bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Maxwell’s equations
Authors: Neittaanmäki P , Rudnicki M , Savini A
Published: November 2023

The field equations for the general. time-varying case are collectively known as Maxwell’s equations after J C. Maxwell. Several results were obtained by Ampere, Faraday, Gauss and Coulomb Thus Maxwell’s equations are the culmination of many years of research into the electric and magnetic phenomena. Given below is a list of the most important discoveries in electricity and magnetism, including the derivation of Maxwell’s equations up to their experimental verification:
Synthesis of material properties
Authors: Neittaanmäki P , Rudnicki M , Savini A
Published: November 2023

A very common problem in parameter estimation is that of identifying the unknown properties of the material of which a system is composed from a knowledge of measurements on the boundary of the response of the system to some input or to some other global quantity characterizing the system. In noninvasive medical imaging, for mstance, one is interested in estimating the electrical activity within a bounded-value conductor, either from measured potential values on the outer boundary or directly from inner electric sources.
Introduction and historical survey
Authors: Kenjo Takashi , Sugawara Akira
Published: November 2023

This book concerns itself with the electrical machines called stepping or step motors, covering their construction, principles, theory, driving techniques, and applications. To begin with we will survey the brief history and technological advancement of stepping motors. Various types of stepping motor are referred to in this chapter, but the structural details of the modern motors will be discussed in the next chapter.
Surface and groundwater flow-types of equation
Authors: Wood W L
Published: November 2023

The movements of groundwater and of surface water (in lakes, reservoirs, and rivers) are closely related. When the water level in a river is higher than the water level in the adjacent aquifer and the river bed is permeable, the water will flow from the river to feed the aquifer; falling groundwater levels in the vicinity of a spring can cause it to dry up and the river may disappear in that neighbourhood. When the water level in the aquifer is higher the river takes water away from the aquifer. Figure 1.1.1 from the Thames Water Lower Colne Gravels study illustrates these effects. Natural recharge and stream leakage from the Colne Brook combine to add to the groundwater and the River Thames is draining the water away.
The method of characteristics
Authors: Wood W L
Published: November 2023

As explained in section 1.5 the hyperbolic equations such as the kinematic wave equation typically have curves associated with them called characteristics and these carry information about the solution. The method of characteristics uses this property to obtain the solution by moving out along the characteristics from the starting values. In some simpler cases it can be applied directly (section 2.2). In more complicated cases illustrated in sections 2.3 and 2.4 it is applied numerically.

In Chapter 1 the St Venant equations for surface flow are formulated. These can be in terms of the depth H and the mean velocity u as in eqns (1.4.2) and (1.4.3). Alternatively for channel flow they can be in terms of the cross-sectional area A and the discharge q as in (1.4.9) and (1.4.11).
The finite element method
Authors: Wood W L
Published: November 2023

The finite element method (FEM) is not recommended in this book for the solution of surface flow problems because finite difference methods are easier for these. The FEM is introduced here as applied to the solution of subsurface flow, i.e. for the spatial discretization of elliptic and parabolic problems (Chapter 1). At first it is assumed that the region concerned is two dimensional. The basic idea is that this region in which the solution is required is divided into triangles or quadrilaterals and in each of these a simple polynomial approximation to the exact solution is taken. The simplest is that of a piecewise linear approximation on triangles. The result of this can be visualized as a polyhedral surface of triangular flat plates approximating a smooth curved surface. The edges of the triangular flat plates projected on to an intersecting plane give the elements into which the region in the plane has been divided (what happens if the region has curved boundaries is considered later – section 6.4). With this image it is clear that the error in the piecewise linear approximation will be proportional to the curvature (i.e. the second derivative) of the surface and that where the curvature is greatest there should be smaller elements.
Dimensionless parameters
Authors: Wood W L
Published: November 2023

So far in this book the equations have mainly been left in their dimensional form but in practice the equations should always be non-dimensionalized before the numerical method is applied. This gives a clue as to the relative sizes of the terms in the equations and hence guidance as to the strategy to be used.
The Christianization of Society
Authors: Pryce Huw
Published: November 2023

By the early ninth century the Christianization of society was complete. So, at least, is the impression given by the Martyrology of Óengus, a calendar of saints’ days written c.830 in Irish verse at the monastery of Tallaght near Dublin. The prologue to this work celebrates the triumph of Christianity: whereas the pagan rulers of Ireland and their fortresses had passed away, the renown of saints such as Patrick, Ciarán, and Brigit was greater than ever, reflected in powerful churches that resembled flourishing cities.
Writing
Authors: Cróinín Dáibhí Ó
Published: November 2023

In one of the most famous passages of medieval English literary history, the preface to the English translation of Pope Gregory the Great’s Regula Pastoralis (‘Pastoral care’), which Alfred the Great, king of Wessex 871–99, had commissioned, the king remarked how, at the time of his accession, ‘learning had declined so thoroughly in England that there were very few men on this side of the Humber who could understand their divine services in English, or even translate a single letter from Latin into English; and I suppose that there were not many beyond the Humber either’.
Britain, Ireland, and the South
Authors: Gillingham John
Published: November 2023

