‘From Austen to Zola’ | Harvard Gazette

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Amy Lowell’s vast collection at Harvard's Houghton Library

Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Images courtesy of Houghton Library

Amy Lowell’s larger-than-life personality often overshadowed her writing and collecting. Lowell’s collection will be showcased in “From Austen to Zola: Amy Lowell as a Collector” at the Houghton Library beginning Sept. 4.
 This is a photograph by Marceau, Boston.

Amy Lowell — a controversial, cigar-smoking, outspoken, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet — collected works by prominent creative artists such as Jane Austen, Ludwig von Beethoven, William Blake, Charlotte Brontë, John Keats, Michelangelo, Walt Whitman, and Émile Zola.

Works from Lowell’s collection are showcased in “From Austen to Zola: Amy Lowell as a Collector,” Houghton Library’s fall exhibition. This exhibit opens on Sept. 4 and will run through Jan. 12, 2013.

Lowell’s (1874-1925) larger-than-life personality often overshadowed her writing and collecting. Early in her career she became deeply interested in imagism, a new school of poetry led by Ezra Pound. Imagism, in Lowell’s words, aimed to “produce poetry that is hard and clear, never blurred nor indefinite.” She became its champion, and lectured tirelessly, edited anthologies, and provided discreet support for young writers of promise, notably D.H. Lawrence. In 1925, Lowell won the Pulitzer Prize for her posthumously published collection “What’s O’Clock.”

Lowell was one of the few women competing in the male-dominated world of collecting. She began at age 17 by purchasing Sir Walter Scott’s “Waverly” novels with her Christmas money. Thanks to her inheritance and her income as a poet, critic, and lecturer, Lowell continued collecting throughout her life. The exhibition includes a beautifully hand-colored copy of Edward Young’s “Night Thoughts,” with illustrations by William Blake; Blake’s “Songs of Innocence”; and his engravings for an edition of Dante. Other artistic gems include a sketch by Michelangelo on the back of a work order (1523) and the delicately colored woodblock prints of Hokusai’s “Kachō gaden” [Drawings of birds and flowers] (1848).

Literary women were another, and natural, collecting interest. The exhibition includes a letter from Jane Austen to her sister Cassandra, six miniature storybooks written by the 13-year-old Charlotte Brontë, the manuscript notebook “quarry” from which George Eliot mined characters and events to write “Middlemarch,” manuscript poems by Emily Dickinson, and more.

And there is Lowell’s Keats collection. In its day it was the most important single collection of Keats autograph material in private hands and now forms the center of the Harvard Keats Collection, which is the largest collection of original Keats material in the world. Lowell, a romantic (and a Romantic) at heart, was particularly interested in rehabilitating Keats’ relationship with Fanny Brawne. The first Keats letter she purchased, in 1902, was a love letter from Keats to Brawne. Lowell later purchased other love letters, the volume of his “Poems” Keats gave Brawne, and a lock of Brawne’s hair. The working manuscript of “To Autumn,” Shelley’s letter inviting Keats to visit him in Italy, and the manuscript of Shelley’s “A Proposal for Putting Reform to the Vote,” also included in the exhibition, show how Lowell’s interest in Keats, which culminated in the two-volume biography of Keats she published shortly before her death, grew from collecting him into developing a research collection to support her writing.

Other themes in Lowell’s collecting are highlighted in the exhibit, including her focus on “association books” (books owned and often annotated by famous authors), including volumes belonging to Gibbon, Robert Browning, Charles I, and the Empress Josephine; and on autographs and manuscripts, including a passionate letter from Lord Nelson to Lady Hamilton, and manuscript poetry by Ben Jonson, Whitman, and Coleridge, and a manuscript essay by Thoreau. French literature was another passion, and Lowell collected manuscripts by La Fontaine, Voltaire, and Verlaine, as well as books presented by Flaubert, Mallarmé, and Zola to friends. The exhibition concludes with a look at Lowell’s collecting of her own contemporaries, such as Thomas Hardy, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and D.H. Lawrence.

“The Amy Lowell Collection forms the core of our 19th-century English literature holdings,” said Curator of Modern Books and Manuscripts Leslie Morris, exhibition organizer, “as well as providing incredibly important individual manuscripts and books in other fields. It’s time we highlighted Miss Lowell’s key role in building the Harvard Library collections.”

From October through January, a companion exhibition, “Six Decades of Treasure Hunting: Purchases with the Amy Lowell Fund,” will be in the Amy Lowell Room at Houghton, focusing on the important library acquisitions made possible by the funds bequeathed by Lowell to further develop the Harvard collections.

Included in Lowell’s collection is William Blake’s “Songs of Innocence,” 1789. The title page is shown.

‘From Austen to Zola’ | Harvard Gazette

Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare by Stephen Greenblatt - Reviews, Discussion, Bookclubs, Lists

Stephen Greenblatt, the charismatic Harvard professor who "knows more about Shakespeare than Ben Jonson or the Dark Lady did" (John Leonard, Harper's), has written a biography that enables us to see, hear, and feel how an acutely sensitive and talented boy, surrounded by the rich tapestry of Elizabethan life; full of drama and pageantry, and also cruelty and danger; could have become the world's greatest playwright. A young man from the provinces a man without wealth, connections, or university education moves to London.

