Getting Medieval on the BBC

Great long silence lately on my part: apologies. I've been busy, writing like crazy, travelling, and teaching. Was in Oxford yesterday for a school's dinner with my old second years. Lovely to see them again. Lovely. They'll do well.

Picked up a couple of lovely things in Oxfam books:, but most happy with J. B. Whiting's Proverbs, Sentences, and Proverbial Phrases from English Writings mainly before 1500 (Cambridge, MA & London: Belknap Press & Oxford University Press, 1968) for a cool seven squids. Also picked up a copy of Anne Carson's Decreation and have been making my way v e r y v e r y s l o w l y t h r o u g h i t. I've been lucky to pick up a number of other things lately. For example, the second edition of Barbi's edition of the Vita Nuova (Bemporad, 1932), in super condition, from the library of an Irish priest! I also found a copy of Gombrich's Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography, 2nd ed. (Phaidon, 1986), which I cannot wait to get into.

Over the past while the BBC has been broadcasting lots of stuff on poetry, including medieval poetry. Michael Wood has a programme on Beowulf, and Simon Armitage has one on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. While the first on Beowulf is quite good, though there's a bit too much lunatic fringe about it and looking meaningfully into meres and the like. But generally it was ok.

I was quite looking forward to Armitage on Gawain, thinking that he would talk about translating the text, how he went about it, what poetic challenges he faced. And there are glimmers here and there of this. But mainly it is not very good. Not very good at all in fact. He makes just a few references to the Middle English, including testing out words on local northern farmers to see if any of it sounds familiar (admitting he was disappointed he didn't find them speaking in fluent Middle English NW Midland dialect...). The rest is filmed 'on location', but based speculatively on where that location might be. There isn't a trace of a medievalist to be found. Michael Wood discussed Heaney's translation of Beowulf with the man himself. Why didn't Armitage talk to Bernard O'Donoghue about translating the poem, as a poet and a medievalist. (I'm tempted to wonder why O'Donoghue did not do the documentary himself). It was a real missed opportunity.

One worrying thing was his reference, twice, to the Green Knight picking up his head and putting it back on his shoulders. This first happens when Armitage opens the film, and then while talking to someone who'd been healed at the well of St Winefride (in Holywell), he repeats it while comparing the gesture to the miracle of the said saint, whose severed head is reattached by Saint Beuno and restored to life.

The Green Knight never replaces his head on his shoulders. What happens is far more interesting and a poet of Armitage's creativity and imagination should not be so deaf to this. The Green Knight's head is kicked about the court for a bit as his torso remains. This torso reaches down and picks up the head and opens his eyelids and speaks. When he gets back on his horse he does so continuing to hold his head in his hand. The scene is one of an extraordinarily careful management of the horror. Putting his head back on his shoulders would have been positively banal by comparison.

For þe hede in his honde he haldez vp euen,
Toward þe derrest on þe dece he dressez þe face,
And hit lyfte vp þe yȝe-lyddez and loked ful brode,
And meled þus much with his muthe, as ȝe may now here:
'Loke, Gawan, þou hatz hette in þis halle, herande þise knyȝtes;
To þe grene chapel þou chose, I charge þe, to fotte
Such a dunt as þou hatz dalt—disserued þou habbez
To be ȝederly ȝolden on Nw Ȝeres morn.
Þe knyȝt of þe grene chapel men knowen me mony;
Forþi me for to fynde if þou fraystez, faylez þou neuer.
Þerfore com, oþer recreaunt be calde þe behoues.'
With a runisch rout þe raynez he tornez,
Halled out at þe hal dor, his hed in his hande,
Þat þe fyr of þe flynt flaȝe from fole houes.
To quat kyth he becom knwe non þere,
Neuer more þen þay wyste from queþen he watz wonnen.
What þenne?
Þe kyng and Gawan þare
At þat grene þay laȝe and grenne,
Ȝet breued watz hit ful bare
A meruayl among þo menne.

(SGGK, ll. 444-466, ed. Tolkien & Gordon, rev. Davis, [1967], p. 13)

He held the head up straight with his hand,
and turned the face towards the king who sat on the throne.
He raised his eyelids and stared at him open-eyed;
then with his mouth said the words you will hear.
'Be sure, Gawain, you're ready, as you have sworn
to seek conscientiously until you find me,
as you've said in this hall, in these knights' hearing.
Seek out the Green Chapel, I urge you, to get
such as blow as you have struckf. You've earned the right
to be promptly repain on New Year's morning.
Most people call me the Green Chapel Knight;
so, if you ask, you won't fail to find me.
Therefore come, or be called a defaulter.'
With a violent tug he pulled the reins round,
and galloped out the hall door, his head in his hand,
so that fire from the flint sparked off the hooves.
To what country he went no one there knew,
any more than they knew where he'd come from at first.
What next?
The king and Gawain then
laughed at this green man.
But they had to face the truth
that this was unnatural.

(trans. Bernard O'Donoghue [Penguin, 2006], p. 16).

I should say that his translation does not make this mistake; it seems to be a kind of misremembering. I know I'm being a bit snippy about this as a mistake, and it is a mistake. But it is also interesting. It is as if Armitage wishes to make the Green Knight whole, to restore him to a fully human form as soon as possible after Gawain decapitates him. This is in such contrast with the Green Knight himself, who might be said to accentuate his non/in-human form. And this is a very important part of his character and of the story. It also feels like a kind of injustice to the violence of Gawain's act. He performs an act of great violence, described in detail: the blade shatters the bone, and goes through his neck with such force that the edge of the blade bites into the ground. This too is important.

Dancing at Lughnasa, by Brian Friel at the Old Vic (dir. Anna Mackmin), until May 9th 2009

Now in the last week of its run at the Old Vic in London, this production of Brian Friel's beautiful play Dancing at Lughnasa (pronouced Loooo-Na-Saa, for the non-pagans) can only be described as a remarkable triumph. The play is told in flash-back sequences by the young Michael Evans, who remembers his childhood in a rural Donegal house of five women. The women have just welcomed back Uncle Jack, a missionary priest for a lifetime in Uganda, who has returned in a state of confusion. His gradual recuperation, and the realization that Jack has been sent back from his parish for becoming more native than the natives themselves, is traced out against the backdrop of the annual Lughnasa festivals, especially the harvest dance. The women desperately want to go, and in a carefree moment of delight resolve to go, dancing around the kitchen in ecstatic excitement. Kate (Michelle Fairley), the eldest sister, the only one with a steady income as the local schoolteacher, has a change of heart and insists it would be improper for women of their age to be seen at such an event. And the chance of something fun and wonderful evaporates. And all that is wonderful (in the sense of being full of wonder) evaporates throughout the rest of the play.

The women desperately want to get away, and this yearning is palpable throughout. But responsibility is important too, and Christina, who has had Michael out of wedlock, takes a job in the local factory to earn an income and hates every day of it for the rest of her life. Rose and Agnes go off to England and die there, destitute. This is recounted in a truly heartbreaking moment by Michael, in what is a masterpiece of understated acting by Peter McDonald. The rest of the cast are extremely strong. Niamh Cusack plays Maggie with wonderful sensitivity, and Andrea Corr, playing Chris, is really excellent. There are moments in the play where it was clear that her tears were not acted. (I say this as I was blubbering myself!). The set design is super too, as it is part of the Old Vic's experiment with theatre in the round. The result allows for all sorts of interesting things, such as Michael's continual circling of the kitchen space, watching the sisters and what's happening to them. It adds to the poignancy of his memories as an adult.

Dancing at Lughnasa is a great great modern play, and this is a great production. GO TO SEE IT if you can.