During the ninth, tenth, and early eleventh centuries, Britain and Ireland, two islands on the north-western edge of the known world, had not been much affected by contacts with continental European powers and cultures—much less so than in the seventh and eighth centuries. Merchants and pilgrims had always ensured that the populations of Britain and Ireland had not remained entirely impervious to the ideas and tastes of peoples living in mainland Europe and the Mediterranean region; such ideas had, for example, contributed to the attempts at monastic reform in mid-tenth-century England.
What Kind of Society Was Israel?
Authors: Coggins Richard
Published: November 2023

The potential value of archaeology for a better understanding of the Old Testament has been recognized for more than a century; any formal contribution from sociology, by contrast, has been a much more recent development and is, so far, of much more modest dimensions. That situation is, however, already changing, and in a number of ways it has come to be recognized that the understanding of the actual society which constituted ancient Israel can be very significant for many aspects of Old Testament study.
Jane Austen
Authors: Stafford Fiona
Published: November 2023

Although Jane Austen ‘s earliest surviving writings date from the late 1780s, her first published novel was Sense and Sensibility, which appeared in three volumes in 1811. By 1813 all the copies had sold, so Thomas Egerton published a second, revised, edition; the same year also saw the appearance of the first and second editions of Pride and Prejudice. Mans. field Park followed in 1814, but since Egerton was reluctant to authorize a further edition, the rights were bought by John Murray who published Emma late in 1815 (title-page dated 1816) and the second edition of Mans. field Park in 1816. After the death of Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion were published as a four-volume set in 1818, together with a ‘Biographical Notice ‘ written by her elder brother, Henry. There were no further English editions until 1833, when Richard Bentley published all the novels in his Standard Novels series. The first scholarly edition was R. W Chapman ‘s The Novels of Jane Austen, which came out in five volumes in 1923 and established the texts, based on collations of the early editions, that were to provide the basis of numerous subsequent editions. Of the recent popular editions, the New Penguin texts have been edited directly from the first editions; this is particularly significant in the cases of Sense and Sensibility and Mans. field Park, since all previous texts had used the second editions. Many of the twentieth-century editions of Austen ‘s novels retain their value because of the distinguished writers who have contributed introductory essays.
Melodrama (1966)
Authors: Bentley Eric
Published: November 2023

Eric Bentley (born in England in 1916) has been a seminal influence in the academic study and indeed in the general understanding of drama not only in the United States, where he has spent the greater part of his life, but also in other English-speaking countries. He has taught at Columbia University, at Harvard, Buffalo, Maryland, and elsewhere. He has written extensively on theatre as a theorist, a critic, and a reviewer; he has made a wide range of world drama available in English as a translator and an anthologist: a full bibliography of his works would number over 400 items. In the English-speaking world he pioneered the knowledge of, and the vogue for, Bertolt Brecht, with whom he had been personally acquainted during the latter’s stay in America; he is also well known as an expert on Shaw and Pirandello. He is himself a playwright and he has directed for the stage: hence his approach to drama has been informed by first-hand knowledge of the practicalities of theatre.
Author’s Note to A Dream Play (1901)
Authors: Strindberg August
Published: November 2023

Just as Strindberg had written the definitive manifesto of naturalistic drama in his Preface to Miss Julie (see pp. 88-9), he put forward precisely the opposite doctrine in equally memorable terms at the turn of the century. The following note to A Dream Play—which was his own favourite among all of his plays—sums up in few words what was to become a major trend in twentieth-century drama: an irrationalism which, if not invariably indebted to the inner world of the dream, at any rate cut loose from the constraints of the everyday reality of naturalism and reinstated the unfettered imagination upon the stage. The essentially dark tone of A Dream Play anticipated much of the angst expressed in various kinds of irrationalist drama. Although this brief seminal statement by Strindberg has (deservedly) been reproduced quite a few times before, it simply cried out to be included here yet once again.
On the Futility of the ‘Theatrical’ in the Theatre (1896)
Authors: Jarry Alfred
Published: November 2023

This article by Alfred Jarry (1873-1907) was published in the September 1896 issue of the Mercure de France, shortly before the opening night of his play, Ubu Roi (King Ubu), which was about to be staged at the Thé âtre de l’OEuvre by the avant-garde director Aur élien Lugn é-Poe. Lugn é-Poe published an article under the same title in the following month’s issue of the Mercure de France, in which he referred to Elizabethan staging methods as a precedent for the non-naturalistic decor employed in the production.
The Futurist Synthetic Theatre (1915)
Authors: Marinetti Filippo Tommaso , Settimelli Emilio , Corra Bruno
Published: November 2023

The propagandist activities, before, during, and after the First World War, of the Italian poet, novelist, journalist, and playwright F. P. Marinetti (1876-1944) were essentially theatrical, although they were in fact directed at a total renewal not merely of the theatre but of all the arts. Marinetti’s efforts to sweep the whole of traditional European culture (including classical, naturalist, and symbolist drama) into the dustbin of history in order to make room for the ‘Futurism’ which he was advocating and indeed helping to create together with like-minded friends, came in the form of public, highly staged provocations: serate (evenings) of mixed artistic events and sintesi (syntheses, i.e. extremely short performance pieces) designed to surprise and infuriate audiences.
The Modern Theatre is the Epic Theatre: Notes to the opera Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny(1930)
Authors: Brecht Bertolt
Published: November 2023