In a remarkably short time he becomes the greatest playwright not just of his age but of all time. His works appeal to urban sophisticates and first-time theatergoers; he turns politics into poetry; he recklessly mingles vulgar clowning and philosophical subtlety. How is such an achievement to be explained? Will in the World interweaves a searching account of Elizabethan England with a vivid narrative of the playwright's life.

We see Shakespeare learning his craft, starting a family, and forging a career for himself in the wildly competitive London theater world, while at the same time grappling with dangerous religious and political forces that took less-agile figures to the scaffold.

Above all, we never lose sight of the great works A Midsummer Night's Dream, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Macbeth, and more that continue after four hundred years to delight and haunt audiences everywhere.

The basic biographical facts of Shakespeare's life have been known for over a century, but now Stephen Greenblatt shows how this particular life history gave rise to the world's greatest writer.

Bringing together little-known historical facts and little-noticed elements of Shakespeare's plays, Greenblatt makes inspired connections between the life and the works and deliver "a dazzling and subtle biography" (Richard Lacayo, Time).


Readers will experience Shakespeare's vital plays again as if for the first time, but with greater understanding and appreciation of their extraordinary depth and humanity.

 A Best Book of the Year The New York Times 10 Best Books of 2004; Time magazine's #1 Best Nonfiction Book; A Washington Post Book World Rave; An Economist Best Book; A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book; A Christian Science Monitor Best Book; A Chicago Tribune Best Book; A Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Best Book; NPR's Maureen Corrigan's Best.











Source:
Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare by Stephen Greenblatt - Reviews, Discussion, Bookclubs, Lists

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/137717.Will_in_the_World

Will Power : The New Yorker

hy do we read critical biographies of Shakespeare? The reasons that we shouldn’t have been ably given by his best critics. “Reader, looke / not on his Picture, but his Booke” was Ben Jonson’s advice right there at the start, on the title page of the First Folio, confronting the familiar Droeshout portrait of the unprepossessing bald guy with the ruff. The advice not to look at the life continues to this day. Artists, Auden insisted, should be anonymous; Shakespeare, for all intents and purposes, is, and we should revel in it. But Auden filled his criticism with confident assertions about Shakespeare’s love life, and Jonson himself couldn’t help but chat compulsively about the man: he couldn’t write Latin or Greek, he was a social climber, he needed an editor. Whatever our official pieties, deep down we all believe in lives. The sternest formalists are the loudest gossips, and if you ask a cultural-studies maven who believes in nothing but collective forces and class determinisms how she came to believe this doctrine, she will begin to tell you, eagerly, the story of her life.

The life and works of a man whose life is so plain and whose works are so fancy produces the kind of book that belongs less to a scholarly genre than to a performing genre, a hoop for a scholar to jump through when he no longer has anything to prove, as Lear is a role for an actor to jump through when he has done all the others. To the long run of such life-and-works books, the Harvard professor Stephen Greenblatt now offers his own reading, with the perfect punning title “Will in the World” (Norton; $26.95). Greenblatt’s book is startlingly good—the most complexly intelligent and sophisticated, and yet the most keenly enthusiastic, study of the life and work taken together that I have ever read. Greenblatt knows the life and the period deeply, has no hobbyhorses to ride, and makes, one after another, exquisitely sensitive and persuasive connections between what the eloquent poetry says and what the fragmentary life suggests. A fully postmodernized critic, he knows the barriers of rhetoric and artifice that make us write the poems and then have the feelings as often as we have the feelings first. But he does not make the postmodern mistake of overestimating those barriers, either. Poets may often write things they do not feel, but they rarely feel things that they do not, sooner or later, write. The absence of one emotion in Shakespeare, the undue intensity of another are powerful indicators of a mind and a man at work.
Drawing on surprisingly fertile decades of biographical scholarship, Greenblatt is not afraid to make definite assertions. He begins with a fine, disabused picture of Stratford circa 1564, when the poet was born. Against the old notion of an expansive Elizabethan culture connected by the open English road, he draws a portrait of a society nearly Soviet, or perhaps South American, in its paranoias, public persecutions, and sudden, murderous changes of ideology.