McKeon on Toibin

Read Belinda McKeon's Irish Times article on the Irish writer Colm Tóibín here.
His new novel, Brooklyn has just been published by Penguin Viking.

Roberto Benigni, Tuttodante (Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, London)

Over the past number of years the Italian actor Roberto Benigni has been performing the work of Dante Alighieri to delighted and enthusiastic audiences around Italy and now, around the world. He is known for his exuberance and energy, and these were much in evidence last evening at Tuttodante in his single London date on his world tour. Every Italian in London seems to have turned out for the show and were in festive mood when he appeared on stage. He decided to do the show in English, and this became a recurring gag throughout the performance, an assurance that he was, in fact, speaking in English. His English was, in fact, a lot better than he let on, as he often used idioms and slang words that would not be characteristic of a beginner. The audience were clearly delighted when he did turn to Italian and would sometimes shout out ‘in italiano!’ I imagine that the decision to do the show in Italian was one of consideration for the audience in London, but I do rather wonder if it was entirely successful. But there was something moving about him trying to find the right word, using a language that was a mixture of Italian and English, a plurilinguismo worthy of its subject-matter.

I remember when Benigni devised this show and came to Bologna with it: tickets were impossible to get hold of and I did not get to see it. When this opportunity arose, I was more than ready to seize it, with both hands. (I was invited to the show by my generous benefactor at Pembroke.)

Benigni is a man of extraordinary energy and passion and his love of Dante is clear, sincere, and profound. But most of the show was taken up with what might be called a preamble, a funny and at times excoriating set of observations on the absurdity of contemporary Italy. A key figure in this comedy is Silvio Berlusconi, and Benigni often referred to Berlusconi as a highly sexual man, a man who likes to be photographed with pretty girls, in various states of undress, etc. Andreotti, too, made an appearance, characterised as a man who has been granted eternal life in Italian politics. Benigni then proceeded to a long introduction to Inferno 5, the canto of the lustful in the first circle of Hell, interspersed with explications and close readings. Particularly powerful was the way in which he deployed a profoundly affective reading of the New Testament, especially the woman touching the hem of Christ’s garment, in his reading of Francesca’s Amor ch’a nullo amato amar perdona (Inf 5. 103). It was much appreciated by the audience who burst into applause, and it was, for me, an indication of a brilliance that I was not quite expecting. The performance culminated in a recitation of the full canto, beginning to end. It was a fitting way to end the evening.

What I enjoyed about this was the strong sense that it was explaining itself; the poetry took centre-stage and was given room to breathe. What was clear too was Benigni’s sense of the poem’s searing relevance to contemporary society, that it is as much an indictment of our time as it is of Dante’s own time. This is the performance of a committed, engaged, and public intellectual, a man trying to make sense of his world, with a certain knowledge of the injustice that marks it, and deep sense of indignation at the continuance of those wrongs. What is striking is that I could be talking as much about Dante there as I am about Benigni.

Michael Symmons Roberts, The Half Healed (Cape, 2008)

This is Michael Symmons Roberts's fifth collection of poetry and I'm really enjoying making my way through it. He returns to the theme of the body, but this time in the context of violence and destruction. Much of the collection is set in war torn cities, with the image of the hotel, abandoned, gutted, destroyed, as a recurring motif. These hotel rooms can be the site of a couple making love in 'Armistice', or there's the beautiful deserted room in 'Room 260', with its pristine abandoned perfection that is touched only once a year, in mid-July: by 'a perfect | coin of gold light prints onto the wall: | a gift of imperfection, | blemish in the blackout seal.' It is a kind of Newgrange soltice scene. The imagery is complex and enjoyably so. The name 'Intercontinental' recurs, which is meant to resonate the way it does. Symmons Roberts has a great sense of how some of these words and names can be completely transformed by some action, by events. There is a series of poems call 'Last Words', commissioned by the BBC to commemorate 9/11 and which takes as its theme the text messages sent by those in the planes that flew into the Twin Towers. There is anger in these poems, but it is controlled, never allowed to take over. The poems have, too, a great melancholy, a great sense of loss, of what we have lost. There's a lot at stake. The religious language, used by the poet so often and so effectively, and the way that language is transformed or carried out of meaningfulness is another powerful theme that resonates throughout the collection (and his work more generally).

I print in full a poem entitled 'Hooded'.

Six men, hooded, face a wall on knees,
hands bound behind their backs.
How did it come to this?

Ancentral, printed deep, a lineage
through hangman, ku klux klan,
back through the polar pioneers

to foxglove, bluebell, capuchin,
robin and red riding back
to killers, cobras, kings in hiding,

anoraks and duffels, pac-a-macs,
a lizard's ruff on burning sand,
a harebell, snail shell, cadillacs

with soft tops, trout tucked in weed,
shelter, uniform, ashes and sack,
a fashion choice, a rule, a creed,

back to blind, wink, skin-shade
to protect the blue, brown, green,
so yes, the first hood was an eyelid.

And now we hood our enemies
to blind them. Keep an eye on that irony.

This work is strong, important and beautiful.

April: National Poetry Month

April is the cruellest month, but it is also National Poetry Month in the United States.

The wonderful poster was designed by Paul Sahre.

Bodies

Yesterday I saw Bodies: The Exhibition at the Ambassador in Dublin. So bodies have been on my mind lately. The specimens on display are real, and the way the exhibition is marketed it is considered to be a teaching aid. In the words of the organizers: "This method of preservation creates a specimen that will not decay. This offers thousands of unique teaching possibilities for educators at all levels, including medical professionals, archeologists and other scientists."

With current technology, I do rather wonder whether they needed real bodies, other than for the sensational aspect. And they way that they have prepared some of the specimens, such as the arteries, is with a process called 'corrosive casting', which means that they fill the vessels with a liquid that sets and they then corrode the arteries around them, leaving the polymer in the shape of the vessels. So what you're seeing is a polymer specimen in the shape of an original, rather like what they did to reveal the bodies under the ash at Pompei. Other specimens are actual bodies treated in a special preservation process.

Very few of the bodies were female, all of the others were male; it is interesting that the male bodies were represented in active poses, playing tennis, volleyball, conducting an orchestra. The female specimens were used to illustrate adipose tissue (i.e. fat) and the female reproductive system (and another raising her arms in praise of the heavens). In other words, I found an interesting gender discourse at work in the exhibition.

I did find the message of the exhibition a bit uncertain. For example, they displayed specimens of a smoker's lungs and then placed a perspex box beside it for the cigarette boxes of visitors who have decided to give up. Then other points urged visitors to appreciate the complexity of the body and to begin to treat their own body better. But I'm not sure at all that this is how and why the individual items were displayed. As an account of the body, each component individually works, but I feel that holistically a convenient message was imposed that feels a tad preachy.

What I really wanted to know was who they were; who were they playing tennis and volleyball with? And most important of all, what piece of music was the man with the baton in hand conducting? Surely, no matter how complex your body is, it's what you do with it that really compels.

* * *

To this end, I think that the really marvellous exhibition 'Assembling Bodies' at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge is a good deal more successful. It runs until November 2010 and I intend to return. It covers an extremely wide range of issues. Organized around seven thematic headings, it comprises both artifacts and art objects; the whole exhibition fits into one room on the second floor, so it is easy to take in at a visit but provides enough to keep one ruminating. The thematic headings include: Assembly of Bodies; Measuring and Classifying; Art and Anatomy; The Body Multiple; Extending and Distributing; Genealogies and Genomes; Body and Landscape. A very good catalogue has been prepared for the exhibition. Well worth a visit if you're in Cambridge.