The figure of Eugen Berthold Friedrich (‘Bert’) Brecht (1898-1965) is bound to loom large in any consideration of dramatic theory in the twentieth century. Poet, director, and playwright, he let his theorizing arise out of and feed back into theatrical practice —whenever, that is, he was able to get near a theatre; for the greater part of his exile from Germany, between 1933 and 1946, this was rarely the case. Brecht’s thinking about drama and performance has influenced men and women of the theatre—writers, directors, designers, actors —all over the world, partly because of the strength of the plays that embody his theoretical position, partly because of the incisiveness of the theory in its own right, and partly because of the prestige of the Berliner Ensemble which he founded in 1949 and which he led until the time of his death.
Semiotics of Theatrical Performance (1977)
Authors: Eco Umberto
Published: November 2023

The career of Umberto Eco (b. 1932) has shown —at least —two distinct faces. He has achieved international fame as a writer of fiction: one of his novels, The Name of the Rose (1980), a medieval mystery story, has been translated into twenty languages and was made into a film in 1986. But he is also Italy’s leading semiotician who enjoys a worldwide reputation. At the University of Bologna, where he has been Director of the Institute of Communications and the Performing Arts since 1959, his Chair of Semiotics was the first appointment explicitly so designated at any university. Professor Eco has served as Secretary-General of the International Association of Semiotic Studies.
5
Authors: Boddy William
Published: November 2023

The Proliferation Of Digital imaging technologies in the early 1990s, with virtual reality (VR) as their most technically elaborate and high-profile application, inspired new scholarly attention to the relations between the histories of communication technologies and those of cultural forms. Part of the challenge in addressing the range of technologies and discourses constituting the field of virtual reality in American culture is an almost wilful slipperiness of the object.
The General Prologue
Authors: Cooper Helen
Published: November 2023

Although the General Prologue was probably written fairly early in the course of Chaucer’s work on the Tales, it was not necessarily the first item to be composed, nor need it all have been written at one time. There is at least a possibility that some parts were written or adapted when the writing of the tales was well advanced; the Wife of Bath’s deafness, for instance, acquires its significance only retrospectively, and the last five pilgrims, the Miller, Manciple, Reeve, Summoner, and Pardoner, are fitted into the scheme a little oddly, being both briefly listed and described in detail. There is however no evidence for extensive revision in the manuscripts, where the text is unusually consistent—a consistency that can itself be problematic, as the ‘preestes thre’ universally assigned to the Prioress result in the wrong number of pilgrims. Two couplets are omitted in some manuscripts; the second of these (on the Summoner’s speaking Latin when drunk, 637-8, missing from Hengwrt and apparently the cause of trouble to some other scribes) is required by the sense; the first, found in only five manuscripts including Hengwrt, notes the Friar’s territorial jealousy:
The Miller’s Tale
Authors: Cooper Helen
Published: November 2023

Most manuscripts designate the links between the tales as ‘prologues’ to the following tales, and it seems likely that the terminology is in most instances Chaucer’s own, but it can on occasion be misleading. Many of the links function as epilogues as much as prologues: they both sign off the preceding tale and introduce the next, and in the process they often serve to indicate a relationship between the two.
The Cook’s Tale
Authors: Cooper Helen
Published: November 2023

The Cook enters the action of the pilgrimage, not through being called on for a story, but through the vigour of his response to the Reeve’s Tale. He picks out two aspects, both of which will colour his own tale: the ‘jape’, and the moral. The Reeve told of a ‘jape of malice’; he himself will tell of a ‘litel jape’. His addition of a third moral to the two the Reeve has already given (4320–1) demonstrates the taste for aphorisms that is to characterize his tale: ‘Ne bryng nat every man into thyn hous’ (4331). He cites Solomon as the source for the maxim (Ecclus. 11:29), though the dangers of herberwynge are pointed out in some of the analogues to the Reeve’s Tale; but the immediate stimulus to his comment is the ‘conclusion’, sexual rather than philosophical, that the clerks have brought to Simkin’s ‘argument of herbergage’ (4329, cf. 4122-6). There may be a punning comment on the tale’s genre here, for argumentum was the rhetorical term for a palpably fictional story— a category that includes most, if not all, fabliaux.
Tragedies
Authors: Miola Robert S
Published: November 2023

To create his tragedies, Shakespeare read classical and contemporary history and literature. Plutarch’s The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans provided a fascinating mix of fact and fiction, a storehouse of ancient history and legend. The book so charmed Tom Gilthead of BenJonson’s play, The Devil is an Ass, that he named his son Plutarchus:
Shakespeare as Reader
Authors: Miola Robert S
Published: November 2023

