiece—‘The Dream of the Rood’ —that found no parallel in three hundred years, so, when in the late twelfth century English has its renascence, the first poet to be heard spoke in assured tones and showed a delicate humour, a rich humanity, and a sensitivity to nature that amounted to genius, and that will hardly be met with again before Marvell’s time. The Altercacio inter Filomelam et Bubonem —the name given in the two extant manuscripts to the poem now called The Owl and the Nightingale—has been called miraculous by those who sense the change in English feeling that it displays when set alongside  Beowulf or Ma/don, The Seafarer or the Riddles—or even the Latin pastoral in which Alcuin laments the departure of the cuckoo, anticipating Arnold’s ‘too quick despairer, wherefore wilt thou go’; or the Ecloga Theoduli, in which the contestants challenge each other, prizes are promised, and a judge appointed: that title suggests a connection with Virgil’s third eclogue, which Servius had called an altercacio. But ‘miraculous’ is merely a loose synonym for ‘mysterious’, ‘unaccountable’: a confession that we know nothing of the cultural conditions and little of the literary context out of which it grew. There is a springtime freshness about it, a verve, a sense of sheer fun.
The Close of the Middle Ages in Scotland
Authors: Lewis C S
Published: November 2023

In 1488, raised by the rebellion which dethroned and killed his father and of which he repented his own share, wearing an iron girdle while he lived, James IV was crowned at Scone. Though patrons cannot create poets, and though James was no great patron, it is deeply appropriate that the court poetry which will mainly concern us in this chapter should have been written under such a king; for in him and in it alike, as also in the dress and architecture of the period, all that is bright, reckless, and fantastical in the late medieval tradition finds superb expression. He was primarily a knight, only secondarily and disastrously a king; ‘not a good captain’ notes the Spanish ambassador, ‘for he begins to fight before he hasgiven his orders’ and is ‘more courageous than a prince should be’. ‘He luvid nothing so weill’, says Pitscottie, ‘as able men and guid hors and used great jousting’, so that the fame of his tournaments drew knights-errant from all Europe. At the same time he shared with the poets a hearty relish for low life and loved to ‘ludge in poore mens houses’ unattended and disguised. His very vices were chivalrous; no avarice, no countenance shown to ‘pick thanks’, but a weakness for loving par amors. He was mercurial, wilful, restless, and inquisitive; much like Arthur himself (in Gawain and the Green Knight), who hated to be still for long—’so busied him his young blood and his brain wild’. The price was Flodden, and ifhe half killed Scotland he did it in character. A ‘lufe letter’ from the Queen of France containing a ring and a claim on his services as her true knight helped to speed him on that last journey, and the very act whereby he made defeat certain was a repetition of Byrhtnoth’s heroic folly at Maldon.
The Close Of The Middle Ages In England
Authors: Lewis C S
Published: November 2023

The contrast between these two pieces of anonymous verse—the graceful movement and firmness of line in the former, and the doggerel rigmarole of the latter—epitomizes the history of later medieval poetry in England. From the varied excellence of the fourteenth century to the work of the early sixteenth it is a history of decay; so that in turning from the Scotch poetry of that age to the English we pass from civilization to barbarism. In certain other respects, of course, it might be called a transition from barbarism to civilization. We pass from a Scotland perpetually torn by feudal wars, in which neither life nor property is secure for a moment, to an England where Henry VII’s triumph at Bosworth (1485) had at least begun the restoration of national unity, where the New Learning was already beginning to spread, and where the new king’s mythical connexion with Arthur (after whom he named his son) might be expected to give a poetic sanction to men’s not ill-grounded hopes of a new era of prosperity, splendour, and power. All the conditions—or what we naturally suppose to be the conditions—of a great literature seem to be present in early Tudor England. If that great literature had been written, can we doubt that most historians would confidently point to those conditions as its cause? In Scotland they are all lacking. But it is Scotland which has the literature.
Prose in the ‘Golden’ Period
Authors: Lewis C S
Published: November 2023

In the last quarter of the century we find a greatly increased output of literature. There is on the whole a remarkable improvement in quality; but even if this had not been so, the mere quantity would be striking. Part of the explanation is that literature is now finding its feet as a commercial art and printers are eager for saleable copy. Many of the authors are victims of that academic overproduction which Mulcaster deprecated, men who have been helped through the universities by friends who could help them no further and who try to live (if nothing better turns up) by the pen. The more fortunate of them make plays for the new theatres; the others depend on the patron and the bookseller. There are also, of course, many ‘gentle’, pious, or learned authors who write from other motives.