Jonathan Bate's Blog, page 3

Discuss. As they say in the examination question paper.

Interesting interview with George Lakoff in Guardian online:

It is, plainly, the longstanding failure to protect nature that powers Lakoff's exasperation with liberals. "They don't understand their own moral system or the other guy's, they don't know what's at stake, they don't know about framing, they don't know about metaphors, they don't understand the extent to which emotion is rational, they don't understand how vital emotion is, they try to hide their emotion. They do everything wrong because they're miseducated. And they're proud of that miseducation. Oxford philosophy reigns supreme, right? Oxford philosophy is killing the world."

Do we agree? I do want to return to writing some literary ecotheory some time. Though actually the position here - anti-Cartesian most obviously - is not so far from the place I currently am in my account of the thought of Ted Hughes, that great ecowarrior and ecoworrier.

Robben Island 'Bible'

A timely poignancy to "the valiant never taste of death but once": CNN story.

How stories grow

I'm always interested in the question of when and why a "literary" story makes it off the review pages, or indeed out of the academic world, into the "news" sphere. The "new scene by Shakespeare" versus "possible new attribution to Fletcher" scenario ... An under-estimated aspect is the desire of an individual, either regional or freelance, journalist to place a story nationally. It was thanks to Dalya Alberge's interest and tenacity that Collaborative Plays by Shakespeare and Others briefly became a news story. By the same account, my other half, Paula Byrne, had an interesting experience this week: answered a question about the Jane Austen banknote at the Isle of Wight Literary Festival (not exactly the buzzing heart of breaking news), pointing out that it is the "airbrushed" Victorian engraving, not the original portrait (or caricature?) by her sister. An enterprising local journo from Radio Solent is there. She does an interview with Paula for her local station, but then, presumably in order to give good profile to Solent within the fragile ecology of local radio, suggests to Radio Five Live that this could also be worth an interview. Next thing, it is the Today programme, stories in almost every national newspaper and a global twitterstorm. The mediation of author pictures (cf. Chandos versus Droeshout, whether Cobb Portrait really is Sir Thomas Overbury etc. etc.) is a fascinating subject, but of course the "mainstream media" is only interested if (a) there is a controversy, and (b) it's about a big name - Austen or Shakespeare (as opposed to, say, Burney or Fletcher - my candidate for the sitter in the "Sanders Portrait").

Shakespeare's Mucedorus?

What, then, is the claim? Other than that the stage direction "being pursued with a bear" in a King's Men revival of 1610 cannot be entirely unconnected with Shakespeare ...
The new claim, made in Collaborative Plays by Shakespeare and Others, is that the following scene in the revised Mucedorus is either Shakespeare or someone else - Fletcher, perhaps - writing very self-consciously in the style of Shakespeare:

[SCENE 10]Sound musicEnter the King of Valencia, Anselmo, Roderigo, Lord Barachius, with othersVALENCIA Enough of music, it but adds to torment:            Delights to vexèd spirits are as dates            Set to a sickly man, which rather cloy than comfort.            Let me entreat you to entreat no more.RODERIGO Let your strings sleep: have done there!     Let the music ceaseVALENCIA Mirth, to a soul disturbed, are embers turned,            Which sudden gleam with molestation,            But sooner lose their light for’t.’Tis gold bestowed upon a rioterWhich not relieves, but murders him:’Tis a drug given to the healthful,Which infects not cures.How can a father that hath lost his son—A prince both wise, virtuous and valiant—Take pleasure in the idle acts of time?No, no: till Mucedorus I shall see againAll joy is comfortless, all pleasures pain.ANSELMO Your son, my lord, is well.VALENCIA I prithee, speak that thrice.ANSELMO The prince, your son, is safe.VALENCIA O, where, Anselmo? Surfeit me with that.ANSELMO In Aragon, my liege, And at his parture, bound my secrecy,By his affectious love, not to disclose it.But care of him and pity of your ageMakes my tongue blab what my breast vowed, concealment.VALENCIA Thou not deceiv’st me: I ever thought thee            What I find thee now, an upright, loyal man.            But what desire or young-fed humour            Nursed within the brain Drew him so privately to Aragon?ANSELMO A forcing adamant:            Love mixed with fear and doubtful jealousy,            Whether report gilded a worthless trunk,            Or Amadine deserved her high extolment.VALENCIA See our provision be in readiness:            Collect us followers of the comeliest hue            For our chief guardians: we will thither wend.            The crystal eye of heaven shall not thrice wink            Nor the green flood six times his shoulders turn,            Till we salute the Aragonian king.            Music speak loudly now, the season’s apt,            For former dolours are in pleasure wrapped.