* * *

And as if the gods were conspiring to keep me thinking bodies, I have just picked up a copy of this new collection of essays on the theme of Dante and the human body, which comes out of the UCD annual Lectura Dantis (in this case, held between 2003-2004). It comprises: Simon A. Gilson, 'The Anatomy and Physiology of the Human Body in the Commedia'; Vivian Nutton, 'Dante, Medicine and the Invisible Body'; Joseph Ziegler, 'The Scientific Context of Dante's Embryology'; Simone de Angelis, 'Sanatio and Salvatio: "Body" and Soul in the Experience of Dante's Afterlife'; Manuele Gragnolati, 'Nostalgia in Heaven: Embraces, Affection and Identity in the Commedia'; Elizabeth Mozzillo-Howell, 'Divina Anatomia: Laying Bare Body and Soul in the Commedia'; Vittorio Montemaggi, ' "La rosa in che il verbo divino carne si fece": Human Bodies and Truth in the Poetic Narrative of the Commedia'; Oliver Davies, 'World and Body: A Study in Dante's Cosmological Hermeneutics'. Have already looked at Mozillo-Howell's very interesting essay (thoroughly resonant for the Bodies exhibition), and of course Montemaggi's very excellent essay.

DLR Poetry Now Festival 2009

This year's DLR Poetry Now Festival has been extraordinarily good. I heard Belinda McKeon's opening address on Thursday, a deeply engaged and serious meditation on the role of poetry in modern life, taking a cue from Auden's poetry makes nothing happen. She began with Husserlian phenomenology, moved on to empathy, and then wove her observations into an acknowledgment of the work of all the participating poets. It was skilled, humane, and reinforced in one, yet again, just how important poetry is; how important.

On Thursday, Robert Pinsky gave an opening lecture, which I missed (I write this red-faced), and on Friday evening the first reading took place, featuring Sujata Bhatt, Paddy Bushe and Paul Batchelor, followed later by Harry Clifton and Tomas Venclova. These too, alas, I missed, but I heard they were fantastic.

Saturday had readings from Valzhyna Mort, Ellen Hinsey & Ian Duhig, all extremely enjoyable. Mort read in Belarussian and some translations. She was strong and urgent. Hinsey read some work on violence, drawn from International War Crimes testimony. It was compelling and almost impossible to listen to without breaking. Duhig's reading was super, full of anger and a searing sense of justice. Later Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin read, with her characteristic understated humour, wearing her learning lightly, followed by the remarkable Tomaž Šalamum who read in Slovenian and English. Finally, Frank Bidart read. He was gorgeous.

I speak of Bidart with a bit of affection because he lead a poetry workshop in the morning in which nine poets participated. I was lucky enough to be among them. He was gentle and humane and such a careful reader. He ran way over time in his utter fastidiousness, giving time to everyone, wanting to read and re-read poems aloud incorporating suggested changes, repunctuations. It was also a great pleasure to meet and read the work of the other poets. One in particular, Padhraig [PJ] Nolan, designed the programme and the beautiful broadside for Heaney's birthday. His blog is as measured as his poetry: read it.

On Saturday another very special event took place: a celebration of Seamus Heaney's 70th birthday. A group of poets read Heaney's work, with the great man sitting in the front row. Everyone chose something that meant a lot to them, and Venclova read a Lithuanian translation of 'Mid-Term Break'. It was an experience to hear a translation in a language I do not know of a poem I know better than my own hand. Deeply deeply moving. A very special birthday gift was presented to him: a painting entitled 'Inheritance' by the great Hughie O'Donoghue. Heady stuff when the greats are in conversation with each other.

Today had the Strong Reading and Award for Best First Collection. Ciaran Berry's The Sphere of Birds (Gallery); Patrick Cotter, Perplexed Skin (Arlen House); Áine Moynihan, Canals of Memory (Doghouse); and Simon Ó Faoláin, Anam Mhadra (Coiscéim). The very deserving winner was Ó Faoláin who gave a super reading of his work, full of humour and humility but with a great sureness of touch. He seemed so comfortable but not too comfortable. Mary O'Malley, the judge for this year's competition, cited his flexibility, and it was much in evidence.

The final reading (to a packed house I might add) had Adam Foulds read from his extraordinary The Broken Word, which I immediately bought afterwards and started to read in full. Then Colette Bryce read, from her three collections. There was something so formal but relaxed about her work. I confess that I did not know either of these poet's work but have come away with books under arm and am hungry for more. The final poet to read was Carol Ann Duffy. She was funny, reading poems from The World's Wife, and elegiac, reading poems from Rapture. She had such a presence on stage, understated but very self-assured (right down to the little bow she took at the end, the only poet I saw do such). It was a terrific reading, and a terrific way to end. Belinda graciously thanked all who participated, poets, audience, staff, the lot. I look forward to next year. It is simply not to be missed.

I went away feeling enriched and blessed.

Mieke Bal

Read anything you can get your hands on by Mieke Bal. I've just picked up a copy of her Lethal Love: Feminist Literary Readings of Biblical Love Stories (Indiana U.P., 1987) and am hooked on it. I've already read her Murder and Difference: Gender, Genre & Scholarship on Sisera's Death (Indiana U.P., 1992) and greatly enjoyed it. She's well known as a cultural theorist, biblical scholar, and feminist critic, but that's only the beginning. Her website gives an indication of the richness and breadth of her work. She also seems to have a good number of Irish graduate students, all working on really fascinating things.

Read Mieke Bal.

In Search of Art: Marina Carr, Marble, The Abbey Theatre

Last night had the penultimate performance of Marble, Marina Carr's new play at the Abbey Theatre. Carr has never shirked from writing the elemental forces that truly terrify and Marble is no different. The play opens with two old friend, Art (Stuart McQuarrie) and Ben (Peter Hanly), in a swanky hotel drinking brandy and smoking cigars. Art tells Ben that he'd had a dream about Ben's wife the night before, that he'd made love to her in a beautiful marble room on a marble bed. This image of marble becomes the a motif throughout the play, almost a refrain from the four characters. It turns out that Catherine (Aisling O'Sullivan), Ben's wife, had the same dream about Art, even though they hardly know each other. Instead of considering this as just one of those coincidences (sure!), the lives of these two couples begin to unravel. Art's wife, Anne (Derbhle Crotty) is determined to control the reality around her, planning everything and deciding when to go to bed before she gets up. When confronted with Catherine's increasingly erratic behaviour, she only grips more fiercely onto what she has.

Carr shifts the setting from rugged landscapes to the urban. The action takes place in hotels and fancy restaurants, and luxurious homes in the suburbs where the most taxing thing a housewife will have to do is go to the shops to buy washing up liquid. The women are desperate. They have found themselves in these desolate lives, in landscapes as desolate and lonely as a bog in the midlands. The dream generates a reality that is as unreal as anything they've encountered and their attempts to embrace that is desperate to watch.

The set design was very good, sensitive to the surreal, the tricks of the eye and the mind. And the subtext of Giorgio de Chirico was very interesting. De Chirico is famous for melancholic scenes in monumental space, often with marble figures lying in the open, beside arches, waiting for something to happen.

For all of the power of the play, there is something not quite right about it. I don't know whether the acting was a little tired, or whether the writing was a little uncontrolled. I have a sense that the forces at work between the words were not quite fully ready; there is an unfinished quality about the writing and a slight sense of a paralysis of awe about it that did not satisfy.

