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Adam Smyth: Rewriting ‘Pericles’, 24 October 2019

Spring 
by Ali Smith.
Hamish Hamilton, 336 pp., £16.99, March 2019, 978 0 241 20704 8
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The Porpoise 
by Mark Haddon.
Chatto, 309 pp., £18.99, May 2019, 978 1 78474 282 9
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... that were performed or printed tended to cut out, or minimise, these elements. Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare (1807) has an Antiochus who commits ‘a shocking deed … in secret’ that is never specified, and a Marina who is sold into slavery, not prostitution. George Lillo’s theatrical redaction-adaptation, Marina, based on Acts ...

A Spanish girl is a volcano

John Pemble: Apostles in Gibraltar, 10 September 2015

John Kemble’s Gibraltar Journal: The Spanish Expedition of the Cambridge Apostles, 1830-31 
by Eric Nye.
Macmillan, 416 pp., £100, January 2015, 978 1 137 38446 1
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... Apostles. This select brotherhood was heavily into male bonding, arcane causes and Wordsworth and Shelley (Byron was too worldly and cynical). They wrote poetry themselves and communicated via interminable letters about the meaning of life and the problem of how to act in order to realise the self and redeem the world. But in Tennyson’s day the Apostles ...

A Frisson in the Auditorium

Blair Worden: Shakespeare without Drama, 20 April 2017

How Shakespeare Put Politics on the Stage: Power and Succession in the History Plays 
by Peter Lake.
Yale, 666 pp., £25, November 2016, 978 0 300 22271 5
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... the French Revolution and the doctrines that accompanied it were to Wordsworth, or Godwinism to Shelley.’ The boldness of his claim becomes clear when we set it beside the almost simultaneous announcement by the influential critic John Palmer that Shakespeare was ‘forced’, by the public demand for plays about political figures, ‘to take the ...

On Top of Everything

Thomas Jones: Byron, 16 September 1999

Byron: Child of Passion, Fool of Fame 
by Benita Eisler.
Hamish Hamilton, 835 pp., £25, June 1999, 0 241 13260 6
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... racing various English officers around Venice; plunging into the sea while Trelawny cremated Shelley’s body.Eisler’s portrait of Byron is not going to prompt a radical reassessment of the poet, but she does write in more detail about his sex life than any previous biographer. As the blurb on the jacket would have it: ‘Here also are the first ...

Public Works

David Norbrook, 5 June 1986

The Faber Book of Political Verse 
edited by Tom Paulin.
Faber, 481 pp., £17.50, May 1986, 0 571 13947 7
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... Moderation’, which can be found in Roger Lonsdale’s New Oxford Book of 18th-Century Verse. As Mary Astell pointed out nearly three centuries ago, Milton’s defence of the subject’s liberty against the monarch clashed with his desire to subordinate women. But it could be argued that there was a structural link between his patriarchally Protestant ...

Nature’s Chastity

Jose Harris, 15 September 1983

Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the 19th Century 
by Barbara Taylor.
Virago, 402 pp., £9.95, March 1983, 0 86068 257 9
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Virgins and Viragos: A History of Women in Scotland from 1080 to 1980 
by Rosalind Marshall.
Collins, 365 pp., £13.50, June 1983, 0 00 216039 0
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... any comparable body before the present day. Unlike their 18th-century Jacobin predecessors such as Mary Wollstonecraft, or their Victorian successors such as Harriet Taylor and Josephine Butler, the Owenite feminists ascribed sexual repression and exploitation, not merely to the imbalance of power between the sexes, but to the whole structure of private ...

American Manscapes

Richard Poirier, 12 October 1989

Manhood and the American Renaissance 
by David Leverenz.
Cornell, 372 pp., $35.75, April 1989, 0 8014 2281 7
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... as in Homer, Spenser, Marlowe, the Shakespeare of Coriolanus, the Milton of Paradise Lost, Byron, Shelley, Fielding and Scott. Most of these were more widely read in pre-Civil War America than were any male American writers. With some notable exceptions early on, like F.O. Matthiessen, Marius Bewley and Leslie Fiedler, in Harold Bloom’s critical admixture ...

