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About KU’s Trollope Prize.
1. Seven Short Poems by Lucian Staiano-Daniels.
2. Reflections on Anonymity 2 by W.D. Jackson.
3. On Learning a Poet I Admire Often Carries a Pocket Knife by David Greenspan.
4. Hautes Études and Mudra by Michael Londra.
5. Rhyme as Rhythm by Adam Piette.
6. Windows or Mirrors… by Charles Martin.
7. Three Texts by Rupert M. Loydell.
8. Two Poems by Moriana Delgado.
9. Mariangela by Ian Seed.
10. Six Prose Poems by Pietro De Marchi, translated by Peter Robinson.
…and much more, below in this column.
Audio archive: Two poems, with an audio track, from Heart Monologues by Jasmina Bolfek-Radovani | Daragh Breen’s Aural Triptych | Hayden Carruth reads Contra Mortem and Journey to a Known Place | Anthony Howell reads three new poems | James Laughlin reads Easter in Pittsburgh and five more | Peter Robinson reads Manifestos for a lost cause, Dreamt Affections,Blind Summits and Oblique Lights
New to The Fortnightly Review? Our online series, with more than 2,000 items in its archive, is more than ten years old! So, unless you’re reading this in the state pen, you may never catch up, but you can start here with ITEMS PUBLISHED DURING OUR 2023 HIATUS (July-August 2023):
Master Ru by Peter Knobler | Four Poems on Affairs of State by Peter Robinson | 5×7 by John Matthias | You Haven’t Understood and two more poems by Amy Glynn | Long Live the King and two more by Eliot Cardinaux, with drawings by Sean Ali Shostakovich, Eliot and Sunday Morning by E.J. Smith Jr. :: For much more, please consult our massive yet still partial archive.
2011: Golden-beak in eight parts. By George Basset (H. R. Haxton).
2012: The Invention of the Modern World in 18 parts. By Alan Macfarlane.
2013: Helen in three long parts. By Oswald Valentine Sickert.
2016: The Survival Manual by Alan Macfarlane. In eight parts.
2018: After the Snowbird, Comes the Whale, by Tom Lowenstein.
LONDON
Readings in The Room: 33 Holcombe Road, Tottenham Hale, London N17 9AS – £5 entry plus donation for refreshments. All enquiries: 0208 801 8577
Poetry London: Current listings here.
Shearsman readings: 7:30pm at Swedenborg Hall, 20/21 Bloomsbury Way, London WC1. Further details here.NEW YORK
10 reliable poetry venues in NYC.
· The funeral of Isaac Albéniz
· Coleridge, poetry and the ‘rage for disorder’
· Otto Rank
· Patrons and toadying
· Rejection before slips
· Cut with a dull blade
· Into the woods, everybody.
· Thought Leaders and Ted Talks
· How Mary Oliver ‘found love in a breathing machine.’
By Roger Berkowitz, Juliet du Boulay, Denis Boyles, Stan Carey, H.R. Haxton, Allen M. Hornblum, Alan Macfarlane, Anthony O’Hear, Andrew Sinclair, Harry Stein, Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé, and many others. Free access.
· James Thomson [B.V.]
Occ. Notes…
A dilemma for educators:
Philosophy and the public impact.
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Michelene Wandor on Derek Walcott and the T.S. Eliot Prize.
.Nick Lowe: the true-blue Basher shows up for a friend.
Kate Hoyland: Inventing Asia, with Joseph Conrad and a Bible for tourists.
Who is Bruce Springsteen? by Peter Knobler.
Martin Sorrell on John Ashbery’s illumination of Arthur Rimbaud.
The beauty of Quantitative Easing.
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‘Love’s Victory’ at Penshurst.
A Fortnightly Review
Love’s Victory.
by Lady Mary Wroth.
Penshurst Place.
By ANTHONY HOWELL.
‘Love’s Victory’
Penshurst Place.
16 September 2018.
The Urania Company.
Directed by Martin Hodgson.
We went down to Penshurst, on this Sunday of 16th of September 2018, to be part of the audience for the first performance in 400 years of Love’s Victory, a comedy by Lady Mary Wroth, written between 1617 and 1619. It might have been written for a family wedding (though, since the message is clearly a complaint concerning arranged marriages, I somehow doubt this). There is no evidence that it was ever performed. It was never printed, and exists only in two manuscripts, one in California and one in Penshurst.