Women in Art

Slow Reading and Slow Writing: A Return to the Art of the Essay

Have a read of Lindsay Waters, 'Slow Writing; or, Getting Off the Book Standard: What Can Journal Editors Do?', Journal of Scholarly Publishing, 40 (2009), 129-143, where he talks about the tyranny of the monograph in the academy and calls for a return to the art of the essay. He takes a fairly savage swipe at Žižek and his lack of clarity, and the tone of the article sometimes makes me a little uncomfortable. Perhaps this is not so much to do with me disagreeing, but more because I ask myself whether I am guilty of writing hermetically, for three other people who have written on the subject, or whether I do manage to express myself to an interested reader.

The article is deliberately provocative, and the critique of jargon is interesting, and likely won't be much appreciated by many, shall we say, theoretical scholars.

We need to slow down and remember that the essay has been the main form for humanistic discourse. The book is an outlier. Many of the writings that changed the direction a scholarly community was marching toward were essays. Think of Edward Said’s ‘Abecedarium Culturae’ or Paul de Man’s ‘The Rhetoric of Temporality,’ to stay in recent history and not begin, as I easily could, an epic catalogue from Montaigne’s ‘De l’amitié’ onward. Some of the most important books are collections of essays not unlike journals, sometimes assembled with no pretence at forging a unity of them, such as John Freccero’s Dante: The Poetics of Conversion. (pp. 132-133)

In an article that looks at what the role of editors can be in this new world of the essay, he might have mentioned that Freccero's book might not have seen the light of day nor taken the form it did had it not been for the editorial work of Rachel Jacoff. And it might also be said that for publication purposes, edited volumes are not actually counted (they aren't for the RAE). This too surely needs to change.

Whatever one's views of Waters' article, surely one can never be reminded often enough of the importance of good writing, of craft, of making oneself understood and of being clear. Ars longa, vita brevis.

Bonæ Litteræ

You'll have noticed a new link on my blogroll which is Bonæ litteræ, by the rather excellent Dr David Rundle, a scholar of English renaissance humanism. These are various and occasional musings on Renaissance humanism, manuscripts, scribes, and a great many other learned things. Well worth reading.

World Book Day 2009

Today is World Book Day.

Happy World Book Day.

Love and Marriage in Renaissance Florence (Courtauld Gallery, London, 12 Feb-17 May 2009)

Now showing at the Courtauld Gallery in London is an exhibition dedicated to cassoni, or painted marriage chests. This is an area that has been the subject of much study in the last twenty or thirty years and cassoni have emerged as an extremely important aspect of domestic art in the Italian renaissance. A recent exhibition, curated by Cristelle Baskins, at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, centred on painted marriage chests and the catalogue is another important contribution to the field (Cristelle L. Baskins, Adrian W.B. Randolph, Jacqueline Marie Musachio and Alan Chong, The Triumph of Marriage: Painted Cassoni of the Renaissance (Pittsburgh: Periscope Publishing, 2008; ISBN: 9781943772867). This Courtauld exhibition, curated by Caroline Campbell, is an intimate affair, and that is very intentional. There are just ten items on display, all fitting (fairly) comfortably in a single room. The centrepiece is undoubtedly the famous Morelli chest, painted by Biagio di Antoinio (1446-1516), Jacopo del Sellaio (1441-93), and Zanobi di Domenico (active ca. 1464-74). These two imposing chests depict 'Camillus and the Gauls' and 'The Schoolmaster of Falerii', with two spalliere depicting Horatius Cocles and Mucius Scaevola and Lars Porsenna, respectively. These are the only cassoni to survive with their spalliere intact, so they are very important in thinking about how the cassone worked with its related items. While they are now almost attached to the cassoni Campbell asserts, I think quite correctly, that they would have been placed much higher up on the wall and she points to their rather low view-point as evidence. She also speculates that they may have formed a continuous panel. The viewer (Renaissance, modern) had their eye drawn both vertically and horizontally; the whole room was part of the effect, not just a framed item bracketed away from the rest of the room.

Another fascinating pair of panels are by Giovanni Toscani (around 1370/90-1430), depicting scenes from Boccaccio's Dec II 9, the story of Ginevra, Bernabò and Ambrogiuolo, dating to about 1425. This is an interesting one because only one of the panels (the first), now in the National Gallery of Scotland, was known in any detail. The other, in a Private Collection, has been brought together for this exhibition and it is great to see them together. The panels attest to the popularity of Boccaccio in the early fifteenth century, but what is even more interesting is the way that much of the story hinges on a trick involving a chest, and so the chest itself figures prominently in the first panel. Campbell makes some very interesting remarks about this panel, the way that Ginevra assumes a masculine role and how the artist chooses to depict her dressed as a man in the final scene even though the text explicitly states that she had changed into her feminine clothes. Ginevra is only shown twice as a woman, 'probably to mask the unusualness of her behaviour' (p. 86). There would be much to say about such a dynamic. In fact, Campbell wonders about the choice of Boccaccio as a source for the iconography and links the move away from Boccaccio, and love stories, about mid-century, to more martial themes to the change in commissioning patterns of painted marriage chests, when it became the responsibility of the groom's family rather than that of the bride.

One of the most stimulating aspects of this material was the attention that Campbell paid to the literary texts in the possession of Morelli, in particular a compendium associated with Morelli now in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze (Pal. 359). 'The unassuming appearance, contents and lack of illustrations of this chapbook, purchased form "Zanobi Deleicha", make it very typical of surviving manuscripts of this type. Its contents mirror the core genres of stories depicted on cassone frontals: Roman poetry, contemporary Tuscan verse, ancient Greek, Roman, biblical and modern history. As such it provides a good framework for exploring the subjects depicted on cassoni and spalliere panels, and decoding their meanings.' (p. 34). This is good stuff and I intend to learn more.

Another pair of panels, by Lo Scheggia (1406-86) are exhibited, depicting 'The Journey of the Queen of Sheba' and 'The Meeting of Solomon and Sheba', both dating to around 1450. These are both in private collections and so it is a treat to see them exhibited. Another panel by a Florentine follower of Lo Scheggia, dating to around 1460, depicts 'The Siege of Carthage and the Continence of Scipio' (Courtauld P.1966.GP.129). There is another chest depicting the Battle of Pharsalus, in which Caesar defeats Pompey, by an unidentified artist, dating to around 1470-5 (Courtauld F. 1947.LF.3). The final pair of panels are in the collection of the Earl of Harewood at Harwood House, depicting 'The Rabe of the Sabine Women', and 'The Reconciliation of the Romans and the Sabines', dating to around 1480.

Go to the exhibition. And buy the catalogue: Caroline Campbell, with contributions by Grame Barraclough and Tilly Schmidt, Love and Marriage in Renaissance Florence: The Courtauld Wedding Chests (London: The Courtauld Gallery in association with Paul Holberton Publishing, 2009), ISBN: 9781903470916.

Mick Imlah (1956-2009)

Mick Imlah died on 12 January, aged just 52. His first collection of poetry in 20 years, The Lost Leader (Faber, 2008) had recently been published and had won the Forward Prize. He had also been shortlisted for the TS Eliot prize. His death is a terrible loss to contemporary poetry. The Lost Leader is a huge and powerful poetic history of Scotland. I print one poem from the collection:

Guelf

Love moves the family, but hate
makes the better soldier;
why would the boxer scatter his purse,
sell up his soul, be Ugolino evermore,
for the soft-hard piece of his rival’s ear—
were it not for the lovely taste of hate;
if it didn’t award him a pleasant pillow
of hate to soften the stone of his cell?
Dante, who loved well because he hated,
Hated the wickedness that hinders loving.


Read reviews here, here, here, and here. Read obits here, here, here, and here. And this.

Gone Cuckoo

I have been remiss here in leaving it so long to post. One thing happened, then another. And then it was now.