• from the issue
• cartoon bank
• e-mail this

The underlying crisis was religious. In half a century—within the lifetime of Shakespeare’s father, John—England had gone through a very conservative regime of Catholicism, to an uneasy form of improvised state Catholicism under Henry VIII, through a period of radical Protestantism under King Edward VI, back to Roman Catholicism under Queen Mary, and then on to the staunchly Protestant monarchy of Elizabeth. As each sect seized power, it set about burning and disembowelling those who had been ascendant moments before. By the time Shakespeare was a young man, to be a Catholic priest at all was a capital offense.
The fear and brutality of this unending religious civil war was relieved by the richness of the surrounding folk culture: May Days and Robin Hood pageants, morality plays in tavern courtyards and miracle plays on holidays. “Folk culture is everywhere in his work, in the web of allusions and in the underlying structure,” Greenblatt writes. And this folk culture was, for Shakespeare, inextricably tied up, as it is in the Mediterranean world to this day, with the rituals and calendar and enveloping presence of the old faith. Greenblatt is assured here, where earlier generations of scholars were reserved: little doubt remains that Shakespeare, whose father, mother, and daughter were all, at times, secret Catholics, was at some level a partisan of the old religion. (A disinterested record remarks after his decease that “he dyed a papist.”) His mother, Mary Arden, came from an old, distinguished, and ardently Catholic family. His father, John, a glovemaker (and therefore an artisan, but one who dealt in luxury goods), was a leading citizen of Stratford, an alderman and bailiff, who participated in the Protestant ascendancy, arranging to have the local church ripped up and its icons and paintings removed—but who at the same time helped make sure that the schoolmasters hired for the public school were Catholic sympathizers, and secretly signed a Roman Catholic “Spiritual Testament” and hid it in the rafters of his house. (The testament of faith was found, still concealed, in the eighteenth century.)
There is no evidence that Shakespeare was a believing or a churchgoing Catholic; in his London years, he must have gone regularly to a Protestant church, or there would have been recorded legal consequences. Catholicism seems tied up for him, as it was for Englishmen well into the nineteenth century, with a love of ceremony and theatricality, a longing for a set of rituals that Protestant sobriety was eager to forbid. It was the pagan part of Catholicism that he loved—“Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang”—and the Puritan part of Protestantism, its Malvolio-ism, that he feared. In 1575, Greenblatt tells us, when Shakespeare was eleven, a group of local artisans, exactly like those in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” wanted to put on a play for the Queen on her visit to Kenilworth Castle, just twelve miles from Stratford. Playacting had been banned, however, and they wrote to complain tactfully about “certain of their preachers, men very commendable for behavior and learning, and sweet in their sermons, but somewhat too sour in preaching away their pastime.” It was this preaching away of his favorite pastime that Shakespeare associated with Protestantism. The medieval part of his imagination, his delight in lists of local flowers (“I know a bank whereon the wild thyme blows / where oxlips and the nodding violet grows”), the light of fairy tale and fable that shines through all his comedies, was haunted by the old faith and its rituals. Greenblatt uses “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” as a road map in his section on Shakespeare’s childhood, and persuasively so. The play, one of the very few in the entire canon without any previous literary model, is the most deeply autobiographical of Shakespeare’s works, in that it encompasses the three formative sources of his imagination: the fairy world of pagan folk memory and ritual; his father’s world of rustic tradesmen and artisans, joiners and tailors and glovers; and the world of young lovers having sex in the woods, which eventually got him trapped in a bad marriage—all seen from the safe point of view of the aristocratic life that he would get to know in London.

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/09/13/040913crat_atlarge#ixzz2Cl6f7C5W

hy do we read critical biographies of Shakespeare? The reasons that we shouldn’t have been ably given by his best critics. “Reader, looke / not on his Picture, but his Booke” was Ben Jonson’s advice right there at the start, on the title page of the First Folio, confronting the familiar Droeshout portrait of the unprepossessing bald guy with the ruff. The advice not to look at the life continues to this day. Artists, Auden insisted, should be anonymous; Shakespeare, for all intents and purposes, is, and we should revel in it. But Auden filled his criticism with confident assertions about Shakespeare’s love life, and Jonson himself couldn’t help but chat compulsively about the man: he couldn’t write Latin or Greek, he was a social climber, he needed an editor. Whatever our official pieties, deep down we all believe in lives. The sternest formalists are the loudest gossips, and if you ask a cultural-studies maven who believes in nothing but collective forces and class determinisms how she came to believe this doctrine, she will begin to tell you, eagerly, the story of her life.

The life and works of a man whose life is so plain and whose works are so fancy produces the kind of book that belongs less to a scholarly genre than to a performing genre, a hoop for a scholar to jump through when he no longer has anything to prove, as Lear is a role for an actor to jump through when he has done all the others. To the long run of such life-and-works books, the Harvard professor Stephen Greenblatt now offers his own reading, with the perfect punning title “Will in the World” (Norton; $26.95). Greenblatt’s book is startlingly good—the most complexly intelligent and sophisticated, and yet the most keenly enthusiastic, study of the life and work taken together that I have ever read. Greenblatt knows the life and the period deeply, has no hobbyhorses to ride, and makes, one after another, exquisitely sensitive and persuasive connections between what the eloquent poetry says and what the fragmentary life suggests. A fully postmodernized critic, he knows the barriers of rhetoric and artifice that make us write the poems and then have the feelings as often as we have the feelings first. But he does not make the postmodern mistake of overestimating those barriers, either. Poets may often write things they do not feel, but they rarely feel things that they do not, sooner or later, write. The absence of one emotion in Shakespeare, the undue intensity of another are powerful indicators of a mind and a man at work.
Drawing on surprisingly fertile decades of biographical scholarship, Greenblatt is not afraid to make definite assertions. He begins with a fine, disabused picture of Stratford circa 1564, when the poet was born. Against the old notion of an expansive Elizabethan culture connected by the open English road, he draws a portrait of a society nearly Soviet, or perhaps South American, in its paranoias, public persecutions, and sudden, murderous changes of ideology.