An early critic, Charlotte Lennox (175r4), acerbically surveyed Shakespeare and his habits of reading. In her opinion, Shakespeare introduced improbabilities and inconsistencies and usually changed his sources for the worse; witness, for example, her hostile account of Much Ado About Nothing: This fable, absurd and ridiculous as it is, was drawn from the foregoing story of Ginevra in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, a fiction which, as it is managed by the epic poet, is neither improbable nor unnatural, but by Shakespeare mangled and defaced, full of inconsistencies, contradictions, and blunders Shakespeare, by changing the persons, altering some of the circumstances and inventing others, has made the whole an improbable contrivance, borrowed just enough to show his poverty of invention, and added enough to show his want of judgment. (Vickers, iv. 140).
[1744-68], Thomas Davies on David Garrick (1719-79) and Mrs Pritchard (17u-68) in Macbeth, from Dramatic Micellanies [sic], 3 vols. (1784), ii. 140-1, 148-9, 166-7; with James Boaden, Life OfMrs Siddons, 2 vols. (1827), ii. 140-2.
Authors: Shakespeare Critics Theatre
Published: November 2023

The meteoric rise to fame of David Garrick was signalled by his performance of Richard III, in Colley Cibber’s adaptation, at the minor theatre in Goodman’s Fields, London, on 19 October 1741. He became Shakespeare’s greatest champion, playing in and adapting (sometimes drastically) many of his plays, and organizing in 1769 the Jubilee at Stratford-upon-Avon which inaugurated the Romantic deification of the dramatist. Garrick first played Macbeth, with great success, on 7 January 1744; Hannah Pritchard was his Lady Macbeth, and he relinquished the role when she died, in 1768. William Davenant’s considerably rewritten version (published in 1674) had held the stage.
[1789-c.1812], Julian Charles Young (died 1873) on J.P. Kemble as Coriolanus and Sarah Siddons (1755-1831) as Volumnia in Coriolanus at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, London, from his Memoirs of Charles Mayne Young (1840), pp. 40-1.
Authors: Shakespeare Critics Theatre
Published: November 2023

The first performances of Kemble’s version of Coriolanus were given at Drury Lane in 1789, with great success. Kemble based his version on one by Thomas Sheridan which borrowed from a play on the same subject by James Thomson. The title role, in which Kemble was finely portrayed by Sir Thomas Lawrence (see Pl. 2,), was especially suited to his talents as a heroic actor in classical parts, and Volumnia gave great opportunities, too, to Sarah Siddons, who played with him on these and later occasions. The Reverend Julian Charles Young (vicar of Ilmington, Warks.), son of one of Kemble’s disciples, the actor Charles Mayne Young (rm-1856), offers his account of Mrs Siddons’s performance in support of what he calls his ‘theory of the mute eloquence of gait and movement’, remarking that his father ‘used to speak in terms of almost wanton admiration, of a boldly conceived point he saw Mrs Siddons once make, while playing the comparatively inferior part of Volumnia for her brother’s benefit’.
21 January 1816, William Hazlitt on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, adapted by Frederic Reynolds (1764-1841) with music composed and arranged by Sir Henry Bishop , at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, London, from The Examiner, reprinted in Hazlitt on Theatre, ed. William Archer and Robert Lowe (1895; repr. New York, n.d. [1957]), pp. 73-6.
Authors: Shakespeare Critics Theatre
Published: November 2023

We hope we have not been accessory to murder, in recommending a delightful poem to be converted into a dull pantomime; for such is the fate of the Midsummer Night’s Dream. We have found to our cost, once for all, that the regions of fancy and the boards of Covent Garden are not the same thing. All that is fine in the play, was lost in the representation. The spirit was evaporated, the genius was fled; but the spectacle was fine: it was that which saved the play.
4 October 1818, Leigh Hunt on Edmund Kean as Othello at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, London, from The Examiner, reprinted in Leigh Hunt’s Dramatic Criticism I8o8-I8JI, ed. L. H. and C. W. Houtchens (New York, 1949), pp. 20I-2.
Authors: Shakespeare Critics Theatre
Published: November 2023

M.R. Kean has returned from his tour to France and Italy—a very proper relaxation for a man of his talents—and has performed in the course of the week Richard the Third and Othello. We saw the latter on Thursday evening; and with all our experience of the stage, and with all our scepticism as to the powers of the very best actors in characters from Shakspeare, we never witnessed a performance that struck us so forcibly. It brought back upon us the earnestness and implicit attention of our younger days. We have admired Mrs. Siddons, been infinitely amused with Lewis,’ been sore with laughing at Munden, been charmed with Mrs. Jordan; but we never saw anything that so completely held us suspended and heart-stricken, as Mr. Kean’s Othello. In all parts it is as complete as actor can shew it-in the previous composure of its dignity, in its soldier-like repression of common impulse, in the deep agitation of its first jealousy,
31 October 1819, Leigh Hunt on William Charles Macready (1793-1873) as Richard III at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, London, from The Examiner, reprinted in Leigh Hunt’s Dramatic Criticism r808-r83r, ed. L. H. and C. W. Houtchens (New York, 1949), pp. 219-21.
Authors: Shakespeare Critics Theatre
Published: November 2023