Last evening I watched The Natural World on BBC iPlayer, which talked about the Cuckoo. Prof. Nick Davies, an expert and fellow of my college, talked about the bird and its pretty awful behaviour. I know that it is silly to think in moral terms about the behaviour of birds but I found it all rather...well chilling actually. The cuckoo doesn't build a nest of its own. I had known this. It was the rest that I was a bit sketchy for me.

The cuckoo lays its eggs in other birds' nests, making room for it by eating the eggs it finds there. When this is done, and it manages to get the shape and colour to match, the egg hatches and the reed warbler begins to look after the cuckoo as its own chick. Then, the blind and featherless monster chick senses the other eggs in the nest and throws them out of the nest. In one piece of footage, David Attenborough cooly talks us through the chick pushing another hatched reed warbler chick out of the nest. All this while Prof. Davies walks around College and the Fens during a beautiful summer's day. One scene has him looking around rivers and trees, spectacularly shot, then he's in the College Library looking up learned books about egg-collecting (now illegal). And then you realize you are watching a kind of cuckoo snuff movie.

I'll never look at a cuckoo clock in the same way again. Ruined, I am.

Writers' Rooms

One of the greatest pleasures meeting fellow academics is the chance to get into their rooms and have a look around at their books. I remember having terrible trouble concentrating during meetings with my supervisor(s) such was my curiosity to have a look around and enjoy the space. Sometimes, if I visit someone and I know them well enough, I simply excuse myself for fifteen minutes explaining that I'll be distracted unless I have a little newsy around. It's about admiration and enjoyment rather than wanting to know someone else's business.

It is perhaps for this reason that I so enjoy the Guardian's Writers' Room series, photographed by Eamonn McCabe. An exhibition collects these photographs together at the Madison Contemporary Art Gallery in London. A preview is available here. I realise that these photographs are about much more than the bookshelves (which often you cannot see that well). It's about the space, about an aura of creativity and a recognition of its mystery. This is especially the case when you find yourself saying "Oh I could never work there...". And the space itself has a kind of creativity, it is a negotiation, something that the occupant, the writer, chips away at over the years. The space is, in a way, another work by the writer. And it is this that I find so fascinating about these photographs.

above: Beryl Bainbridge's room.

Books Books Books

Help. I think that may be what I need. Help. I have gone a little insane on the old book buying front lately and this term have been adding significantly to the Biblioteca del Crazy Guy. Just before I moved over I found a lovely original copy, in two parts, of Rossetti's parallel text edition of Troilus and Criseyde (Chaucer's Troylus and Cryseyde (from the Harl. ms. 3943) compared with Boccaccio's Filostrato [London: Pub. for the Chaucer Society by N. Trübner & Co, 1873]). I also picked up some of those parallel texts transcriptions of Troilus MSS in the Chaucer Society series. Very pleasing. Still in Oxfam on St Giles, I found a (cheap-ish) copy of the Z-Text facsimile (Brewer, 1994), prepared by Brewer and Rigg. In BW's, I found a lovely discounted copy of Claire Donovan's The De Brailles Hours (BL, 1991) which I very much enjoyed reading.

I have also received some books in lieu, such as the excellent facsimile of Bodleian Library, MS Arch. Selden B. 24, intro. Boffey & Edwards (Brewer, 1997), and Butterfield's collection of essays in Chaucer and the City (Brewer, 2006), which is extremely good. I also got some interesting Palgrave books, such as The Palgrave Literary Dictionary of Chaucer (2006); Baldwin's A Guidebook to Piers Plowman (2007), which looks very good; Cooney's collection Writings on Love in the English Middle Ages (2006); Edwards' Chaucer and Boccaccio (2002), which of course I'd read by did not own; Patterson's Temporal Circumstances (2006), most of which I've read before, but with a few new things; Tison Pugh's Queering Medieval Genres (2004); Martha Rust's Imaginary Worlds in Medieval Books (2007), which I have not read yet but am looking forward to; and Elizabeth Scala's Absent Narratives (2002).

It was however, when I moved over that I discovered G. David, a rather well-known bookseller here in Cambridge. There I found some marvellous things, mainly Chaucer editions and criticism (about 15 items or so) but other stuff too, such as Philippa Tristram, Figures of Life and Death in Medieval English Literature (London: Paul Elek, 1976) which I did not know. These books belonged to the late and lamented Derek Brewer, which he'd sold off shortly before he passed away. I feel unworthy to have them, but glad too.

A visit to Oxford last weekend for a very enjoyable birthday party provided the opportunity to return to BW's where a distinguished don was selling his books after retirement. Gawd. I hardly knew where to look. What I'm particularly pleased with is Mary Wack's Lovesickness in the Middle Ages (UPenn, 1990); Smither's edition of Havelok (Oxford, 1987); and Vantuono's edition of Pearl (Garland, 1984), though sadly vol. 1 only. I'm not exactly sure how good it is, but it is rather full. Vol. 2 seems utterly irretrievable. Anyway, there was lots of Langland too, which I wanted, but I restricted myself to Justice & Kerby Fulton's Written Work (UPenn, 1997), and then Bloomfield's PP as a Fourteenth-Century Apocalypse and Robertson & Huppé's PP and Scriptural Tradition. Very pleased with that haul I must say.

By the way, I managed to find a paperback copy of Volume 1 Foster & Boyde's Dante's Lyric Poetry. Yes, a paperback was printed of the first volume only, which I had never seen. I'm still on the lookout for the whole thing in h/b, needless to say. But I'm getting there. I also picked up some volumes (1, 6 & 10) of Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, ed. by Vittore Branca (in 10 volumes, published between 1964-1998), but am still missing vols 2, 3, 4, 5/1, and 9, which I despair of ever seeing in the flesh. I also found a copy of Judson Boyce Allen's Ethical Poetic of the Later Middle Ages (Toronto, 1982), which is very hard to find and looks now like it was printed during the war the paper is so yellowed (in every copy I've ever seen actually!).

I'm afraid that this is just a taster of what has been going on this term chez miglior acque but I admit I'll have to cool it for a while. I have now been banned from using my debit card or credit card for a number of months. I may also need a psychiatric evaluation before I'm allowed them back.

Breaking Down Barriers, 19-30 October 2009

Just received news of the Interdisciplinary Virtual Conference to be held between 19-30 October 2009 on the subject 'Breaking Down Barriers'. This from the website:

In these days of increasing fragmentation and hyper-specialisation in academia, Compass aims to foster connections amongst scholars. To further this cause, Wiley-Blackwell and the Compass Editors-in-Chief are organising this online conference to promote interdisciplinary approaches.

The first Compass conference aims to cut across academic boundaries - within and between disciplines, between theory and practice, approaches and methodologies by providing a space for multi- and cross-disciplinary review.


In particular, we welcome papers on the sub-themes of:

• Paradigms

• Borders

• The Environment/Energy

• Communication

• Justice/Human Rights

Abstracts are invited for survey/review papers from the disciplines of History, Literature, Philosophy, Religion, Geography, Linguistics, Sociology, and Social Psychology. Preference will be given to papers which interest more than one discipline.

While the sub-themes reflect important intersections between these subjects, the overall theme of Breaking Down Barriers expresses the cross-period, cross-discipline remit of the Compass project. This conference represents our largest undertaking to date in the service of interdisciplinary collaboration.

The conference will be entirely virtual taking place online 19-30 October 2009. Participants can attend at any time during the conference, when it suits their schedule, to download keynote addresses, read and comment on papers, and take part in other activities. The conference will include all the sessions you would expect from a real conference including keynote speakers, workshops, question and answer sessions, and a book exhibit. Papers will be posted online along with commentaries for discussion and comment. Accepted papers will be published in special issues of the Compass journals.