• from the issue
• cartoon bank
• e-mail this

The underlying crisis was religious. In half a century—within the lifetime of Shakespeare’s father, John—England had gone through a very conservative regime of Catholicism, to an uneasy form of improvised state Catholicism under Henry VIII, through a period of radical Protestantism under King Edward VI, back to Roman Catholicism under Queen Mary, and then on to the staunchly Protestant monarchy of Elizabeth. As each sect seized power, it set about burning and disembowelling those who had been ascendant moments before. By the time Shakespeare was a young man, to be a Catholic priest at all was a capital offense.
The fear and brutality of this unending religious civil war was relieved by the richness of the surrounding folk culture: May Days and Robin Hood pageants, morality plays in tavern courtyards and miracle plays on holidays. “Folk culture is everywhere in his work, in the web of allusions and in the underlying structure,” Greenblatt writes. And this folk culture was, for Shakespeare, inextricably tied up, as it is in the Mediterranean world to this day, with the rituals and calendar and enveloping presence of the old faith. Greenblatt is assured here, where earlier generations of scholars were reserved: little doubt remains that Shakespeare, whose father, mother, and daughter were all, at times, secret Catholics, was at some level a partisan of the old religion. (A disinterested record remarks after his decease that “he dyed a papist.”) His mother, Mary Arden, came from an old, distinguished, and ardently Catholic family. His father, John, a glovemaker (and therefore an artisan, but one who dealt in luxury goods), was a leading citizen of Stratford, an alderman and bailiff, who participated in the Protestant ascendancy, arranging to have the local church ripped up and its icons and paintings removed—but who at the same time helped make sure that the schoolmasters hired for the public school were Catholic sympathizers, and secretly signed a Roman Catholic “Spiritual Testament” and hid it in the rafters of his house. (The testament of faith was found, still concealed, in the eighteenth century.)
There is no evidence that Shakespeare was a believing or a churchgoing Catholic; in his London years, he must have gone regularly to a Protestant church, or there would have been recorded legal consequences. Catholicism seems tied up for him, as it was for Englishmen well into the nineteenth century, with a love of ceremony and theatricality, a longing for a set of rituals that Protestant sobriety was eager to forbid. It was the pagan part of Catholicism that he loved—“Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang”—and the Puritan part of Protestantism, its Malvolio-ism, that he feared. In 1575, Greenblatt tells us, when Shakespeare was eleven, a group of local artisans, exactly like those in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” wanted to put on a play for the Queen on her visit to Kenilworth Castle, just twelve miles from Stratford. Playacting had been banned, however, and they wrote to complain tactfully about “certain of their preachers, men very commendable for behavior and learning, and sweet in their sermons, but somewhat too sour in preaching away their pastime.” It was this preaching away of his favorite pastime that Shakespeare associated with Protestantism. The medieval part of his imagination, his delight in lists of local flowers (“I know a bank whereon the wild thyme blows / where oxlips and the nodding violet grows”), the light of fairy tale and fable that shines through all his comedies, was haunted by the old faith and its rituals. Greenblatt uses “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” as a road map in his section on Shakespeare’s childhood, and persuasively so. The play, one of the very few in the entire canon without any previous literary model, is the most deeply autobiographical of Shakespeare’s works, in that it encompasses the three formative sources of his imagination: the fairy world of pagan folk memory and ritual; his father’s world of rustic tradesmen and artisans, joiners and tailors and glovers; and the world of young lovers having sex in the woods, which eventually got him trapped in a bad marriage—all seen from the safe point of view of the aristocratic life that he would get to know in London.


Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/09/13/040913crat_atlarge#ixzz2Cl6Jwoa1

hy do we read critical biographies of Shakespeare? The reasons that we shouldn’t have been ably given by his best critics. “Reader, looke / not on his Picture, but his Booke” was Ben Jonson’s advice right there at the start, on the title page of the First Folio, confronting the familiar Droeshout portrait of the unprepossessing bald guy with the ruff. The advice not to look at the life continues to this day. Artists, Auden insisted, should be anonymous; Shakespeare, for all intents and purposes, is, and we should revel in it. But Auden filled his criticism with confident assertions about Shakespeare’s love life, and Jonson himself couldn’t help but chat compulsively about the man: he couldn’t write Latin or Greek, he was a social climber, he needed an editor. Whatever our official pieties, deep down we all believe in lives. The sternest formalists are the loudest gossips, and if you ask a cultural-studies maven who believes in nothing but collective forces and class determinisms how she came to believe this doctrine, she will begin to tell you, eagerly, the story of her life.