Tchaikovsky's Byron

Itching to write my book on Romanticism, when I finally have time to finish the one on Ted Hughes. The cult of Byron will be a major part of it: had the pleasure of doing some work for this in the form of research on 19th century composers and their Byronmania (Berlioz, Schumann, Liszt), culminating in Tchaikovsky's Manfred symphony - brilliantly performed at last night's prom. Edited version of pre-show discussion was broadcast in the interval. Discussion of Byron in second half of this. Probably only on "Listen Again" for a week. But there is so much more to say ...

Defence of the Humanities

Never have time to blog these days, with so many other duties - and several writing projects horrendously behind. But I do still keep on the lookout for powerful defences of the humanities, and this is certainly one - rhetorically speaking, if nothing else: commencement address at Brandeis by Leon Wieseltier.

Shakespeare Authorship

This, surely, is one of the great contributions to The Shakespeare Authorship Debate:
http://www.newyorker.com/humor/2011/11/21/111121sh_shouts_idle

The End of the University as we know it?

Several of the reviews of Stefan Collini's recent polemical book What are Universities For? suggested that it had missed a trick by ignoring the real threat to the university as we know it, which is not the British Coalition government's funding reforms for teaching but the global - and, of course, California-led - phenomenon of the virtual university. I reflected on this in the latter part of an essay in Standpoint magazine last April.

As the saying goes: we have seen the future and it works ... or does it? This long article in Guardian Online is the fullest journalistic explanation I've yet seen of what is happening. But it's striking that if you go to Khan Academy, edX, Udacity and the rest, the Humanities hardly get a look in. I completely get how Artificial Intelligence, Chemistry and How to Build a Search Engine can be delivered online, but what will the late 21st century virtual Humanities classroom look like? I remember sitting in a Cambridge lecture room as an undergraduate, with 200 others, being dazzled by the brilliance of Christopher Ricks, Jeremy Prynne or Frank Kermode. You could reproduce that online, though perhaps without the buzz of the lecturer's charismatic presence (which Ricks and Prynne had, but Kermode didn't, so maybe charisma isn't all). I remember teaching Shakespeare to a class of 40 at UCLA: a mix of lecture and discussion, with people putting their hands up. You could do this online pretty easily: 40 Skype connections, 40 little screens and a controlled click to allow the questions to be asked one at a time. But what would an Oxbridge style one on one tutorial, the historic apex of higher education, look like online?

Random Penguin

As an author published by Penguin in UK and Random House in USA, the press speculation on a merger between the two could not fail to interest me ... so I checked out the Guardian report at which point there was that perennial temptation to look down at the Reader Comments, which I did, and one of which raised a big smile: "Simply to have a company called 'Random Penguin' would be reason enough to merge, pleeeeeease do it."

"All's Will, Ends Well"

Being Shakespeare has transferred to New York and it is fascinating to see that the critics have a completely different take on the show from that of their counterparts who have seen it across the UK and in the West End. They all love it, but they all focus on the Authorship Question: New York Times ("Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury, the defense calls Simon Callow"), The New York Post ("All's Will, Ends Well"), New York Daily News, Washington Post ("makes it cool again to be smart"), Huffington Post ("restoring King Shakespeare"). The show never directly addresses it, though the programme note confronts it head-on. We didn't create the piece with the authorship dispute in mind, though the title under which it was first staged, The Man from Stratford, was a deliberate poke in the eye of the doubters. And last year's risible-if-good-to-look-at movie Anonymous, which maybe didn't bomb quite so much in the US as it did in the UK, has made it timely - "Eat your heart out, Roland Emmerich," as one of those smart Yankee reviewers puts it.