Call for Papers: Play: Aspects and Approaches

Miglior acque is pleased to announce that the 2009 Oxford Medieval Aspects and Approaches Conference will take place on April 3-4, and that it will be on the subject of Play. For further information and updates click here.

Joyful Joyful

Show Me The Money

I normally keep this blog fairly medieval and bookish in its interests but the past few weeks and the next couple of days are a little unusual for anyone who reads the newspapers and keeps up with what's going on. I am, of course, not eligible to vote in these elections and am reluctant to enter into any strongly politicized ramblings. I know who I'd vote for, but then, anyone who reads this probably would vote the same way. I am going to limit myself to a small observation.

It has been reported that Barack Obama's aunt is an illegal immigrant living in Boston. She appears to have had her application for political asylum, made in 2004, rejected by a federal immigration judge. The timing is suspect, needless to say. That such a leak might have come from a government official is certainly unethical and might even be illegal. Senator McCain has said that it is a family matter and out of bounds, though I think most grassroots and diehards will consider this yet another reason to believe that Senator Obama is not American.

This lady is 56, she lives in public housing, she has volunteered as a resident health advocate for the Boston Housing Authority, and has apparently recently stopped because she is recuperating after surgery on her back. It is clear the lady does not have much money, and according to the Obama campaign they have not been in contact for two years. She did attend his swearing-in ceremony as a Senator, but he was under the impression she had travelled from Kenya for that.

This is all a sad story of a woman in her mid-fifties, with no money, wanting to live in the US and getting sick there. Frightening, terrifying.

And what does she do: the Federal Election Commission lists a Zeituni Onyango in South Boston as making a series of contributions, totaling $265, to the Obama campaign, with the most recent contribution, $5, made on Sept. 19.

This lady's nephew is running for President of the United States of America, one of the most powerful and influential positions of political and social importance in the world, a man who is running with one of the richest war chests ever raised in a campaign that has seen some of the most extraordinary expenditure ever devised. She is just a few days away from potentially becoming a family member of the President. And what does she do? And she donates five dollars to his campaign.

Five dollars.

This lady gave five dollars for her nephew to become the President of the United States of America.

I am trembling with admiration for her and for him. I hope that she recovers from her surgery, and I hope that he becomes President.

A Civic Education

Last evening saw the 2008 K G Sykes Lecture at Pembroke College Cambridge, delivered by Professors Lucy Riall and Marizio Viroli entitled 'The Religion of Liberty and Italian Antifascism (1922-1945)'. The discussion was lively and the speakers were excellent. There was a very stimulating and dynamic sense of exchange between both speakers and there was a great sincerity in their engagement with the problems. A good night had by all I rather think.

During dinner I learned about Viroli's new Master in Civic Education [pdf here], which he runs in Asti drawing on experts from his own university, Princeton, as well as elsewhere. It all takes place under the aegis of a non-profit organization called Ethica Forum and it is intended to bring a new way of integrating an ethics of exchange and learning. The Masters is intended develop a sense of civic responsibility, of creating a holistic engagement with ethics in work and life. I must say that I found it rather compelling and can only imagine how it must be looked upon with suspicion by the Academy in Italy. Here's the section on what's driving the project:

L’obiettivo educativo del Master è di offrire ai partecipanti l’opportunità di acquisire una consapevolezza matura e critica della coscienza civica e del suo significato morale, politico, storico mettendo in risalto le implicazioni che essa comporta per i cittadini d’oggi, così come emerge dalla ricerca dei migliori studiosi e delle più prestigiose istituzioni internazionali. Il Master è rivolto a studiosi, insegnanti, magistrati, avvocati, giovani professionisti, funzionari di enti pubblici, regionali, nazionali ed europei, ufficiali, manager pubblici e privati, persone impegnate nell’associazionismo laico e religioso. Il principio fondamentale al quale saranno ispirate le attività del Master è la certezza che l’educazione civica consista in una combinazione di responsabilità morale e saggezza che può essere insegnata solamente in un contesto che rispetti profondamente le diversità, la libertà morale ed intellettuale e che ripudi ogni forma di indottrinamento. In linea con questo principio, il Master presterà particolare attenzione affinché i docenti che terranno i corsi abbiano dimostrato di possedere, oltre alla competenza scientifica, una genuina passione per l’insegnamento ed un’impeccabile reputazione d’integrità etica. Essi inoltre saranno invitati a sottoporre all’attenzione dei partecipanti un’ampia gamma di opinioni in campo morale, religioso e politico. Nello specifico il Master dovrà fornire agli studenti una solida conoscenza in campo storico, politico ed etico con particolare attenzione alle teorie della cittadinanza, aiutarli a far propria una rigorosa consapevolezza di problemi e ragionamenti etici, insegnare loro a comprendere il mondo contemporaneo.

It was very depressing to hear Viroli speak with such sadness about the state of his country. The incredible system of corruption and patronage in the university sector is doing very bad things to the way that the future generations of scholars are being produced and nurtured. The brain drain is extraordinary and excruciating and it is difficult to see how it can be sustainable. Perhaps, I learned last evening, there is hope.

Derek Brewer (1923-2008)

The great Chaucerian scholar Derek Brewer passed away yesterday.

Dante In Our Time

Listen to Melvin Bragg's In Our Time talking about Dante's Inferno with guests Dr Margaret Kean (St Hilda's College, Oxford), Dr Caire Honess (Leeds) and Prof. John Took (UCL). Some very good discussion.

Prayer, by Alice Oswald

Alice Oswald's first collection of poetry, The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile was published by Oxford University Press in 1996 and she has followed this impressive debut with equally impressive collections Dart (2002) and Woods, etc. (2005). In 2007 Faber republished her first collection. She writes the kind of poems I would love to write, they are huge in their perspectives. She looks at her environment and she seems to see all that is important, like the world curving into the eye of an eagle. One of my favourite poems from this collection is called Prayer:

Here I work in the hollow of God's hand
with Time bent round into my reach. I touch
the circle of the earth, I throw and catch
the sun and moon by turns into my mind.
I sense the length of it from end to end,
I sway me gently in my flesh and each
point of the process changes as I watch;
the flowers come, the rain follows the wind.

And all I ask is this—and you can see
how far the soul, when it goes under flesh,
is not a soul, is small and creaturish—
that every day the sun comes silently
to set my hands to work and that the moon
turns and returns to meet me when it's done.

On Allegory: Some Medieval Aspects and Approaches (Newcastle, 2008)

Miglior acque is proud to present: On Allegory: Some Medieval Aspects and Approaches, ed. by Mary Carr, K.P. Clarke, and Marco Nievergelt (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), ISBN 1-84718-400-6. Pp. ix + 269. This volume of original essays took its inspiration from an Oxford graduate conference held in 2005 at Lincoln College.