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/09/13/040913crat_atlarge#ixzz2Cl6vs5tj

hy do we read critical biographies of Shakespeare? The reasons that we shouldn’t have been ably given by his best critics. “Reader, looke / not on his Picture, but his Booke” was Ben Jonson’s advice right there at the start, on the title page of the First Folio, confronting the familiar Droeshout portrait of the unprepossessing bald guy with the ruff. The advice not to look at the life continues to this day. Artists, Auden insisted, should be anonymous; Shakespeare, for all intents and purposes, is, and we should revel in it. But Auden filled his criticism with confident assertions about Shakespeare’s love life, and Jonson himself couldn’t help but chat compulsively about the man: he couldn’t write Latin or Greek, he was a social climber, he needed an editor. Whatever our official pieties, deep down we all believe in lives. The sternest formalists are the loudest gossips, and if you ask a cultural-studies maven who believes in nothing but collective forces and class determinisms how she came to believe this doctrine, she will begin to tell you, eagerly, the story of her life.

The life and works of a man whose life is so plain and whose works are so fancy produces the kind of book that belongs less to a scholarly genre than to a performing genre, a hoop for a scholar to jump through when he no longer has anything to prove, as Lear is a role for an actor to jump through when he has done all the others. To the long run of such life-and-works books, the Harvard professor Stephen Greenblatt now offers his own reading, with the perfect punning title “Will in the World” (Norton; $26.95). Greenblatt’s book is startlingly good—the most complexly intelligent and sophisticated, and yet the most keenly enthusiastic, study of the life and work taken together that I have ever read. Greenblatt knows the life and the period deeply, has no hobbyhorses to ride, and makes, one after another, exquisitely sensitive and persuasive connections between what the eloquent poetry says and what the fragmentary life suggests. A fully postmodernized critic, he knows the barriers of rhetoric and artifice that make us write the poems and then have the feelings as often as we have the feelings first. But he does not make the postmodern mistake of overestimating those barriers, either. Poets may often write things they do not feel, but they rarely feel things that they do not, sooner or later, write. The absence of one emotion in Shakespeare, the undue intensity of another are powerful indicators of a mind and a man at work.
Drawing on surprisingly fertile decades of biographical scholarship, Greenblatt is not afraid to make definite assertions. He begins with a fine, disabused picture of Stratford circa 1564, when the poet was born. Against the old notion of an expansive Elizabethan culture connected by the open English road, he draws a portrait of a society nearly Soviet, or perhaps South American, in its paranoias, public persecutions, and sudden, murderous changes of ideology.

• from the issue
• cartoon bank
• e-mail this

The underlying crisis was religious. In half a century—within the lifetime of Shakespeare’s father, John—England had gone through a very conservative regime of Catholicism, to an uneasy form of improvised state Catholicism under Henry VIII, through a period of radical Protestantism under King Edward VI, back to Roman Catholicism under Queen Mary, and then on to the staunchly Protestant monarchy of Elizabeth. As each sect seized power, it set about burning and disembowelling those who had been ascendant moments before. By the time Shakespeare was a young man, to be a Catholic priest at all was a capital offense.
The fear and brutality of this unending religious civil war was relieved by the richness of the surrounding folk culture: May Days and Robin Hood pageants, morality plays in tavern courtyards and miracle plays on holidays. “Folk culture is everywhere in his work, in the web of allusions and in the underlying structure,” Greenblatt writes. And this folk culture was, for Shakespeare, inextricably tied up, as it is in the Mediterranean world to this day, with the rituals and calendar and enveloping presence of the old faith. Greenblatt is assured here, where earlier generations of scholars were reserved: little doubt remains that Shakespeare, whose father, mother, and daughter were all, at times, secret Catholics, was at some level a partisan of the old religion. (A disinterested record remarks after his decease that “he dyed a papist.”) His mother, Mary Arden, came from an old, distinguished, and ardently Catholic family. His father, John, a glovemaker (and therefore an artisan, but one who dealt in luxury goods), was a leading citizen of Stratford, an alderman and bailiff, who participated in the Protestant ascendancy, arranging to have the local church ripped up and its icons and paintings removed—but who at the same time helped make sure that the schoolmasters hired for the public school were Catholic sympathizers, and secretly signed a Roman Catholic “Spiritual Testament” and hid it in the rafters of his house. (The testament of faith was found, still concealed, in the eighteenth century.)
There is no evidence that Shakespeare was a believing or a churchgoing Catholic; in his London years, he must have gone regularly to a Protestant church, or there would have been recorded legal consequences. Catholicism seems tied up for him, as it was for Englishmen well into the nineteenth century, with a love of ceremony and theatricality, a longing for a set of rituals that Protestant sobriety was eager to forbid. It was the pagan part of Catholicism that he loved—“Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang”—and the Puritan part of Protestantism, its Malvolio-ism, that he feared. In 1575, Greenblatt tells us, when Shakespeare was eleven, a group of local artisans, exactly like those in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” wanted to put on a play for the Queen on her visit to Kenilworth Castle, just twelve miles from Stratford. Playacting had been banned, however, and they wrote to complain tactfully about “certain of their preachers, men very commendable for behavior and learning, and sweet in their sermons, but somewhat too sour in preaching away their pastime.” It was this preaching away of his favorite pastime that Shakespeare associated with Protestantism. The medieval part of his imagination, his delight in lists of local flowers (“I know a bank whereon the wild thyme blows / where oxlips and the nodding violet grows”), the light of fairy tale and fable that shines through all his comedies, was haunted by the old faith and its rituals. Greenblatt uses “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” as a road map in his section on Shakespeare’s childhood, and persuasively so. The play, one of the very few in the entire canon without any previous literary model, is the most deeply autobiographical of Shakespeare’s works, in that it encompasses the three formative sources of his imagination: the fairy world of pagan folk memory and ritual; his father’s world of rustic tradesmen and artisans, joiners and tailors and glovers; and the world of young lovers having sex in the woods, which eventually got him trapped in a bad marriage—all seen from the safe point of view of the aristocratic life that he would get to know in London.

