Such excitement here in Oxford. About twenty-four hours ago the first female Professor of Poetry at Oxford University resigned the post she'd held for 8 or 9 days. Our Brit-land is a small world, and though I was not eligible to vote (I spent two post-graduate years at my Oxford college, but never took an Oxford degree), I seem, more or less, to know everyone involved in the fracas. … [Read more...]
Archives for May 2009
What makes Peter tick?
Until I saw Britten's Peter Grimes last week at the English National Opera with surtitles, I hadn't realised how clunky and often silly Montagu Slater's libretto is. Or maybe I should say (by contrast), that I hadn't realised how fine is my late friend Myfanwy Piper's libretto for Turn of the Screw, or Britten and Peter Pears' redaction of Shakespeare for that of Midsummer Night's Dream. The … [Read more...]
Something Nasty in the Forest of Arden
As a philosophy undergraduate at the University of Chicago in the early 1960s, I had relatively little instruction from members of the English department. But I was taught Shakespeare by Norman Maclean, whom I had no idea would write "A River Runs Through It." Indeed, I had no idea he wrote fiction. But I should have guessed, for Norman (as I was allowed to call him when I later became a graduate … [Read more...]