Here is the Table of Contents:

E. G. Stanley, 'Allegory Through the Ages, As Read Mainly in England and As Seen Anywhere' (pp. 1-27); Meredith Bacola, 'The Persistence of Narrative: An Exploration of Hans Memling's The Seven Joys of the Virgin' (pp. 28-41); Kirsten Stirling, '“The Picture of Christ Crucified”: Luthern Influence on Donne's Religious Imagery' (pp. 42-55); Olga Malinovskaya, 'Personification and abstractio in Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy' (pp. 56-69); Darragh Greene, 'Sum newe thing: Autobiography, Allegory and Authority in the Kingis Quair' (70-86); Catherine A. M. Clarke, 'The Allegory of Landscape: Land Reclamation and Defence at Glastonbury Abbey' (pp. 87-103); Alice Spencer, 'Erotic Dialogue and the Meaning of Margaryte in Usk’s The Testament of Love' (pp. 104-132); Jane Griffiths, 'Truth and Prophecy in Stephen Hawes’ Conforte of Lovers' (pp. 133-155); William Rossiter, 'Translation of Allegory or Allegory of Translation? Petrarch’s Redressing of Boccaccio’s Griselda' (pp. 156-182); K. P. Clarke, 'Reading/Writing Griselda: A Fourteenth-Century Response (Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, MS Plut. 42,1)' (pp. 183-208); Crofton Black, 'Allegory, Cognition, and a Philosophical Controversy: Two Texts by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola' (pp. 209-230); Vincent Gillespie, 'Afterword: On Allegory, Allegoresis and the Erotics of Reading' (pp. 231-256). There is a list of Contributors, pp. 257-259 and an Index, pp. 260-269.

Enjoy!

Camera Ready

Check out the New York Times College Issue article entitled: "The Camera-Friendly, Perfectly Pixelated, Easily Downloadable Celebrity Academic", by Virginia Heffernan, which test-drives five celebrity academics and their online lectures. Fascinating stuff and well worth a browse.

Read too the article on Barack Obama as a senior lecturer in law at the University of Chicago. Fascinating and compelling reading. And depressing, too, when one looks at the Republican presidential and vice-presidential candidates.

Jiminy Cricket! No Escaping This Grasshopper

My first stroll around Cambridge had me pass the Corpus Clock, just up the road, and it was a wonderful treat. This was something I'd anticipated, seeing articles about it on the BBC website, and elsewhere (here & here and see the video here). The enormous and ferocious grasshopper sitting on top of the clock is the clock's escapement, mechanism, a "grasshopper escapement" actually, a regulator developed by John Harrison and intended as an homage by the clock's inventor Dr John Taylor. What he has done is effectively to turn the clock inside out, so the escapement and escapement wheel become its major features. The grasshopper, exquisitely detailed, sits on top of the wheel eating away at time: the clock is called the "Chronophage". And an inscription on the outside ledge reads Mundus transit et concupiscentia eius (I John 2: 17). Time is not on our side.

The dial comprises a series of Vernier strips, beneath which are three discs which have a set of constantly lit LED lights. So the time telling is not digital but entirely mechanical.

But time is relative, too. So while Harrison's invention was an important step in the development of a clock that told the correct time (or rather a clock that told the correct time for a longer period of time), this clock is only correct once every five minutes. This is because it actually stops, speeds up, and slows down, making the viewer constantly aware of the passing of time. It does not just tell the time, it draws attention to time. It's a clever idea, and it is hard for me to express the discomfort felt when you actually see the clock stop. You almost hold your breath waiting for it to start again (like watching a patient flat-line!). The clock is supposed to remind us that tempus fugit, it confronts us with our own mortality.

As I start a research fellowship here in Cambridge, these are good and important things to have before me. Tempus fugit, so get on with it!

Puccini in the Wild West, and Bacon at the Tate Britain

An magnificent production of Puccini's La fanciulla del West (The Girl of the Golden West) is currently running at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden. It was first performed in New York, at the Met, with Caruso and Destinn in the lead roles and was received with great aplomb. It has not has the same success in Europe, though there are some great recordings (I have the Nilsson/Matacic recording); it is being staged with greater frequency in recent years. This production boasts José Cura and Eva-Maria Westbroek, flawlessly conducted by Antonio Pappano. The opera is often described as less 'flashy' than some of Puccini's other works, and there are certainly fewer big arias. But I think that it benefits from this, in a way, in that there's a great narrative thrust to the story. The way the characters use English names for each other (Jack Rance, for example) creates (inadvertent?) comic moments. The set is beautifully designed and executed, the cast is extraordinary. This really is unmissable.

At the Tate Britain there is a powerful and at times disturbing Francis Bacon exhibition. His work intense enough as individual works, but ten rooms of works really do pack quite a punch. And you've been punched in the gut after this. They've tried to provide a broad chronological sweep, with the earliest work dating from 1933 and the latest to 1991. There is also a room of archival material, with a good deal of stuff from Dublin's Hugh Lane (now home to the Bacon Studio). The paintings and studies based on the famous Velázquez portrait of Innocent X are so familiar, iconic really. But seeing them together was tremendous. It is easy to not think about them, to consume them as trademarks. Standing in front of them, however, has the effect of stripping away all of your defences. The screaming mouths, gaping in horror, are directed right at you, and there's nowhere to go. The space, so carefully constructed and also produced by the figures, envelopes you despite its delimiting lines and the way the figures are boxed in.
I bought Deleuze's book on Bacon on the way home and will read it soon. Bacon compels and will compel when you go to this exhibition.

Love 2.0, Project Cube 18-20th September 2008

Love 2.0 comprises two plays, originally commissioned by the Abbey Theatre as part of the 20:Love season of new writing and now expanded into two discreet plays of 20 minutes each. They form part of the Dublin Fringe Festival 2008. The theme was "love", and both writers have explored it in different ways, with many intersections.

Two Houses, by Belinda McKeon, has siblings Maeve and Eamon in a confrontational situation late one night in their sitting room. She is in her fifth year at school, he (in his late twenties) is living at home after separating from his wife. The programme notes have McKeon say that she "wanted, with Two Houses, to put these characters in a place that is to them at once dully familiar and unnervingly volatile". This is exactly the tone, familiar and volatile. And it makes for a not always comfortable experience. Maeve wants to grow up fast, she has a friend on Bebo who is older than her, more Eamon's age. Eamon's outrage that she should be going near such a fella is much more personal than might at first be apparent and as the scene progresses, it becomes obvious that both siblings share in an understanding of the complexities of love and sex and their limits. Maeve's paralysis at the end of the play is perfectly judged, she cannot or does not want to reveal Eamon's secret, not just because she knows it will get him into trouble with the law, but also because she understands the impulses that got him there. It's a cerebral work that I think will be seen again.

Phillip McMahon's Investment Potential is an extremely enjoyable and troubling play about love in a modern, materialist Ireland. That's a little pat, I know, and does not do justice to what's going on. It is structurally more complex, having several scene changes and time-frame shifts. The depths of the character of Anne (Kathy Keira Clarke) are subtle and bring the audience from laughter to despair with hardly a moment's notice. Brendan (Brendan McCormack, who also plays Eamon, with great versatility), her boyfriend, is charming and lazy, and Anne's sinking ennui with the neighbours and friends who own their own apartments and houses is drawn out with some skill. Dragging herself home with her Marks and Spencers shopping, being mistakenly "recognized" by a lonely woman there, being insulted by the staff in the Spar downstairs, the increasing grimness almost imperceptibly mounts to a very sad end with a broad horizon. What is powerful about the play is the slow realization of just how destructive this angst really is, how it infects everything.

Phillip McMahon and Belinda McKeon make a powerful duo, and it should be said that McMahon is a co-founder of the production company thisispopbaby who produced the play in association with the Abbey. He generously refers to McKeon as an "obscenely talented writer" in the notes, and this is true. But I think his own work is beautiful too and not undeserving of such generosity. A thoroughly enjoyable evening.