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/09/13/040913crat_atlarge#ixzz2Cl6f7C5W

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/09/13/040913crat_atlarge#ixzz2Cl6f7C5W

Will Power : The New Yorker

Shakespeare, the inventive conservative | Harvard Gazette

 

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Shakespeare, the inventive conservative

Scholar Greenblatt says that even the Bard knew his creative limits

By Alexandra Perloff-Giles ’11

Harvard Correspondent
Monday, November 1, 2010

Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer

“I think Shakespeare understood that there was something wrong, something disturbed, about the dream that you could have no limits whatsoever,” said Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt. “Any pleasure or value associated with having a life worth living would depend on your understanding that it was governed by constraints.”

A new book by Stephen Greenblatt, the Shakespeare scholar who wrote the celebrated 2004 biography “Will in the World,” probes topics that the Bard pushed to their limits: beauty and the cult of perfection, murderous hatred, the exercise of power, and artistic autonomy.

Greenblatt observes in “Shakespeare’s Freedom” that the playwright’s linguistic inventions are a testament to his remarkable aesthetic autonomy. Indeed, Greenblatt notes, “Hamlet” alone contains 19 new words and 372 words already in circulation that had never been used in precisely that way. Yet, at the same time, Shakespeare seems to wrestle with the question of whether the artist — or anyone else — can truly be autonomous.

“There are boundaries,” said Greenblatt, the John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities. “Now, Shakespeare may have encountered those boundaries much less than ordinary mortals, but there are things you want to say and things you can’t.”

Greenblatt acknowledges that while the book is called “Shakespeare’s Freedom,” it’s just as much about Shakespeare’s limits.

“I think Shakespeare understood that there was something wrong, something disturbed, about the dream that you could have no limits whatsoever,” he said. “Any pleasure or value associated with having a life worth living would depend on your understanding that it was governed by constraints.”

Despite the vast body of scholarship devoted to Shakespeare over the years, Greenblatt said he believes that every scholar can bring a new perspective to issues raised in Shakespeare’s plays.

“You bring to bear on these things anything you can from your own life,” he said. “The questions that you ask and the things that you notice and the things that you’re interested in depend on who you are and the life you have lived, a life inevitably different from that of your parents or grandparents.”

For Greenblatt, the genius of Shakespeare was that he understood that audiences change, from one performance to the next, or from one generation to the next.

“The plays wouldn’t have survived for so many years if they weren’t written in such a way that they are adaptable,” Greenblatt said. “Shakespeare himself grasped that from the beginning.”

In writing “Shakespeare’s Freedom,” which began as a series of lectures that Greenblatt presented first at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt and later at Rice University, Greenblatt was keenly aware that issues that have preoccupied American society in recent years, from concerns about torture to anxieties about radical Islam, inevitably color his interpretation of Shakespeare’s work and influenced the book.

“I don’t believe in excluding the present,” Greenblatt said, noting that “After Abu Ghraib, it was impossible to read the scene of the torture of Gloucester in ‘King Lear’ without thinking about it.”

Greenblatt is known as the father of new historicism, which advocates the reading and understanding of literature in its historical context. Yet he would be the first to point out that the way in which observers reconstruct the historical context is mediated by their present situation. Literature, or any work of art, is at once tied to a specific context and able to transcend that context as it takes on new meanings for different audiences.

“The interesting thing about cultural objects is that they can float free of the original historical context and show up like seashells on your own shore,” he said. “You have to figure out what they mean and what to do with them.”

While “Shakespeare’s Freedom,” forthcoming this month from University of Chicago Press, is geared toward an academic audience, another of Greenblatt’s current projects, dedicated to exploring how stories move across contexts, seeks a much broader audience.

In 2008 Greenblatt, in collaboration with Charles Mee, wrote a play titled “Cardenio,” after a lost play of the same name by Shakespeare and John Fletcher. The play was produced at the American Repertory Theater and has since been performed across the globe.

Greenblatt has traveled to see adaptations of the play in Calcutta, Tokyo, Zagreb, Madrid, São Paolo, Cairo, Istanbul, and Warsaw. Further adaptations will soon be mounted in Cape Town and Belgrade. Each adaptation is more than a simple translation, he said.

“What I was interested in is what happens when a story moves from one culture to another or from one place to another and gets transformed according to its own circumstances,” Greenblatt said.

All of the productions are based loosely on a story of betrayal that Shakespeare took from Cervantes: An engaged couple discovers that they no longer want to be with each other. 

