I cannot pretend to have read this book in its entirety, nor have I pulled it off the shelf more than a dozen times since I bought it in 1975, when I I cannot pretend to have read this book in its entirety, nor have I pulled it off the shelf more than a dozen times since I bought it in 1975, when I started recording the dates alongside the insects I had seen. But I have scanned it cover to cover several times, reading of select insects which attracted my attention, often when I had spotted some bug or butterfly or moth (Lepidoptera) in the garden or park, as I did tonight, in the bathroom. It was a minute type of ladybird, probably a skin beetle, with scarcely obvious patches instead of spots, under the magnifying glass.
It is beautifully illustrated with 780 paintings of individual species, though only partially representative of the 20,000 insects found in the British Isles. There are 2,400 Lepidoptera common to Britain, and I have probably seen about 20, at most, knowingly. One strange insect, though, like a very small furry hummingbird, I saw in the garden near the New Forest, and it turned out to be a Hummingbird Hawk-moth, absolutely beautiful. Of course, this is relatively easily found now via the internet, but there is a charm to books like this where artists have painted the insects....more
A brief survey of the watchwords, rules, laws and prominent membership of the City Watch, plus some brief biopics of leading members of the community A brief survey of the watchwords, rules, laws and prominent membership of the City Watch, plus some brief biopics of leading members of the community the Watch are interested in, such as Guild presidents and key helpful informants. There are a couple of laugh-out loud jokes and some particularly fine drawings by Paul Kidby.
I'd forgotten I had this little gem of the miscellaneous Discworld companions, and I'm glad I found it while looking through the old Pratchett library for a different book. Never used it; one of those miscellaneous Xmas presents that got lost. Enjoyed it....more
All maps are beautiful, even the primitive ones exhibited by amateur fantasy writers, and those of professional writers are often thoughtful and wittyAll maps are beautiful, even the primitive ones exhibited by amateur fantasy writers, and those of professional writers are often thoughtful and witty, if rarely funny (Norton Juster's map in his 1962 The Phantom Tollbooth is more witty than funny, for example). Terry Pratchett's brief introduction to this early map (after only 18 novels) of the Discworld is informative, witty and funny, with his survey of 6 well-known explorers of that parallel world.
The six character sketches (spoilers) exhibit British bluster (a kind of Colonel Blimp crossed with Colonel Deadshott of Norman Hunter's Professor Branestawm series), who rises up the army hierarchy by mistake, to finally make General; a Scandinavian bore, whose reputation preceded him, and so he never met any natives of the places he visited; a pious Welshman who explored either by short loops by boat (to fit in regular choir practise back home), or by travelling in a straight line till he hit something (considering the nature of the Discworld, this presented some considerable risk whichever direction he chose); a female aristocrat who would have called the Watch if she had witnessed native behaviours performed in rituals abroad (often fabricated for the locals' amusement); a seeker of the elixir of life, who died downing his find; and a wizard whose theories on early Discworld geological development and prehistoric reptilian fauna were remarkably accurate (if he had briefly ventured into a public library in our world and borrowed a couple of books).
A short story in itself - Pratchett is most humorous when describing the kinds of directions the locals would provide to the lost explorer (like, 'Follow the sign to the Alzheimer's Clinic, then straight on; or better still, forget that, and...') - there is also a map for the aid of the truly lost who have as yet not come across any such helpful locals, no matter which country he has just visited, like C.M.O.T. Dibbler, whose produce was probably the cause of those searches for the elixir of life....more
One of the deepest pleasures in reading and re-reading Shakespeare's plays, its criticism, the introductions to them and their commentary notes, is thOne of the deepest pleasures in reading and re-reading Shakespeare's plays, its criticism, the introductions to them and their commentary notes, is the cross-fertilisation of phrases, imagery, themes and ideas which occurs between all these aspects, the stream of correspondences that create a kind of fluid web between the plays and their criticism. This can extend from a simple marking of the metonymic use of horses in plays such as Richard III (1592-4) and the Prologue of Henry V (1599), to the recognition of the Catholic references in plays such as Hamlet (1600-1), Troilus And Cressida (1601-2) and the romances (Pericles [1608], Cymbeline [1610] and The Winter's Tale [1611]) with their symbolic resurrections at a time of interdiction of Catholic practice in Protestant England, for example. This seam of richness in these correspondences is almost a savour, a flavour, which only comes, and comes continually, the more you read and become familiar with Shakespeare's plays.
One aspect of this cross-fertilisation is the growing sense - through reading critical essays - of the richness of the world for which Shakespeare is taken as the exemplar, the Elizabethan or Jacobean (or Caroline) theatrical world which was a cultural explosion in London between 1576 and 1642, from the opening of the first purpose-built public commercial Theatre to the closure due the Civil War of the Globe, the Rose, the Blackfriars, the Fortune and so on, which instrumentally helped develop this cultural explosion of early modern drama. You become aware of the cultural correspondences of the wider world of Renaissance drama, and so desire more knowledge about this foundational detail, as well as the plays of all those other dramatists of the time, within an environment of dramatic collaboration and competition, as well as a need for a greater sense of theatre as a commercial practice which drove this phenomenal proliferation of artistic development.