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“Closet drama” is an unfortunate and derogatory term… These were plays performed in private, or perhaps not performed at all.
“Closet drama” is an unfortunate and derogatory term. It is what one would expect (and grudgingly permit) from a chattel (which is how women were so often seen). These were plays performed in private, or perhaps not performed at all, simply written — imagined — by their authors. Love’s Victory has a pastoral setting — it concerns nymphs and shepherds who are obliged to come under the authentic sway of Cupid, while threatened by marriages arranged by their ambitious mums. In Some Versions of Pastoral, William Empson has this to say:
In art, perhaps in art alone, the court can mingle with the proletariat. A thread of this pastoral reaction to officialdom runs on through history via Sappho and the lyricists of Greece to the Arcadias of the Elizabethans and beyond. With the pharaoh, the reaction to being seen as a god was to go camouflaged as a man; for the Renaissance, it was the court mingled with the countryside or with some courtly notion of it. For the emergent feminine, love is invariably the subject, since courtly love, pioneered by the genocided Cathar troubadours of the Pyrenees, was revolutionary, elevating the relationship of man and woman to the highest goal that could be achieved — a far cry from the notion of the subservient womb, which likened women to cattle — as Rustic, the would-be husband does in Love’s Victory.
Perhaps the grip of drama weakens as a result. Love’s Victory is written in rhyming couplets — in emulation of the French Alexandrine, which, according to Jacqueline Flescher, “came into its own in the middle of the sixteenth century with the poets of the Pléiade and was firmly established in the seventeenth century”. This became something of a strait-jacket for French verse and drama for ensuing ages, and the French only got out of it in the nineteenth century by employing the prose poem, while it is one of the achievements of Ionescu and modernism generally that the twentieth century was able to get rid of the Alexandrine. It must be confessed that Lady Mary Wroth handles these couplets (in pentameter) with great mastery, and there are plenty of comedic lines and apt remarks incorporated within her play. But the use of this courtly form does highlight the genius of Shakespeare and the professionals in London, who broke free with blank verse, which was much more plastic, more malleable to the needs of drama, and, in some ways, more an emulation of ancient Greek drama which could quicken its pace or slow it down at will by changes of metre.
The play is a sort of Made in Chelsea written during the Renaissance. The girls gather to chatter about boys. The boys bear jealous grudges against each other, and one girl becomes a radical feminist by vowing chastity and taking up the bow of Diana. But I would have trimmed the text, dividing the girls’ chattering into entr’actes rather than sticking to one long scene of it, getting rid of the riddles, which are provided with no answers other than obvious abstractions – love, vengeance, etc. — and these hardly contribute to the homeostasis of the play.
Mary remained a life-long friend of Jonson’s – who came from a plebeian background, boasting the hands of a brick-layer. He memorialized Penshurst somewhat drily, in “To Penhurst“:
So considerable editing would be needed to make this play truly entertaining. And I would not have staged it in Elizabethan costumes trawled for without much coherence, presumably from various prop-departments. I would have thoroughly rusticated Rustic, making him less of a courtier, more of an overdressed clumsy caricature. I would not have performed it in the somewhat draughty baronial hall, but instead, I’d have done it at the height of Summer, in the lovely grassy little open-air amphitheatre in the Penshurst gardens. This would have been far better suited to the pastoral conceit of the play. I would have designed the costumes as those of a faux antiquity — enabling the cast to cast aside all corsets and bustles. I’d have incorporated more dancing. Titian’s arcadias might have been my guiding spirit, though I might have permitted the audience a backstage glimpse – in the chattering girly moments perhaps — of Elizabethans changing out of the constraints of their formal attire into the loose tunics of mythology.
♦
Love’s Victory was performed by the Urania Company, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, hosted by Lord and Lady de L’Isle, Philip Sidney and Penshurst Place, and researched and developed by Professor Alison Findlay at Lancaster University through a project called “Shakespeare and his Sisters“.
♦
NOTE.
Related
Publication: Sunday, 23 September 2018, at 14:52.
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