Greenblatt said the most fascinating part of the experience has been observing the ways in which cultures with very different attitudes toward marriage and sexual morality interpret the plot. The Egyptian version, for example, centered on honor killings of women who are not virgins on their wedding night.

“None of the adaptations has been what I predicted it would be,” Greenblatt said. “Each of them has been an incredible surprise.”



Stephen Greenblatt will speak about “Shakespeare’s Freedom” at the Harvard Book Store on....

Shakespeare, the inventive conservative | Harvard Gazette


 Link:  http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2010/11/shakespeare-the-inventive-conservative/

Shakespeare's Freedom by Stephen Greenblatt

 

Shakespeare lived in a world of absolutes-of claims for the absolute authority of scripture, monarch, and God, and the authority of fathers over wives and children, the old over the young, and the gentle over the baseborn. With the elegance and verve for which he is well known, Stephen Greenblatt, author of the best-sellingWill in the World, shows that Shakespeare was strikingly averse to such absolutes and constantly probed the possibility of freedom from them.

Again and again, Shakespeare confounds the designs and pretensions of kings, generals, and churchmen. His aversion to absolutes even leads him to probe the exalted and seemingly limitless passions of his lovers. Greenblatt explores this rich theme by addressing four of Shakespeare's preoccupations across all the genres in which he worked.

He first considers the idea of beauty in Shakespeare's works, specifically his challenge to the cult of featureless perfection and his interest in distinguishing marks.

He then turns to Shakespeare's interest in murderous hatred, most famously embodied in Shylock but seen also in the character Bernardine inMeasure for Measure.

Next Greenblatt considers the idea of Shakespearean authority-that is, Shakespeare's deep sense of the ethical ambiguity of power, including his own.

Ultimately, Greenblatt takes up Shakespearean autonomy, in particular the freedom of artists, guided by distinctive forms of perception, to live by their own laws and to claim that their creations are singularly unconstrained.

A book that could only have been written by Stephen Greenblatt,Shakespeare's Freedomis a wholly original and eloquent meditation by the most acclaimed and influential Shakespearean of our time.

Shakespeare's Freedom

Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer

Shakespeare, the inventive conservative

Scholar Greenblatt says that even the Bard knew his creative limits

“I think Shakespeare understood that there was something wrong, something disturbed, about the dream that you could have no limits whatsoever,” said Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt. “Any pleasure or value associated with having a life worth living would depend on your understanding that it was governed by constraints.”

A new book by Stephen Greenblatt, the Shakespeare scholar who wrote the celebrated 2004 biography “Will in the World,” probes topics that the Bard pushed to their limits: beauty and the cult of perfection, murderous hatred, the exercise of power, and artistic autonomy.

Greenblatt observes in “Shakespeare’s Freedom” that the playwright’s linguistic inventions are a testament to his remarkable aesthetic autonomy. Indeed, Greenblatt notes, “Hamlet” alone contains 19 new words and 372 words already in circulation that had never been used in precisely that way. Yet, at the same time, Shakespeare seems to wrestle with the question of whether the artist — or anyone else — can truly be autonomous.

“There are boundaries,” said Greenblatt, the John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities. “Now, Shakespeare may have encountered those boundaries much less than ordinary mortals, but there are things you want to say and things you can’t.”

Greenblatt acknowledges that while the book is called “Shakespeare’s Freedom,” it’s just as much about Shakespeare’s limits.

“I think Shakespeare understood that there was something wrong, something disturbed, about the dream that you could have no limits whatsoever,” he said. “Any pleasure or value associated with having a life worth living would depend on your understanding that it was governed by constraints.”

Despite the vast body of scholarship devoted to Shakespeare over the years, Greenblatt said he believes that every scholar can bring a new perspective to issues raised in Shakespeare’s plays.

“You bring to bear on these things anything you can from your own life,” he said. “The questions that you ask and the things that you notice and the things that you’re interested in depend on who you are and the life you have lived, a life inevitably different from that of your parents or grandparents.”

For Greenblatt, the genius of Shakespeare was that he understood that audiences change, from one performance to the next, or from one generation to the next.

“The plays wouldn’t have survived for so many years if they weren’t written in such a way that they are adaptable,” Greenblatt said. “Shakespeare himself grasped that from the beginning.”

In writing “Shakespeare’s Freedom,” which began as a series of lectures that Greenblatt presented first at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt and later at Rice University, Greenblatt was keenly aware that issues that have preoccupied American society in recent years, from concerns about torture to anxieties about radical Islam, inevitably color his interpretation of Shakespeare’s work and influenced the book.

“I don’t believe in excluding the present,” Greenblatt said, noting that “After Abu Ghraib, it was impossible to read the scene of the torture of Gloucester in ‘King Lear’ without thinking about it.”

Greenblatt is known as the father of new historicism, which advocates the reading and understanding of literature in its historical context. Yet he would be the first to point out that the way in which observers reconstruct the historical context is mediated by their present situation. Literature, or any work of art, is at once tied to a specific context and able to transcend that context as it takes on new meanings for different audiences.