New and unexpected circumstance has taken place here, which promises to rescue the character of the house from the pantomimic degradation into which it was fast falling. Mr. Macready has performed Richard twice in the course of the week, with the greatest applause. We must confess we went to see him with no sort of expectations at all commensurate with the greatness of the part. We thought him a man of feeling, but little able to give a natural expression to it, and so taking the usual refuge in declamation. He appeared to us one of the best readers of a part we had seen, according to the received notions of good reading; but with the exception of a character now and then bordering on the melodramatic, like Rob Roy’-that was all.
[1832], James E. Murdoch (18n-93) on Charles Kean (18n-68) as Posthumus in Cymbeline at the Arch Street Theatre, Philadelphia, from his The Stage, or Recollections of Actors and Acting from an Experience of Fifty Years: A Series of Dramatic Sketches (Philadelphia, 1880; repr. New York, 1969), pp. 146-8.
Authors: Shakespeare Critics Theatre
Published: November 2023

James Murdoch was a versatile and successful American actor and lecturer. Charles, son of Edmund Kean, first visited America in 1830 and played Post humus in late October 1832, when he was twenty-one. He seems never to have played it again. He returned to England in 1833. Murdoch was writing some fifty years after the event, but his account is interesting as one professional’s description of what another did during a precise stretch of action.
[1844], James Robinson Planche (1796—1880), description of Ben Webster’s neo-Elizabethan production of The Taming of the Shrew, from his Recollections and Reflections, 2 vols. (1872), ii. 83—6.
Authors: Shakespeare Critics Theatre
Published: November 2023

After the Restoration of the monarchy, in 1660, performances of The Taming ef the Shrew were normally given in heavily adapted texts, such as John Lacy’s Sauny the Scot (1667), Christopher Bullock’s The Cobbler if Preston (17I6), and, above all, David Garrick’s Catharine and Petruchio (1754), which held the stage until the late nineteenth century with the exception of the production given at the Haymarket Theatre in 1844 and 1847 under the auspices of its manager, Benjamin Webster (1797-1873) and the playwright and antiquarian James Robinson Planche which, uniquely for its time, also attempted a reconstruction of Elizabethan staging methods.
November 1874, Clement Scott (1841-1904) on Henry Irving (1838-1905) as Hamlet, at the Lyceum Theatre, London; from his ‘The Bells’ to ‘King Arthur’ (1896), pp. 6I-7.
Authors: Shakespeare Critics Theatre
Published: November 2023

All present longed to see Hamlet. Bernardo and Marcellus, the Ghost, the platform, the grim preliminaries, the prologue or introduction to the wonderful story, were, as usual, tolerated-nothing more. Away go the platform, the green lights, the softly-stepping spirit, the musical-voiced Horatio. The scene changes to a dazzling interior, broken in its artistic lines, and rich with architectural beauty; the harps sound, the procession is commenced, the jewels, and crowns, and sceptres, dazzle, and at end of the train comes Hamlet. Mark him well, though from this instant the eyes will never be removed from his absorbing figure. They may wander, but they will soon return. The story may interest, the characters may amuse, the incidents may vary, but from this moment the presence of Hamlet will dwarf all else in the tragedy. How is he dressed, and how does he look? No imitation of the portrait of Sir Thomas Lawrence,1 no funereal velvet, no elaborate trappings, no Order of the Danish Elephant, no flaxen wig after the model of M. Fechter,2 no bugles, no stilted conventionality. We see before us a man and a prince, in thick robed silk and a jacket, or paletot, edged with fur; a tall, imposing figure, so well dressed that nothing distracts the eye from the wonderful face; a costume rich and simple, and relieved alone by a heavy chain of gold; but, above and beyond all, a troubled, wearied face displaying the first effects of moral poison.
15 July 1895, Bernard Shaw on Augustin Daly’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Daly’s Theatre, London, from The Saturday Review, reprinted in Shaw on Shakespeare, pp. 125-31.I
Authors: Shakespeare Critics Theatre
Published: November 2023

The Two Gentlemen of Verona has been succeeded at Daly’s Theatre by A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Mr. Daly is in great form. In my last article I was rash enough to hint that he had not quite realized what could be done with electric lighting on the stage. He triumphantly answers me by fitting up all his fairies with portable batteries and incandescent lights, which they switch on and off from time to time, like children with a new toy. He has trained Miss Lillian Swain in the part of Puck until it is safe to say that she does not take one step, strike one attitude, or modify her voice by a single inflexion that is not violently, wantonly and ridiculously wrong and absurd.
13 November 1899, anonymous review of Richard II, produced by William Poel (1852-1934) in the lecture theatre of the University of London in Burlington Gardens, London, from The Times .
Authors: Shakespeare Critics Theatre
Published: November 2023

M.R. William Poel had a surprise in store for the large audience which filled the lecture theatre of the University of London on Saturday afternoon. Acting has not hitherto been the strong point of the society’s performances. A fair all-round representation of Richard II. was all that was expected. Yet the play had scarcely begun before it was dear that there was one player in the company whose talent would make the performance exceptionally interesting. A few months ago that oddly named piece The Weather-Hen showed Mr. Granville Barker in the light of a promising dramatist. Richard II. proved him to be also a wellgraced and intelligent actor, with gifts specially fitting him for romantic drama.
7 November 1903, Max Beerbohm on The Tempest at the Court Theatre, London, from The Saturday Review, reprinted in his Around Theatres (1953), pp. 293-7.
Authors: Shakespeare Critics Theatre
Published: November 2023