Typical purviews of this cultural development follow either chronological lines or generic categorisations. Sanders, in her well-referenced work, which consults a body of modern scholarship (a lot of whom are female) on dozens of issues within early modern drama, has shunned a chronological development to provide a series of exploratory essays followed by case studies of various aspects of the theatrical world from use of a single prop to that of the dumb show, the operation of child actors and the construction of a scene, the soliloquy and the opening gambit, via a generic survey, to establish just those very correspondences which enrich our understanding of and pleasure in early modern drama.
Don't expect, therefore, the structural clarity that a chronological approach would offer, and how our minds naturally work. Cross-fertilisation sometimes means that discussions at the middle layer (different plays of different periods) are not as clear as from the bigger picture of the generic purview, where Sanders may compare plays of similar type from different periods, or different types of a period. But within it all comes a series of composite pictures. Behind the hurly of a rapidly expanding London (15K in 1576 to 200K in 1642), for example, the life of the city rises out of the work as realistically as it does in Madden's Shakespeare In Love (1998), or Neil MacGregor's fascinating Shakespeare's Restless World: A Portrait Of An Era In Twenty Objects (2012) or Matt Haig's fun How To Stop Time (2017), which fictionalises interactions with the players of Shakespeare's works by a character who moves back and forth in time between our world and that of the past.
Sanders' introduction paints a picture of all these facets in the cultural melting pot of the time, a time which saw the defeat of the Spanish Armada (1588) and the consequent rise in patriotism, the opening (1599), burning (1613), rebuilding (1614) and closing (1642) of the Globe, the death of Elizabeth I (1533-1603, r. 1558-1603) and accession of James I (1566-1625, r. 1603-1625), the Gunpowder Plot (1605), and the accession of Charles I (1600-49, r. 1625-49), as well as the rebellion (and execution) of Essex (1601), the death of Kit Marlowe (1593, aged 29), either in a bar-room fight or by the hand of a spy-assassin, as you like, and, of course, the death of Shakespeare in Stratford (1616). Most of us know most of these dates and this chronology. Sanders' look at the genre and stagecraft of early modern drama fills in this chronology with a host of fascinating correspondences, where dramatic expression matched and exceeded the lives of the famous living and dying in this remarkable period of English and theatrical history.
Her first case study starts with a fiction of a theatregoer off to the Globe to see Richard III enacted by Richard Burbage. It is a device to place us in that theatre at that time, to get the feel of the physical experience of being in the world of early modern drama - just as Haig placed us there in his time-travelling fiction. The next is a look at the repertoire of the Rose in the 1590s via Henslowe's diaries. These brief introductory case studies establish the context to look next at tragedy, from the perspective both of the two notable tragedians of the Admiral's and the Lord Chamberlain's Men, Alleyn and Burbage, and the use of dialogue (syntactical, metrical), and especially the effective use of the soliloquy in establishing both intimacy and an allegiance to a Vice figure. Sanders is here at her best, using mini case studies to resonantly exemplify dramatic techniques within specific genre, and in the process reviving - and marking the recent revival of - character study so long out of fashion after Bradleyan brilliance. Her playwright of choice is Marlowe, and after this reading, I want to turn next to those plays, so perfectly apposite are her demonstrations.
Sanders further cross-references several plays which manifest devils or the supernatural, such as ghosts, witches and Furies, sensibly marking the excellence of the small but powerful role of the Porter in Macbeth (1605-6), and taking us back to the prototype of English tragedy, Gorboduc (1561-2), the 'first verse drama in England to use blank verse' (p.63). Indicating the development of the genre from satiric and revenge tragedies to the Jacobean domestic tragedies enacted in the indoor theatres, she depicts the intertextuality and generic transformations evident in this productive 66-year period.
Her next look is at a couple of opening scenes of tragedies and their devices to establish character and draw us in through intimacy. This is contrasted by the appalling co-existent practice of animal cruelty in neighbouring (and sometimes the same; Henslowe invested in both) venues on the Bankside, whipping blind bears and setting dogs onto them, as a filthy blood sport referenced in some of the plays. Rather than leave gentle moralising to playwrights, through sometimes oblique references (Gloucester's eyes in Lear), Elizabeth should have just banned them outright. Thus the ways playwrights combined attraction and repulsion into their dramatic narratives of evil.
Sanders' section on revenge tragedy shows how the subgenre commenced early with Kyd's Spanish Tragedy (1586) and morphed through a series of plays - Shakespeare's Hamlet (1600-1), Marston's The Malcontent (1604), Middleton's Revenger's Tragedy (1605-6), and Webster's The White Devil (1612) - to James Shirley's Caroline play The Cardinal (1641), which not only borrowed tropes from the earlier plays, but subverted the central role of the revenger by feminising it. This is now a subgenre of plays I can't wait to get my hands on.
