1,721,242 research outputs found
Medieval Harps and Their Kingly Players
No full textThis article explores the appearance of the harp and the relation between this instrument and its player, generally a king or an Orpheus-like figure, in medieval English and Scottish literature, from Beowulf to fifteenth-century Scottish poets such as Robert Henryson or the author of the Liber Pluscardensis. Reference is made to the symbology of the harp in early Christian theology, as well as to its role in medieval theories of politics and good government
Walter Scott of Buccleuch, Italian Poet?
No full textThis article examines a small corpus of Italian poems appearing in the manuscript collection known as Hawthornden Manuscripts (National Library of Scotland) and identifies the hand as belonging to Walter Scott of Buccleuch, friend and protector of William Fowler, who is the author of a substantial group of writings in the same mss
Challenging the author: Gavin Douglas's Eneados
No full textGavin Douglas’s Eneados, a translation into the “Scottis” tongue of Virgil’s Aeneid, completed in 1513 and first published in London in 1553, presents, as well as the translation of the additional thirteenth book by Maphaeus Vegius, original prologues and marginal notes to the text, rubrics and articulate conclusive material. The present paper analyses this complex paratext as evidence of Douglas’s almost philological attention to the original and his preoccupation with a faithful reproduction; it is also suggested that the models for his organization of the commentary might be both medieval (i.e., manuscripts such as Petrarch’s Virgilius Ambrosianus) and early modern, as in the case of editions of classical works: the most apt example being Jodocus Badius Ascensius’ edition of the Aeneid, printed in 1501. The Eneados thus stands on the threshold between manuscript and print, and might have indicated new possibilities of use of the printing medium in Scotland, and of the value of the translation of a classical text, had history not intervened with the Scottish defeat at Flodden Fields in 1513, which put a temporary stop both to the circulation of the Eneados and to the development of Scottish printing
Review of Aileen A. Feng, Writing Beloveds: Humanist Petrarchism and the Politics of Gender
Full text linkThis is a review of Aileen A. Fen's book Writing Beloveds: Humanist Petrarchism and the Politics of Gender
The Kingis Quair of James I of Scotland
No full textThis is the first, and so far only, full-length study of The Kingis Quair, a Scottish dream-poem written in the first half of the fifteenth century and attributed to James I, King of Scotland. The book analyses the poem offering a state-of-the-art survey of all existing bibliography on the subject, and then centering on a number of themes: the life and times of James I of Sotland, its supposed author and its protagonist; an analysis of the stylistic features of the poem, undertaken thanks to a statistical examination of tokens and types; a discussion of some of the most important philosophical sources of the Kingis Quair; and a final discussion of the role of literary tradition and autobiography in this work
Italian influences at the court of James VI: the case of William Fowler
No full textIn this essay the author analyses the role of William Fowler, intellectual, translator, poet and spy, at the court of James VI of Scotland. In the early years of his reign, the King called at his court a literary coterie of Scottish and English writers, encouraging not only original and occasional compositions, but also literary translation. The essay shows that, while the King and most of his poetic followers showed a predilection for the translation of contemporary French works, Fowler turned his attention to Italian classic and contemporary works, translating Petrarch's Trionfi, Machiavelli's Prince, but also a number of minor works such as Giordano Bruno's sonnets or the Lamenti of musical tradition. The essay therefore re-locates Fowler's position in the Scottish early modern literary revival, and his role in Scoto-Italian cultural relations
Damnatio Memoriae and Surreptitious Printing: Niccolò Machiavelli in the British Isles
No full textIn this chapter the author discusses the role of censorship in the publication and dissemination of literary texts in early modern Europe, foscussing on the case study of the circulation of Niccolò Machiavelli's Principe in the British Isle
Translations Facing Inwards: James VI/I’s Basilikon Doron
No full textFirst published in 1599, and thereafter subjected to very careful revision on the part of its author, and destined to become the protagonist of a most adventurous editorial history, the Basilikon Doron has always presented a serious puzzle to editors and textual critics. James VI of Scotland, a king with no little experience of writing, attempted with this treatise the impossible task of exerting total control on his published work, and this, coupled with the extraordinary political circumstances surrounding the appearance of this text, triggered its fascinating textual history. This results in a text with many variants and translations, and the first is the work of its author, who transposes the original, heavily Scottish text into a wholly Anglicized version, ready for a publication that would be associated with the new King of England. The text immediately became the subject of discussion in Europe, and unauthorised new editions and translations began to appear, much to James’s annoyance.
The present chapter analyses two translations that are deeply embedded in James’s own preoccupation with the circulation of his political work: one is the King’s own transposition of the text from Middle Scots to English; the other is the Italian translation undertaken by John Florio, and surviving in manuscript. Obsessively faithful to the 1603 printed version, Florio’s translation does not look outward, at a possible Italian readership of the treatise; it rather attempts to reflect further glory on James’s text, closely imitating all its characteristics and explicitly proposing itself as a homage to a king that subsumes in himself all political thought: the centre towards which all advice writing converges, and from which it will spring again in different idioms
A dance routine set in a library
No full textThis article introduces the volume offering a short survey of reception theories on Shakespeare's play
Where Would you Fit the Coconuts? The Reinstatement of Sexual Stereotypes in a Mock-Biopic
No full textOn 9 May 2016, at the height of the “Shakespeare 400” celebrations, BBC proposed the first instalment of what was destined to become an extremely fortunate series: The Upstart Crow, a mock-biopic of William Shakespeare written by Ben Elton and starring some of the best comic actors of British television. The series would run for two more years, for a sum total of 20 episodes; at the same time, Elton wrote another Shakespeare biopic, if a more elegiac one – All is True (2018), directed by Kenneth Branagh, who also played the lead.
The timing of The Upstart Crow was impeccable: not only did the series appear at a moment in which the planet was united in celebrating one of the world’s literary geniuses; it was also riding on the back of a surprisingly high number of academic and semi-fictional biographies, partly motivated by the two anniversaries (2014 and 2016) which had increased the always high interest in the playwright. These biographies had not only re-opened ancient controversies on Shakespeare’s life and on the authorship of the play, but also called into question the very nature of biography as a genre.
In spite of the relatively scant information on Shakespeare’s life, therefore, The Upstart Crow could meet the audience at many different levels and work on the assumption that the composition of the individual plays was closely interlaced to different biographical phases; at the same time, it could rely on the audience being familiar, at least at a superficial level, with Shakespeare and his work for the theatre. Like other films based on Shakespeare’s life, such as Shakespeare in Love, this series could send different messages: for the academic audience, or the lovers of Shakespeareana, it would resurrect and play with ancient myths, half-forgotten characters, and tread the thin line between historical characters and theatrical personae; for the television-loving audience, it could mock staples of British TV sit-com and evoke facile comparisons with contemporary issues, from Brexit to the general disarray of the British public transport.
The present paper explores a rather delicate issue of The Upstart Crow, that is, its treatment of racial and sexual stereotypes. The mixture of the academic and the populist mentioned above makes such allusions especially difficult to deal with, since they are not located within a firm ideological agenda, but rather feed on the ambiguity that pervades the whole series. The series in fact tends to rely on the audience’s complaisance – given its overall tone of mockery of one of England’s great national myths – in order to allow for the presentation of stereotypes that might be unacceptable elsewhere. I will therefore discuss, in this context, the ideological compromise that is often imposed by the very genre of mock-biopic
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