Over certain of the plays of Shakespeare broods darkly the superstition that they don’t ‘act well.’ Whenever a manager dashes in, undaunted by this shadow, and produces one of these plays, we are startled to find that the play does act very well indeed. ‘Julius Caesar,’ ‘King John,’ ‘Richard II,’ ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ were all of them, within recent years, regarded as forlorn hopes. ‘The Tempest’ was in like case. More artistically compact, and therefore more modern, in form than any other Shakespearean play, it was yet scouted as apt only to ‘the study.’ True, Mr. Benson1 had it in his repertory (as, indeed, he had also two, at least, of those other plays which I have named). But somehow, admirable though they are in many ways, Mr. Benson’s productions do not make a sharp and durable impression.
18 November 1934, James Agate (1877-1947) on John Gielgud (born 1904) as Hamlet in his own production at the New Theatre, London, from The Sunday Times, reprinted in his Brief Chronicles: A Survey of the Plays of Shakespeare and the Elizabethans in actual performance (1943), pp. 264-9.
Authors: Shakespeare Critics Theatre
Published: November 2023

James Agate was theatre critic of the Sunday Times from 1923 until he died. He published many volumes of theatre criticism, and his voluminous diaries, full of theatre gossip, were published under the title of Ego (9 vols., 1932-47). Gielgud (knighted in 1953) first played Hamlet at the Old Vic in 1930; it became his most famous role.
2 September 1955, Evelyn Waugh (1902-66) on
Titus Andronicus
directed by Peter Brook at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, with Laurence Olivier as Titus; from The Spectator.
Authors: Shakespeare Critics Theatre
Published: November 2023

From the extremity of the circle, which at Stratford-on-Avon is politely misnamed a ‘box,’ every face in the audience can be plainly seen. Dense, devout, heterogeneous, Americans, negroes and orientals, little girls and grandfathers, they extended without a gap from wall to wall and from roof to floor. The English were dressed, it seemed, for the beach at Broadstairs, the exotics more respectably.
1970, Robert Speaight (1904—76) on Peter Brook’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, from Shakespeare Quarterly, 21 (1970), PP-448—9
Authors: Shakespeare Critics Theatre
Published: November 2023

It was eight years since Mr. Brook had directed a play at Stratford, and one assumed that he would not have directed the Dream unless he had something very particular to say about it. In fact, he forced one to forget—not, let me emphasize, the play itself—but anything one had seen done with it, or imagined being done with it, in the theatre. He swept the mind of the spectator as clear as he had swept his stage, allowing the text of the play, beautifully and deliberately spoken, to play upon you with the freshness of words seen for the first time upon the printed page. He persuaded you to forget a century of theatrical tradition, with its conventions and its cliches; and commanded you into a frame of mind where the very notion of magic, of supernatural agency, had to be created afresh. You could, if you chose, harbour a reminiscence of Alice in Wonderland* but of nothing else.
Shakespeare in History and History in Shakespeare
Authors: Taylor Michael
Published: November 2023

Not even the most committed formalist would argue that Shakespeare’s works could be satisfactorily understood with no concern for their place in history. After all, the very language the formalists practise their art on is a language from another historical era whose idiom-as the mass of commentary in most modern editions of Shakespeare testifies-often needs strenuous interpretation. One of the glories of n twentieth-century Shakespeare criticism, as we have seen, is the inspired interpretations of those Shakespeare passages bristling with ambiguity and metaphor. Modernist poetic practice spurred on modernist critics to give foreign to their intense engagement with Shakespeare’s imagination, and they could not do so without an understanding of the time-bound language and concepts with which he shaped his art. But this is the application of history at its most minimal, whereas for many twentieth-century critics history at its most interventionist is now the sine qua non of Shakespeare criticism-and of most other kinds. ‘The systematic application of historical findings to the interpretation of secular literature’, writes S. Viswanathan, ‘is a characteristic n twentieth-century development’ (1980: 7).
The Greek East
Authors: Reynolds L D , Wilson N G
Published: November 2023

In the early centuries of the Roman empire intellectual life in Greece and the Hellenized provinces of the Eastern Mediterranean was in a state of decline. Despite the existence of institutions of higher education such as the schools of philosophy and oratory at Athens, Rhodes, and elsewhere, there were few outstanding achievements in literature or scholarship. The Museum at Alex andria still existed; although the end of independent government in Egypt brought to a close the royal patronage of scholarship, the situation was soon restored, for we find Strabo reporting (17.1.8) that the Roman emperor now supported the Museum, and there are explicit references to scholars entitled to its privileges. But notable works of scholarship do not seem to have been produced. Only the library continued to render service as a leading collection of material for the scholarly public; the tradition that Caesar was accidentally responsible for its destruction during his visit to Egypt (48-47 B.c.) has been widely accepted, but the sources are not entirely in agreement as to the extent of the damage, and it seems likely that no more than a section of the library was burnt, or that the deficiencies were made good by Antony, who was said to have transferred the Pergamene library to Alexandria (Plutarch, Antony 58); total destruction is also difficult to reconcile with the evidence that Strabo apparently did his geographical research in Alexandria. Literary work is harder to trace. In the Augustan age Aristonicus did further selection of the Homeric commentaries, and Tryphon studied and classified figures of speech (the treatise which now passes under his name has been revised by later redactors). During the reign of Tiberius there are again signs of some activity.
Textual Criticism
Authors: Reynolds L D , Wilson N G
Published: November 2023

