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About KU’s Trollope Prize.
1. Last Kind Words, an anthology of poems after Geeshie Wiley’s song, edited by Peter Riley
2. ‘Ghost’ and eight more poems, by Veroniki Dalakoura, translated by John Taylor
3. The Metaphoric Graveyard, a short essay by Alan Wall
…and much more, below in this column.
Audio archive: Hayden Carruth reads Contra Mortem and Journey to a Known Place | James Laughlin reads Easter in Pittsburgh and five more | Peter Robinson reads Manifestos for a lost cause and Dreamt Affections| Daragh Breen’s Aural Triptych
More below. Scroll down.
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Keary | Peter Riley’s Poetry Notes: An Anthology for the Apocalypse | Diderot: The Curious Materialist, by Caroline Warman | Cambridge and two more poems by Ralph Hawkins | Gerard Manley Hopkins: No Worst There Is None, by Alan Wall | Hoyt Rogers: Seeing with Words: Yves Bonnefoy and the Seicento | Dragon Rock, and two more short fictions, by Umiyuri Katsuyama, translated by Toshiya Kamei | Adorno and the Philosophy of Modern Music: Part three of the essay by Tronn Overend | Michael Buckingham Gray: Back to the drawing board, an extremely short story | Customer. Relationship. Management. 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The first translation in English, by Nicoletta Asciuto | Alan Wall: Considering I, alone, An interrogation of the isolated first person | Anthony Howell reviews Christopher Reid’s ‘Love, Loss and Chianti’ | Jeremy Hilton: An excerpt from Fulmar’s Wing | Peter Riley: Hakim and Byrne and a spring storm of ‘Poetry Notes’ | Simon Collings with news of African films, including a review of Mati Diop’s Atlantics |Alan Price reviews Anthony Howell’s mind-body reflections | Franca Mancinelli: Pages from the Croatian Notebook, in a translation by John Taylor |Anne Stevenson: A tribute to Eugene Dubnov | David Hay: Two poems, one in prose | Four poems from ‘Lectio Volant’ by Steve Ely | Seven very short stories by Ian Seed | Advice from all over: Peter Riley on How to Write Poetry | Geoffrey Hill and the Perturbation of Baruch by Anthony O’Hear | Bird of four tongues by Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee | Deirdre Mikolajcik: Abstract Wealth and Community in The Way We Live Now (Trollope Prize) | Nyssa Ruth Fahy on A Less-Beaten Path: Trollope’s West Indian fiction (Trollope Prize) | Blame it on the rain: flash fiction on two wheels, by Michael Buckingham Gray | True love—at 103: Breakfast with Mrs Greystone by S.D. Brown | The last Mantegna: fiction by Michelene Wandor | My first thirty years: A serial by Alan Macfarlane | Quotidian verse: She went to the hospital for an infection. By T. Smith-Daly | Tradition, by Enzo Kohara Franca. ‘My mother’s parents didn’t make it easy for her. In 1938 they immigrated from Sendai, where all men are Japanese, to São Paulo, where all men are Brazilian.’ | Peter Riley: Autumn reviews of new poetry | George Maciunas and Fluxus, reviewed by Simon Collings | The Political Agent in Kuwait, by Piers Michael Smith | Mother child: fiction by Conor Robin Madigan | The marital subtext of The State of the Union, reviewed by Michelene Wandor | Swincum-le-Beau, a puzzle-fiction in the spirit of Pevsner. By Shukburgh Ashby | Gibraltar Point and three more poems by Iain Twiddy | Six quite brief fictions by Simon Collings | James Gallant: Puttering with E.M. 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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.
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Publication: Sunday, 23 September 2018, at 14:52.
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