Case studies then cover the use of dark and light effects in the new indoor theatres such as the Blackfriars, taken by the King's Men in 1608, which encouraged secretive devices in the dark, and which contributed to the 'chamber of horrors' of revenge tragedy, to the lavish costumes and the addition of music between acts to have the candles trimmed - hence the separation into five act structures that apply to this day; and the use of simple props to symbolise narrative, here, the skull.
Props such as the crown serve both as symbols of and metonyms for the English monarchy, and the correspondences through the spate of history plays in the 1590s are picked out by Sanders in her survey of the genre. This includes representation of good (Henry V, Henry VII) and bad (Richard III), or strong (Henry IV) and weak (Edward II, Richard II, Henry VI) kings, the performativity of certain roles (Richard III), women's roles in the plays, and the diversity of generic overlaps, such as the comedy of the Henry IV plays and the touch of the common people in them. Sanders covers Shakespeare's Henry VI trilogy, via Marlowe's Edward II (1593) and Heywood's Edward IV (1599) through Shakespeare's second tetralogy to Ford's Perkin Warbeck (1634). It is a fascinating range and period even of Shakespeare's eight history plays in it, but is enhanced by a handful of other histories in early modern drama worth our attention, and is one of the best essays in this work.
Sanders' survey of comedy is split into three chapters, pastoral and romantic, city comedies, and satire. In the pastoral mode, she looks at how the Petrarchan exploration of love is developed through the cross-dressing lovers at the centre of As You Like It (1599-1600) and Twelfth Night (1601), pre-empted by the pastoral comedies of Lyly in the 1580s and transformed in the later Caroline plays of Brome. Dependent upon the boy actors who played the roles of women (playing the roles of men), and illustrating the ways such child actors brought an ambiguity to the representations of gender in the plays, the following case study looks briefly at this phenomenon of pre-Restoration drama in the epilogue of As You Like It, a woman (role) closing the play.
The city comedy - of which Shakespeare never partook, except as the counterpoint to his history in Henry IV Part I (1596-7) - became a popular subgenre from about this time, up until the late Caroline period, featuring artisanal, domestic and everyday scenes from the the life of the city. Sanders' survey is useful, with plenty of references to such plays, yet this chapter is the weakest of them so far, since it offers no insights that otherwise would be gained incidentally in the reading of the plays. Her follow-up case studies, while touching on group scenes and collaborative writing, again don't really present anything new or further depth.
Satire is one rich subgenre of comedy, visible from Jonson's 1599 Every Man Out Of His Humor, and Shakespeare's 'problem' or 'dark' comedies between 1601 and 1605 partake of this ilk, Troilus And Cressida (1601-2) easily being the most uncomfortable. Here, though, Sanders concentrates on Jonson's Epicene (1609) and Volpone (1606), with a look at Middleton's Michaelmas Term (1604).
The tragicomedy, a composite subgenre, which owes as much to the preceding tragedies as the romantic (or city) comedies (or satires), is a subgenre I particularly love. Shakespeare's four offerings (Pericles [1608], Cymbeline [1610], The Winter's Tale [1611] and The Tempest [1611-12]) are amongst my favourites. (Sanders strangely shows a different order in her chronology appendix, equally strangely omitting Pericles). Sanders rather concentrates on two other offerings which roughly bookend the generic production, Beaumont and Fletcher's Philaster (1610), and Brome's The Queen And Concubine (1635), to demonstrate the generic borrowings of the subgenre as well as the growing female agency (in the plays and contributing to the plays), cross-referencing the productions of masques at court with the pastoral heritage of the earlier comedies, such as Fletcher's influential The Faithful Shepherdess of 1608. It is the theme of near-tragedy resolving in redemption that makes this romantic genre so attractive.
In her conclusion Sanders' précis of the theatrical life in the city, at court, on private estates and on tour reignites that ferment with which she began her discussion. Her sign-off is a fervent hope that this work will encourage us to read some of those plays she has covered and further absorb more of those correspondences which she alluded to in her introduction and which formed the combinatorial theme throughout the work - even while it sometimes made the journey slightly confused, structurally taking the generic journey.
In conclusion, then, this Introduction To Early Modern Drama, 1576-1642 is useful both for investigating the correspondences between plays of the same or different genres during the period as well as for an introduction to several key plays of both genre and period. Its cross-referencing brings a flavour of this phenomenally creative period and the times, but must necessarily lead to reading a representative coverage of these plays to get the most out of this work, with a view to revisiting it after such a survey. I am familiar with all of Shakespeare's works, but none of the others of early modern drama - but I intend now to rectify this. Sanders' introduction, then, is my gateway into a wider experience, and I enjoyed the views it provided.
This work is marked up a couple of points because of its rigour of academic referencing, its useful chronology, and the extensive bibliography which pointed me to further works on the period I'd like to look at....more
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