The foregoing chapters have attempted to give some idea of the ways in which the Greek and Latin classics were handed down through the Middle Ages to the modern world, and to outline some of the more important historical and cultural phenomena which affected the transmission of these texts. The business of textual criticism is in a sense to reverse this process, to follow back the threads of transmission and try to restore the texts as closely as possible to the form which they originally had.

Since no autograph manuscripts of the classical authors survive, we are dependent for our knowledge of what they wrote on manuscripts (and sometimes printed editions) which lie at an unknown number of removes from the originals. These manuscripts vary in their trustworthiness as witnesses to the original texts; all of them have suffered to some degree in the process of transmission, whether from physical damage, from the fallibility of scribes, or from the effects of deliberate interpolation. Any attempt to restore the original text will obviously involve the use of a difficult and complex process, and this process falls into two stages.
Style
Authors: Harding Phillip
Published: November 2023

Regarding the style of the Atthides, the passage from Dionysius of Halicarnassus referred to above goes on to inform us that they were ‘monotonous and hard for the reader to stomach’. This should cause no surprise, given the nature of the chronicle. Nevertheless, some have been distressed by the non-observance of certain canons of rhetorical style in a long passage from Androtion quoted by the scholar Didymus (see F30 with Commentary; Jacoby, Text, 86-7).
Atthidographers
Authors: Harding Phillip
Published: November 2023

It is not the least of Jacoby’s contributions to classical scholarship that he revealed Hellanikos of Lesbos (c.480-395) as one of the most important figures in Greek historiography. It was simply unfortunate for Hellanikos’ reputation that he lived during the same period as two giants of world literature, Herodotus and Thucydides, by whom he has been overshadowed, but his contri bution to the writing of history is none the less considerable. He was a foremost authority in the study of myth as history, or mythography. His five works in this field, Phoronis, Deukalioneia, Atlantis, Asopis, and Troika became definitive. He also wrote a great number of ethnographic studies, on foreign countries (Egypt, Cyprus, Scythia, Persia) and on areas in Greece (Thessaly, Boeotia, Arcadia, and, closer to home, Lesbos or Aeolis). More important, in a sense, than either of these interests was his pioneering work in chronography, to which he turned near the end of his career. His Priestesses of Hera at Argos, published some time after 421, was an attempt to find a universally applicable chronological system for the whole history of Greece (or a Universal Chronicle as Jacoby calls it, Text, 9). Obviously, by the time he wrote this work he was on the mainland. At some time he came to Athens and combined all his talents in the production of probably his last book, published when he was about 80, his Attike Syngraphe, the first Atthis.
Early Plays
Authors: MacDowell Douglas M
Published: November 2023

Aristophanes’ first play was Banqueters. It was performed in 42 7 B c and came second in the contest (at which festival is not known).’ No copy of it has survived, but we have a few quotations, and also a reference to it by Aristophanes himself in the revised version of his Clouds.
Aristophanes and Athens
Authors: MacDowell Douglas M
Published: November 2023

Each play of Aristophanes has its own subject and its own comic aims, which have been outlined in the preceding chapters. They were not the same from first to last. Times changed; no doubt his personal character and opinions changed too in the course of forty years. But there are at least a few respects in which we can see that he maintained a particular opinion or attitude over a long period. One policy or social class or individual is regularly treated with more favour or sympathy than another.
The Early Years: Ethics and the Public Good
Authors: Oswell David
Published: November 2023

PERHAPS unlike other forms of broadcasting, children’s broad casting has required that those who make the programmes have a responsibility to their audience over and above the money that might be made from transmission or the entertainment of the children watching. Even those at the hard edge of market competitiveness feel compelled to justify the worth of their programmes for children in terms other than those of profit or pleasure maximization. In contemporary discourse, even the most commercial and market-oriented companies legitimate and conceptualize their children’s programmes through claims of ‘education’ and a sense of care for the developing child.
Children’s Television: Participation, Commensurability, and Differentiation
Authors: Oswell David
Published: November 2023

Although children’s television programmes had been shown before the war in the UK, there was no regular service until after 1946. Initially the driving force behind children’s television at the BBC was Mary Adams, Head of Television Talks By 1947, under her control, the BBC had shown Muffin the Mule since the preceding year and one short play. She pushed for a weekly one-hour slot, initially designed to be on Sunday afternoon. She wanted to include plays, ‘how to’ series (e.g. how to make puppets, kites, and toy theatres), storytelling, ‘collectors’ corner’ (e.g. stamp-collecting, butterfly-collecting, and shell-collecting), programmes on pets, travel tales, ‘nature parliament’, Muffin the Mule, James Pratt and Molly Blake, outside broadcasts (e.g. children visiting museums and toy factories), films (e.g. ‘Secrets of Nature’, ‘How the Telephone Works’, and ‘Instruments of the Orchestra’), current affairs, participation programmes (e.g. general knowledge quizzes and spelling-bees), and ‘children’s encyclopaedia’ programmes.
Children’s Television Grows Up: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Authors: Oswell David
Published: November 2023