“The interesting thing about cultural objects is that they can float free of the original historical context and show up like seashells on your own shore,” he said. “You have to figure out what they mean and what to do with them.”

While “Shakespeare’s Freedom,” forthcoming this month from University of Chicago Press, is geared toward an academic audience, another of Greenblatt’s current projects, dedicated to exploring how stories move across contexts, seeks a much broader audience.

In 2008 Greenblatt, in collaboration with Charles Mee, wrote a play titled “Cardenio,” after a lost play of the same name by Shakespeare and John Fletcher. The play was produced at the American Repertory Theater and has since been performed across the globe.

Greenblatt has traveled to see adaptations of the play in Calcutta, Tokyo, Zagreb, Madrid, São Paolo, Cairo, Istanbul, and Warsaw. Further adaptations will soon be mounted in Cape Town and Belgrade. Each adaptation is more than a simple translation, he said.

“What I was interested in is what happens when a story moves from one culture to another or from one place to another and gets transformed according to its own circumstances,” Greenblatt said.

All of the productions are based loosely on a story of betrayal that Shakespeare took from Cervantes: An engaged couple discovers that they no longer want to be with each other. Greenblatt said the most fascinating part of the experience has been observing the ways in which cultures with very different attitudes toward marriage and sexual morality interpret the plot. The Egyptian version, for example, centered on honor killings of women who are not virgins on their wedding night.

“None of the adaptations has been what I predicted it would be,” Greenblatt said. “Each of them has been an incredible surprise.”



Stephen Greenblatt will speak about “Shakespeare’s Freedom” at the Harvard Book Store on Nov. 15 at 7 p.m. The event is free and open to the public.




Source:
http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2010/11/shakespeare-the-inventive-conservative/ 

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If everyone watched this, marijuana would be legal right now! (Share this on Facebook) - YouTube

Uploaded by WakeUpAndLegalizelt on Dec 28, 2011

The Union - The Business Behind Getting High (Full Movie)

The TRUTH about marijuana!

BC's illegal marijuana trade industry has evolved into a business giant, dubbed by some involved as 'The Union', Commanding upwards of $7 billion Canadian annually. 

With up to 85% of 'BC Bud' being exported to the United States, the trade has become an international issue. 

Follow filmmaker Adam Scorgie as he demystifies the underground market and brings to light how an industry can function while remaining illegal. Through growers, police officers, criminologists, economists, doctors, politicians and pop culture icons, Scorgie examines the cause and effect nature of the business - an industry that may be profiting more by being illegal.

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• 12,860 likes, 657 dislikes

If everyone watched this, marijuana would be legal right now! (Share this on Facebook) - YouTube

Louis Theroux meets Max Clifford.avi - YouTube

Gossip Newsman



Louis Theroux meets Max Clifford.avi - YouTube

ITV - Lorraine - Louis Theroux Interview (25/4/12) - YouTube

Published on Apr 25, 2012 by Outis666

Broadcaster Louis Theroux is back with a new two-part documentary called Extreme Love. In the first part he went to America where he explored autism and new treatments being employed to help it's sufferers and their families. For the second episode "Extreme Love: Dementia", Louis meets people suffering with dementia and their carers.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01gvt26
http://www.itv.com/lorraine/celebrity/louis-theroux-on-lorraine/#.T5gd9Mif-gp...

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News & Politics

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ITV - Lorraine - Louis Theroux Interview (25/4/12) - YouTube

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtfHs3X8Uqg&feature=related

Louis Theroux Masterclass @ Docville 2012 - YouTube

Published on May 18, 2012 by DOCVILLEFESTIVAL

 

Registration of Masterclass Louis Theroux, May 4th 2012 at DOCVILLE Documentary Film Festival in Leuven, Belgium. Interview by Jan Leyers.

British documentary film maker Louis Theroux has a unique style. Like no other he manages to strike the balance between getting involved with and close to his topics and making sure he keeps enough distance to guarantee his neutrality and independence. His open approach, integrity and diplomacy win people over, even those living in some of the world's most closed communities. Theroux's work method has resulted in quite a few memorable scenes and movies. In his own words and with the aid of video fragments he will shed a light on his style, technique and vision.

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• 171 likes, 1 dislike

Louis Theroux Masterclass @ Docville 2012 - YouTube


 Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzrHog0mwTY&feature=related

The New Kings of Nonfiction: Ira Glass

 

 A collection of stories-some well known, some more obscure- capturing some of the best storytelling of this golden age of nonfiction.

 An anthology of the best new masters of nonfiction storytelling, personally chosen and introduced by Ira Glass, the producer and host of the award-winning public radio program This American Life.

These pieces-on teenage white collar criminals, buying a cow, Saddam Hussein, drunken British soccer culture, and how we know everyone in our Rolodex-are meant to mesmerize and inspire.


 Source:
The New Kings of Nonfiction: Ira Glass: 9781594482670: Amazon.com: Books

http://www.amazon.com/dp/1594482675/ref=as_li_ss_til?tag=braipick-20&camp=0&creative=0&linkCode=as4&creativeASIN=1594482675&adid=0ARPMX01P91KVHQ2ZBWS