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“... in the topic had first been excited by her reading of Ben Jonson’s Robin Hood play, The Sad Shepherd, for her monograph on Shakespeare’s great rival. Given this history, it may seem surprising that The Shakespearean Forest is not a longer book, but Barton became almost blind as a result of macular degeneration and was forced to abandon her work. When ...”

“... its title. Two essays in the first set are concerned with individual politicians, one seeking to shepherd labour towards the left, the other towards the right. Fred Reid writes of Keir Hardie as newspaper editor, convinced that ‘he, almost alone, stood firm for socialism’ in the ILP, and determined therefore to keep its organ, the Labour Leader, under ...”

“... The year Strauss was born, 1864, saw the publication of Robert Browning’s Dramatis Personae. The author of Andrea del Sarto would have found in Richard Strauss a subject ideally suited to his imaginative powers. He would have cast the composer, not, I think, in his early years, but towards the end of his life: in 1940, perhaps, in late summer ...”

“... George Herbert, Thomas Ken, Watts, Charles Wesley – but many less celebrated names, such as Sir Robert Grant, William Walsham How, William Chatterton Dix: Grant (‘O worship the King, all glorious above’), the Scottish-born English MP who ended his life as Governor of Bombay; Thomas Olivers (‘The God of Abraham praise’), a cobbler who was converted ...”

“... a wall. Later Christ is represented as a human figure, but allegorically, in the guise of the Good Shepherd. The absence of interest in the personal appearance of Christ was matched by a general indifference to the Gospel narratives. Signs and symbols were enough. Later, when the narratives came into prominence, the emblematic habit did not fade ...”

“... noe corrupted voyces braule’. Ralegh’s ‘Nymph’s Reply’ to Marlowe’s ‘Passionate Shepherd to His Love’ combines imaginative description of delicate beauties with destruction and loss: Thie belt of strawe, and bedds of roses, Thie capp, thie kirtle, and thy Poses: Soone weare, soone wither, soone forgotten, In follie ripe, in reason ...”

“... Robert Burns wrote about art, friendship, religion, animals, drink, marriage and love. The First two and the last of these themes – poetry, sociability and sexual adventure, to call them by other names – commemorate activities which enabled him in youth, as did his drinking, to face the prospect of a lifetime’s hard labour on the land ...”

“... of the ‘revelatory eclogue’ established by predecessors like Spenser. In replacing the shepherd by the mower, Marvell not only revises the social hierarchies of aristocratic pastoral but introduces death to his Arcadia in a particularly menacing guise. But the imagery of apocalypse has a positive side in the recreation of nature in millennial ...”

“... of The Last of England & scraped at the head of the female figure.’ The next day he settles on a shepherd plaid shawl (rather than on the large blue and green plaid in the sketch) for the woman. On the 24th he spends two hours dressing up the lay figure of the man, and on the 30th he is working on the ‘coat of the Emigrant from the one I made on purpose ...”

“... poor-but-honest populace. (Rather as Marie-Antoinette liked turning her thoughts to ‘simple’ shepherd life.) But the ‘King and Collector’ of the exhibition title is perhaps best read as a prince who developed a taste for oils on canvas while visiting the Spanish Habsburg court in a failed bid to secure a wife and who, once crowned in 1625, had the ...”

“... But why, at this point in our culture, do we choose to invoke the dog, the ‘prime secret’ of Robert Graves’s druidic triad? Why, by granting it attention, do we need to indulge this elemental whose jaw, once locked, has to be broken open with a specially-contrived wedge? ‘The first beast was like a lion ... and they were full of eyes within.’ Eyes ...”

“... gold signet ring bearing on its bezel the initials ‘W.S.’ It was bought for 36 shillings by Robert Bell Wheler, a local historian, and later donated to the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, where it still resides. When the Romantic painter Benjamin Robert Haydon heard news of the discovery he wrote excitedly to his friend ...”

“... And I guess the "robin” means he stole birds.’ Robin is more likely to be a nickname for Robert, though the resonance with ‘robber’ may also count for something, and Hood may suggest his frequent disguises, for Robin is a great trickster whose masquerades inevitably bamboozle his foolish oppressors: he specialises in pretending to help people ...”

“... the same year as Corin’s daughter Jemma Redgrave, also an actress. Corin was named after the shepherd in As You Like It and named his own son Arden after the forest in the same play. Arden Redgrave is now a theatre director. The story you tell about the Redgraves depends on where your sympathies lie. Do you side with Lynn, the comic outsider, the podgy ...”

“... work. Ricardo Reis had never written any poetry until he met Alberto Caeiro, a sort of sheepless shepherd, when he was 25. Álvaro de Campos had written only a handful of poems before he encountered Caeiro in 1914. Zenith describes one of their dialogues: ‘One day, when attempting to talk metaphysics with Alberto, a frustrated Álvaro finally said, “Just ...”