Troilus and Criseyde, ed. Stephen Barney (Norton, 2006)

The publication of this volume is welcome for a number of reasons. It provides the standard critical text, that prepared by Barney for the Riverside Chaucer, in a handy portable format at an affordable price. More importantly, it presents a translation of the major source of the poem, Boccaccio's Filostrato, in a facing-text format. The translation is that of Robert P. apRoberts and Anna Bruni Seldis, published by Garland in 1986 and now impossible to find. It also presents one of the most extraordinary rewritings or continuations of the poem in English (or in this case Older Scots), Robert Henryson's The Testament of Cresseid. And lastly, it reprints a number of articles that have proved influential amongst Chaucerians in the last couple of decades, including those of Bloomfield, Donaldson, Delany, and Taylor, as well as the classic essay by C.S. Lewis, "What Chaucer Really Did to Il Filostrato".

I have been moved to write this review because I have just read a review of this edition by Jenny Adams (University of Massachusetts Amherst) in the rather excellent online journal Heliotropia, the official publication of the American Boccaccio Association. I feel that the Norton Troilus has been rather hard done by and I am more than a little uncomfortable with the review.

The reviewer admits to not having taught with the edition, nor having reason to go to the poem itself for her research. This is considered to provide a "critical distance", which saves her from a "weird attachment to the poem". This weirdness is something Barney presumably suffers from and Barney's assertion that the Troilus is the greatest work in English between Beowulf and The Faerie Qveene is one piece of evidence to suggest such attachment. The Troilus is not, furthermore, considered to be Chaucer's magnum opus. It would be fruitless for me to disagree; it might even be fruitless to cite the evidence that suggests Chaucer's contemporaries and immediate successors considered the poem to be his magnum opus. Fruitless because patent is the evidence of simply reading the poem itself, which ever ceases to amaze me for its extraordinary depths, its sophistication, its beauty and its difficulty.

The strength of the review, to be even handed, is that the facing-text format provides the reviewer with an opportunity to compare the Troilus and its source (apparently for the first time), a comparison considered to be "a powerful antidote to a common undergraduate assumption that medieval authors unthinkingly recycled material". Her comparison results in observing the complexity of Chaucer's treatment of the beginning of Book II, Pandarus awakening to hear the swallow "Proigne", a realization she delightfully calls a "clincher". I quite agree, and I wholeheartedly agree with her when she observes that similar "clinchers" multiply before your eyes when read as a facing-text.

The text is considered "not revolutionary", being a reprint of the Riverside, and in what amounts to damning by faint praise, the whole thing is considered "acceptable". The main criticisms centre on the choice of the essays included at the back of the edition. The main problem appears to be that only two essays treat of the changes made by Chaucer to Boccaccio, that of Lewis and Davis Taylor. Lewis is considered to be "barely teachable", and Taylor is a numerical list rather than actual analysis. Citation in Italian, and words like Frauendienst (Service of the Lady) and ὕβρις (hubris, over-weening pride or supercilliousness) are all deemed beyond students' abilities. The putative lack of good essays out there is finally suggested as an almost inadvertent benefit of this Norton edition, inspiring others to go out and do it.

While I sympathize with untranslated words, I do think that this should provide the lecturer/instructor with an opportunity to talk about these concepts; not understanding something is a moment when students need to consult dictionaries and encyclopediae. I don't think that it is a bad thing at all to have a bit of difficult material for students to work on, it encourages independent work. And there's no doubt that Lewis' essay is difficult, but it is far more difficult to ignore and is surely an important point of reference for all critics who subsequently wrote about Chaucer and Boccaccio. The other articles at the back of the Norton edition are intended to provide material for a much rounder and broader set of views on the Troilus rather than being solely an analysis of the changes to the Filostrato. The student would, in any case, need to consult carefully B.A. Windeatt's Troilus and Criseyde (London, 1984; 1990), whose introduction and notes would provide much of the necessary detail. This is one of the great strengths of the edition in that it can be used so efficiently with Windeatt's text (an admittedly specialist edition) to great effect. The assumption that medieval authors unthinkingly recycled material could easily be dealt with in reading Henryson's poem, also included in the Norton edition and not mentioned at all by the reviewer. This is a pity and a real missed opportunity to make observations on what the editor was saying by putting these texts together and how teaching the Troilus would be enriched and deepened by a reading of the Older Scots poem.

In sum, as a user of this edition for both my research and in my teaching, as a reader who has thought long and hard about both the texts in this edition and the critical essays at the back, I'd like to warmly recommend this volume as nothing short of indispensible.

An Ideal No Man's Land

Two wonderful productions are on show in Dublin at the moment and I've been to both recently. An Ideal Husband is at the Abbey Theatre, running until 27 September 2008, and is directed by Neil Bartlett. Wilde's Husband dates from 1895, though it was written in 1893. It was during its performance in the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, that Wilde was arrested for gross indecency and his association with the play was suppressed. It is very hard not to watch the play with this somehow in the background, and when Sir Robert Chiltern says to his wife that no man should be entirely jugdged by his past, it resonates. The play's poster has a simple picture of Wilde with a red strip just covering his eyes: "We all all have to pay for what we do". Bartlett has done a marvellous job, and he has rendered the play richly and subtly. He has also drawn some wonderful performances, in particular Derble Crotty's chilling Mrs Cheveley and Mark O'Halloran's Lord Goring, frivolous one moment, poignant, searing, honest, the next. The rest of the cast are quite marvellous, and the way that the scenes change with the domestic staff changing props is very enjoyable. There are startling moments too. While the play's stage directions call for Mrs Cheveley to curse ("A curse breaks from her") as she tries to take the bracelet off, Crotty's Cheveley shouts out "Fuck!". It works, kind of. Mrs Cheveley is no lady but passes judgment on the ladies of London and the difficulty of "the season". The contrast could not be sharper. This is a complex and troubling play and the Abbey production brings out its very great strengths.

The Gate production of Harold Pinter's No Man's Land (1975), was first staged in 1997 as part of the Pinter season. This production (running for just four weeks), directed by Rupert Goold, boasts an all-star cast, David Bradley, Nick Dunning, Michael Gambon and David Walliams. This "tragi-comedy", as it is often described, is full of mystery and menace and the laughter is of the nervous kind rather than the hilarious. There is such an enclosed and suffocating sense in this play, and Nick Dunning's Briggs is a gem of barely restrained menace and anger. I'm not sure that Walliam's Foster is quite right, though I think I see what he was doing. He is certainly, however, ingratiating and his time onstage is very uncomfortable. David Bradley and Michael Gambon as Spooner and Hirst are compelling presences onstage, both so suave, both failures, one with nothing to lose, the other, with everything to lose. And each in some place they both see as a no man's land.

Both productions are very much worth going to see. So go!

Egan's Gold

By Al Bello/Getty Images(L-R) Kenny Egan of Ireland kisses the gold medal of Zhang Xiaoping of China following the Men's Light Heavy (81kg) Final Bout held at the Workers' Indoor Arena during Day 16 of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games on August 24, 2008 in Beijing, China.

This wonderfully composed photograph is on the front page of the Irish Times today. It shows Ireland's boxer Kenny Egan kissing the gold medal of China's Zhang Xiaoping, the light-heavyweight champion, who won 11-7 in yesterday morning's final. I find this image very beautiful. There is such tenderness in the gesture, such respect. Not just for the Chinese boxer, and it is clearly a compliment to him, but to the medal itself, to the place of the gold medalist. There is such beauty in the way these two boxers, men who fight for a living, at the moment of highest emotion and greatest pride, express themselves with such poise and dignity, with a kiss. And Zhang Xiaoping's face is entirely reciprocal. I see no triumphalism in his expression. It is an expression of understanding, of having been there, and there is grace in it. There is something very moving, too, about the way that Egan's own silver medal is just peeping out from under his elbow, just an arm's length away. There were lots of memorable moments in these Games, but this is the one I'm most moved by, and, in a peculiar way, that for which I am most proud of Egan.