Reviews and News:
Gary Taylor argues that Shakespeare wrote Hamlet in 1603, not 1601. That means it was written after the death of the Bard’s own father and after James I took the throne, which, according to Taylor, sheds new light on the meaning of the play: The “story of a tired old regime giving way to a fresh new ruler from a neighbouring country should be seen as an intentional reference to James VI of Scotland assuming power in England after Elizabeth’s death. Fortinbras, the Norwegian king who takes power in Denmark after the death of Claudius and Hamlet at the end of the play, was intended as a direct parallel to James I, Professor Taylor suggested.” (Registration, not subscription, required)
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Jonathan Bate isn’t buying it: “Really? It’s always seemed to me that Hamlet is a slightly problematic play from the point of view of the court of King James. His majesty liked nothing more than to hang out at his hunting lodge in Royston. The real theatre-lover in the family was his wife, Queen Anne of Denmark, who would not exactly have been flattered by Shakespeare’s representation of Queen Gertrude of Denmark bedding her late husband’s brother with such abandon quite so soon after her bereavement… Gary Taylor has form. Thirty years ago he publicised the previous The New Oxford Shakespeare by claiming for the Bard a (third-rate) little poem called Shall I Die? Shall I Fly? It is good to see that in the latest edition this is relegated into a section called ‘Poems attributed to Shakespeare in seventeenth-century miscellanies’.”
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Anthony Daniels on Britain’s trash: “My country, Britain, is now the litter bin of Europe, a kind of vast rubbish dump, and I have been interested in British litter, and littering, for a number of years. The thoroughness with which the country has been befouled, from the grandest city thoroughfares to the most remote country lanes, is astonishing.”
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Joyce among the Jesuits: “Though Portrait wasn’t exactly a ringing endorsement of his educators, they permanently influenced the author, who once remarked to a friend, ‘You allude to me as a Catholic. Now for the sake of precision and to get the correct contour on me, you ought to allude to me as a Jesuit.'”
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The biting satire of Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Heart of a Dog: “Among the 50 or so people who gathered in the Moscow apartment in March 1925 to be introduced to Sharik, the humanoid dog, and the arrogant surgeon who created him, was an informer who took violent exception to his send-up of Soviet society. Bulgakov’s flat was searched and the manuscript seized. Though it was returned to him four years later, and was widely read in samizdat, it would not be officially published in Russian until 1987, nearly half a century after Bulgakov had died.”
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Robert Rauschenberg’s Tiffany windows.
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Essay of the Day:
In Humanities, Danny Heitman revisits John Ruskin’s influence on Victorian tastes:
“Near the dawn of the twentieth century, a young Englishwoman named Lucy is visiting an ancient church in Florence, unsure of what she is looking at, or how, exactly, to see it. She doesn’t have her Baedeker, a popular travel guide, and is feeling lost without it. ‘She walked about disdainfully,’ we learn, ‘unwilling to be enthusiastic over monuments of uncertain authorship or date. There was no one even to tell her which, of all the sepulchral slabs that paved the nave and transepts, was the one that was really beautiful, the one that had been most praised by Mr. Ruskin.’
“The woman unsure of her own reaction to a lovely church without consulting “Mr. Ruskin” is Lucy Honeychurch, the heroine of E. M. Forster’s celebrated 1908 novel, A Room with a View. The reference to “Mr. Ruskin” might be lost on many modern readers, although Forster obviously felt no obligation to explain it when he wrote his story. The man in question, John Ruskin, had died eight years earlier, in 1900, but his memory was still fresh in popular culture. In Ruskin’s heyday, just about every educated Victorian knew who he was.
“Born in 1819 to a wealthy merchant and an overbearing mother, Ruskin was an English writer on art, nature, literature, and political economy who dominated cultural thought throughout Britain—and, to some degree, the Western world—in the second half of the nineteenth century. Given his relative obscurity today, it’s hard for contemporary readers to grasp how famous Ruskin once was. Reverently read and reflexively quoted, his pronouncements on everything from painting to poetry to private capital rang among his fans with an almost scriptural authority. His mother had once longed for him to be a bishop, and as an arbiter of his society’s standards, Ruskin, in his own way, came close. ‘Taste . . . is the only morality. . . . Tell me what you like,’ Ruskin asserted, ‘And I’ll tell you what you are.'”
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Image of the Day: An interactive map of the world’s cargo ships. Ignore the commentary at the end and enjoy the selection from Bach’s Goldberg Variations (HT: Adam Keiper)
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Poem: William Logan, “Spring, Spring”
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