Reviews and News:
The new segregation: “Probably the most corrosive thing about Safe Space ideology is that it encourages the segregation and racialisation of campus life. I witnessed this firsthand during a recent visit to an American campus, where I was greeted by the sight of students racially and ethnically segregated from one another while they were eating lunch. When I pointed out that the practice of segregated cafeteria tables violated the spirit of the academy, my host told me, ‘it’s their choice to find their own space’.”
* *
The Globe sacks Emma Rice: “Shakespeare’s Globe artistic director Emma Rice is to leave the theatre in 2018 after its board decided her methods were not authentic enough. Rice took charge of the London theatre in January but has come in for fierce criticism, including for her use of sound and lighting technology. Chief executive Neil Constable said the theatre was founded to stage plays in keeping with Shakespearean traditions. That ‘should continue to be the central tenet of our work’, he said.”
* *
Paul Beatty becomes the first American to win the Man Booker Prize.
* *
In Democracy for Realists, Christopher H. Achen and and Larry M. Bartels argue that “most voters are deeply uninformed and lack meaningful preferences, and even those who do know and care about politics are all just partisan loyalists. Can we acknowledge that social-group identities are the most important structuring force in politics, and politics is really at heart just identity politics?…For political science, this argument actually amounts to a rediscovery of old truths about group conflict being the center of politics. A half century ago, these were the mainstream views in the discipline. At that time, political science was also much more qualitative — for example, congressional scholars actually hung out in Washington and spent hours talking to people who worked there, instead of only staring at computers analyzing data — and sociological, in that scholars focused more on norms and cultures and folkways than they did on modeling individual incentives.”
* *
Why has Oxford University Press decided to name Christopher Marlowe a co-author of Henry VI? “The short answer, I suspect, is that of all the reasonable candidates, he is the only one capable of selling books or tickets.”
* *
An illustrated history of the asylum and the first “criminal lunatic”: “In 1800, James Hadfield attempted to shoot George III in his royal box at the theater. He missed and was tried for high treason, but was found to be acting under an insane delusion and acquitted. This sensational verdict created a new sort of madman, the ‘criminal lunatic,’ and significantly expanded the function of the asylum.”
* *
Essay of the Day:
In The Times Literary Supplement, David Horspool revisits the Battle of Agincourt–a “very big game of chicken”:
“On this day 601 years ago, a depleted invading army faced an outnumbering defensive force across a ploughed field in Normandy. The English invaders had lost some of their numbers to dysentery – the ‘bloody flux’ – and had been forced to leave 1,200 of their comrades behind to garrison the devastated town they had managed to capture after an extended siege. A fourteen-day march through hostile country had led them eventually to this stretch of open ground bordered by woods, where they took up position and waited for the French army, filled with princes of the blood, to attack.
“The young king in command of the English army, Henry V, had made one mistake already in keeping his troops too closely quartered together at the siege, allowing disease to spread freely. Perhaps his march had been another. He could have disembarked after the siege of Harfleur, but decided instead to make for Calais. He had barely managed to elude his pursuers as he attempted to cross the River Somme. Now he was relying on his opponents to make a mistake, the same mistake they had made in his predecessors’ day, of trusting that their cavalry could overwhelm English archers and dismounted men-at-arms. If all went to plan, the French would charge, the arrow shower would cut them down, and those who got through would be impaled on the wooden stakes that the King had ordered to be driven into the ground in front of the bowmen.
“But the French had no intention of falling for that old trick. This time, they waited for the invaders to come to them, confident that in a hand-to-hand fight, their weight of numbers would tell. They may have taken some comfort from the fact that October 25 was the Feast of St Crispin and St Crispinian, brother saints who had worked for the conversion of the Gauls in the third century, and were buried at Soissons, in Picardy. This, surely, would be a day for the French.
“What rarely comes across in accounts of Agincourt is that it was, initially, a very big game of chicken. And Henry V blinked first, or appeared to, at least. He was the first to advance. Unfortunately for the French, the advance was only a short one, before the English took up their static positions again, with archers at the front, still defended by stakes, ready to loose their deadly barrage. But it was enough to prompt a French response, a charge by their over-populated vanguard, and the same old story played out again: horses and men downed by English firepower; horses and men stuck in the sucking mud; horses and men piling on top of each other, the dead and the living, the latter unable to advance or retreat, easy prey for the English men-at-arms, even for the lightly armed archers.”
* *
Image of the Day: Fiery-throated hummingbird
* *
Poem: Kevin Casey, “Thrift Store Coats”
Get Prufrock in your inbox every weekday morning. Subscribe here.