The fourth set of problems significant in the making of the child television audience regards the coming to maturity of the organization of children’s television. This set of problems sits alongside and draws upon the problem spaces I have discussed earlier, concerning the address to the child television audience as a distinct, but differentiated whole, the formation of conditions of domestic supervision and geographies of familial viewing and the congealing of relations of expertise and governance. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, children’s television and the child television audience were increasingly understood within a logic of commercialism and also posed as a matter of public and political concern.
The Measure of All Things
Authors: Le Poidevin Robin
Published: November 2023

On the evening of 15 February 1894, a man was discovered in the park near the Royal Observatory at Greenwich in a most distressing condition: it appeared that he had been carrying or otherwise handling some explosive which had gone off in his hands. He later died from his injuries.
The Edge of Space
Authors: Le Poidevin Robin
Published: November 2023

Could space have an outermost limit, a boundary beyond which there is nothing, not even space itself? Suppose that it does and that you are at that boundary. Could you thrust your arm beyond it? This simply stated but baffling conundrum was first posed, so far as we know, by a contemporary and friend of Plato’s, Archytas. Besides being aphilosopher and distinguished mathematician, Archytas was an administrator of some significance in Tarentum (now Tarento) in Southern Italy in the fourth century BC. One of his achievements was the construction of a mathematical theory of music. But it is for his puzzle concerning the edge of space that he is best remembered. Archytas’ own answer to the riddle was that it would plainly be absurd if we could not put out our arm beyond any putative.
Infinity and Paradox
Authors: Le Poidevin Robin
Published: November 2023

Achilles challenges the tortoise to a race. Being a sporting man, and recognizing his companion’s inferiority in the field of velocity, Achilles allows the tortoise a head start of 100 yards. This is a more generous concession than it seems, as Achilles is not the swiftest of runners-in fact, he can only move ten times faster than the tor toise. This, however, should be more than enough to guarantee him victory. Or so, at any rate, he calculates. The race begins. By the time Achilles has reached the tortoise’s starting-point, 100 yards from his own, the tortoise has moved on a tenth of that distance: IO yards. When Achilles has covered that 10 yards, the tortoise has moved on another yard. When Achilles travels that yard, the tortoise is still ahead-by 0.1 yard. And so, to Achilles’ amazement, it goes on.
Inteifering with History
Authors: Le Poidevin Robin
Published: November 2023

In the September r752 issue of The Gentleman’s Magazine, a monthly periodical offering a diverting mixture of news, book reviews, recipes, advice, and poetry, there appeared a rather unusual letter. The correspondent reported an unsettling experience he had just had: I went to bed last night, it was Wednesday Sept. 2, and the first thing I cast my eye upon this morning at the top of your paper, was Thursday, Sept. 14.
The Version On Which The Sun Never Sets: The English Bible And Its Authorizing Tendencies
Authors: Sugirtharajah R S
Published: November 2023

Writing at the turn of the twentieth century on the history of the English people, J. R. Green observed that no ‘ history, no romance, hardly any poetry save the little known verse of Chaucer existed in the English tongue’ until the emergence of one book: No greater moral change ever passed over a nation than passed over England during the years which parted the middle of the reign of Elizabeth from the meeting of the Long Parliament. England became a people of a book, and the book was the Bible. It was yet one English book which was familiar to every Englishman; it was read at churches, and read at home, and everywhere its words, as they fell on ears which custom had not deadened, kindled a startling enthusiasm. (Green1903:935) One of the most extraordinary events in the history of the English people was the translation of the Bible into English.
The Church
Authors: Swinburne Richard
Published: November 2023

I have argued that, on the evidence of the life of Jesus, if it is already moderately probable that there is a God, it is very probable that Jesus was God Incarnate. But there was one further requirement which, I claimed in Part I, a prophet’s life would need to satisfy if it was to be the life of God Incarnate, and that is that the Church which he founded should give plausible interpretations of his teaching—ones both plausible as interpretations and whose content is plausibly true.
Medical imaging and therapy with ionising radiation
Authors: Allison Wade
Published: November 2023

From the time of their discovery X-rays have been used for imaging. The conventional X-ray examination, as used in medicine and dentistry, with a simple photographic plate is safe, cheap and widely available. In addition to the photographic plate as detector, a source of X-rays is needed. The initial electron beam can be focused to a small bright spot. But because it is not possible to reflect, refract or focus an X ray beam, the straight line optics of the pinhole camera must be used to produce the image. Technically there are three possibilities.
The War Against Magic
Authors: Davies Owen
Published: November 2023

The late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries heralded three profound and interlinked events in European history that can be explored through the story of grimoires: the rise of print, the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, and the witch trials. For some, the Devil lay behind all these momentous events. Printing was described as a ‘black art’ and books as ‘silent heretics’.