Fiery Participles

D.A.N. Jones, 6 September 1984

Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic 
by David Bromwich.
Oxford, 450 pp., £19.50, March 1984, 0 19 503343 4
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William Godwin: Philosopher, Novelist, Revolutionary 
by Peter Marshall.
Yale, 496 pp., £14.95, June 1984, 0 521 24386 6
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Burke, Paine, Godwin and the Revolution Controversy 
edited by Marilyn Butler.
Cambridge, 280 pp., £25, June 1984, 0 521 24386 6
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... like H.G. Wells, perhaps. Peter Marshall’s biography is rich in interesting history, about Shelley, Godwin’s son-in-law, for instance, and about Mary Wollstonecraft, his first wife. It would have been good to read about Godwin’s first meeting with that lady if the account had not been misprinted thus: ‘When he ...

Shaviana

Brigid Brophy, 2 December 1982

Bernard Shaw: The Darker Side 
by Arnold Silver.
Stanford, 353 pp., $25, January 1982, 0 8047 1091 0
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Bernard Shaw and Alfred Douglas: A Correspondence 
edited by Mary Hyde.
Murray, 237 pp., £15, November 1982, 0 7195 3947 1
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... by ‘No: I was a cannibal for twenty-five years,’ and went on to say that it was ‘Shelley who first opened my eyes to the savagery of my diet’. The instinct Freud recognised as Thanatos was dramatised by Shaw as ‘the gospel of St Andrew Undershaft’. (Incidentally, Freud and Shaw shared a fondness for the Salvation Army.) Cusins is ...

You can’t prove I meant X

Clare Bucknell, 16 April 2020

Poetics of the Pillory: English Literature and Seditious Libel, 1660-1820 
by Thomas Keymer.
Oxford, 352 pp., £25, October 2019, 978 0 19 874449 8
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... of imagining, protecting – but also neutering – the seditious verse of Coleridge, Byron and Shelley in ways that would have made little sense to Pope or Defoe. At a dinner party in 1803, Sir Walter Scott, a Tory, launched into an admiring recitation of Coleridge’s vicious anti-Pitt eclogue ‘Fire, Famine and Slaughter’ (1798), demonstrating that it ...

‘Disgusting’

Frank Kermode: Remembering William Empson, 16 November 2006

William Empson. Vol. II: Against the Christians 
by John Haffenden.
Oxford, 797 pp., £30, November 2006, 0 19 927660 9
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... right idea when he said that Milton was of the devil’s party, possibly without knowing it, and Shelley was right to describe Satan in Paradise Lost as ‘a moral being … far superior to his God’. Empson sometimes hints at his own credo: man should not seek transcendence but ‘conciliation with a secular universe’. From his Chinese days he retained ...

Brooke’s Benefit

Anthony Powell, 16 April 1981

... Jocelyn Brooke was born 30 November 1908, third child and second son of Henry Brooke and his wife Mary, née Turner, the youngest of the family by ten years or more. Both his grandfathers had been wine merchants, also his father, who had started life as a solicitor. Brooke’s elder brother, after ten years as a regular officer in the Royal East Kent ...

Libel on the Human Race

Steven Shapin: Malthus, 5 June 2014

Malthus: The Life and Legacies of an Untimely Prophet 
by Robert Mayhew.
Harvard, 284 pp., £20, April 2014, 978 0 674 72871 4
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... social policies he recommended, Enlightened thinkers and their Romantic allies despised him. Shelley wrote that Malthus was ‘the apostle of the rich’, whose writings were ‘calculated to lull the oppressors of mankind into a security of everlasting triumph’. To Southey, Malthus was a voider of ‘menstrual pollution’, who had written ‘the ...

Sunday Best

Mark Ford: Wilfred Owen’s Letters, 26 September 2024

Selected Letters of Wilfred Owen 
edited by Jane Potter.
Oxford, 436 pp., £25, August 2023, 978 0 19 968950 7
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... to mobilise all his literary resources – above all his knowledge of the Bible and of Keats and Shelley – to express what to many seemed inexpressible; later in the year, after meeting Sassoon, he found a way of allowing the same urge to transform his Swinburnian poetic idiom into something radically different.One can hear a proleptic echo of this ...

The Ultimate Socket

David Trotter: On Sylvia Townsend Warner, 23 June 2022

Lolly Willowes 
by Sylvia Townsend Warner.
Penguin, 161 pp., £9.99, October 2020, 978 0 241 45488 6
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Valentine Ackland: A Transgressive Life 
by Frances Bingham.
Handheld Press, 344 pp., £15.99, May 2021, 978 1 912766 40 6
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... older, married man, the musicologist Percy Buck. Life had in the meantime not dealt so kindly with Mary Kathleen Macrory Ackland – universally known as Molly. Robert Ackland’s charisma had always had a punitive edge: he insisted that his daughter accompany him on his rounds in the surgical wards; and then afterwards, according to Warner, to the brothel he ...

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