Finis / Au revoir

Being impressionable, and impressed, with Paula Byrne's new website, I've created a copycat design on wordpress, which really is amazingly easy to use. It has built in blogging, so that's where I'm going and so it is now bye bye not only to Ted Hughes but also to Blogger.

Bye Bye Ted

Having “put to bed” the paperback of my Ted Hughes biography, returned all the books to the shelves, and shredded hundreds of pages of manuscript photocopies, I reflect for a moment on the long journey of writing the book and dealing with its reception. A friend recently asked whether I have any regrets about all the emotional energy involved. Emphatically not, I replied. Not even over the accusations of prurience? About 40 pages of the book make reference to aspects of Hughes’s sexual life; about 600 to his writing life. But you wouldn’t guess that from the reactions of one or two critics of the older generation. So, any regrets about having incurred their wrath by including some explicit material on a handful of occasions? Well, imagine what people would have said if the sexual dimension had been airbrushed from the biography of the author of Gaudete (the long poem that could be summarised as “Yorkshire vicar's spirit double in WI orgy”) and of such poems as the Ploughshares version of “Do not pick up the telephone” (“Panties are hotting up their circle for somebody to burn in / Nipples are evangelising bringing a sword or at least a razor / Cunt is proclaiming heaven on earth”—not, it has to be said, TH’s most immortal lines). I just have a feeling that if the biography had been a bedroom-free zone, the word “whitewash” would have appeared somewhere.

No, my one regret is that not a single reviewer – though I’ve only seen a selection, so I may be traducing someone here – has drawn attention to the book’s excavation of the hitherto unknown long autobiographical poems/sequences “A” and “Trial” (the latter provides an extraordinary new window onto the last days of Sylvia Plath) or to the reading of the manuscript revisions in the great Gaudete epilogue poem “Waving goodbye from your banked hospital bed,” which was intended as the epicentre of the book’s argument. Mark Ford in the London Review of Books comes close to the latter, and he is to be thanked for that.

Returning to Lowell

Memory comes from nowhere, in a flash. Suddenly I am in sixth-form and my great great teachers John Adams and Alan Hurd are introducing us to the mastery of Robert Lowell. 'Waking in the Blue': that BU sophomore in the mental hospital. The statue in 'For the Union Dead'. Then I am an undergraduate, in a little book-lined room in Portugal Place close reading 'Skunk Hour' with my poet-teacher Glen Cavaliero ("for Elizabeth Bishop" - thus taking me to her for the first time). And then I am a grad at Harvard, where the name Lowell is in the fabric of the place. Finding a copy of Life Studies second-hand in the Harvard Square Bookstore, seeing how it changed poetry for ever. That was the time when I was directing a production of Sylvia Plath: A Dramatic Portrait in a tiny space in one of the houses - was it Lowell, I forget now? - called Explosives B. Not knowing then that 35 years later I would be writing the biography of Ted Hughes, trying to bring alive the time when he and Sylvia were loved up, writing well and sitting in Cambridge, Mass., at Lowell's feet.

Why is it that writers who mean so much to us at some particular point in our lives then drop off our radar for years and years? Sometimes we consciously react against, but more often we just move on, and then we forget. For twenty, thirty years, I've barely re-read a line of Lowell. So I've been going back to him, getting deeper and deeper into his greatness, which was so inextricably linked to his mental illness. Re-reading the Ian Hamilton biography too, perhaps because I fear that my Hughes bio will go the way of Hamilton's Salinger.

And then a couple of weeks ago I had lunch with Frieda Hughes and the extraordinary Grey Gowrie, and Lowell's end came back to me: a heart attack in a New York taxi in 1977, aged just sixty. I remember the news report: it was just a few weeks before I began my student life. Hamilton tells us he was carrying a brown paper bag containing Lucien Freud's portrait of his wife Caroline Blackwood (how he loved and wrestled with those wives!), which Grey had obtained for him.

Was Chapman Chapman?

I'm being plagued by emails from anti-Stratfordians again. I suppose it's because of all the current talk and writing about Shakespeare @ 450 years. What really gets me is this: the refusal of anti-Stratfordians ever to talk about the other dramatists of the time about whom we know far less than we know about Shakespeare and yet whose authorship of the plays attributed to them they never deny. Why do they not argue that Jonson didn't write the plays of Jonson or Chapman those of Chapman? George Chapman is an especially interesting case. He was the son of a mere yeoman. He was orphaned. There is no record of him getting *any* formal education, certainly no Oxford or Cambridge career. But then he turns up in the poetry and theatre world, writing works of formidable learning and obscurity. He even translates Homer! How could Chapman possibly have been Chapman? He MUST have been an aristocrat in disguise ... Why, or why, has no one ever seen this?

I've long gone past the point of re-entering these debates, having had my say in my 1997 book on the history of the idea of The Genius of Shakespeare. But if I ever met an anti-Stratfordian who had read every surviving play from the period 1580-1630 and who could produce compelling evidence that Chapman was Chapman, Dekker was Dekker, Heywood was Heywood, Jonson was Jonson, and so on for every dramatist other than Shakespeare, I might begin to listen to their doubts about Shakespeare.

MOOCing

I have seen the future and it works - wearing my hat as Honorary Fellow of Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, my MOOC on Shakespeare and his World, based on their collections, went live today -- and I already have over 9k student and 400 followers. Am so impressed by the enthusiasm, the hunger for learning, and the quality of some of the comments and questions. Amazing that digital technology can beam around the world the kind of content that previously was only available to people signed up for degrees and physically present in the lecture room.

Heaney's "Prelude" and Hughes's

In my TLS article about Hughes and Plath I argued that Hughes considered Black Coat: Opus 131 to be his equivalent of Wordsworth's Prelude. I might have added that Roy Davids, who sold the archives to Emory and then the British Library, also told me that Ted had described Birthday Letters to him as "a kind of Prelude." So it's interesting to have discovered the following in one of the wonderful letters from Hughes to Seamus Heaney, now at Emory, which I'm rereading for a section on the book concerning the friendship between the two great poets. On 8 October 1989, Hughes writes to thank Heaney for the latest poetry sequence he has sent him. ‘The Quartet’, Ted calls it, but it was a draft of ‘Squarings’, the superb collection of 48 12 line autobiographical poems that appeared two years later in Heaney's Seeing Things. Hughes reads it as a reclaiming of Heaney’s own Lares and Penates, his spirit of home and place. It also makes him think of The Prelude ‘in the ranging self-reassessment, the lifting of sacred moments with ordinary gestures, into the pattern of the liturgy, and in the way the whole thing is a self-rededication, a realigning of yourself, to “the vows made for you”.’ I don't have the Selected Letters in front of me (they are in my writing hut, known to the family as the Ted Shed), so I'm not sure whether this letter was included. But what is striking is that Hughes sees that Heaney has written his Prelude, so he must focus on his own equivalent. He's been worrying at this for years, and confiding in Heaney. Back when he was putting Moortown together in 1979, he wrote to tell Heaney that this was a collection of bits and pieces that he had previously thought marginal or not good enough to publish. But what of the ‘central non-marginal lump of poetry’, he asks? He knows that it has yet to appear, and wonders whether it ever will. It did and it didn't. Given how much of Black Coat remains unpublished to this day, in some senses it still hasn't.

I vividly remember Heaney reading from and talking about Seeing Things, soon after its publication, at a wonderful Wordsworth Summer Conference in Grasmere, under the auspices of the late and much loved trinity of Richard Wordsworth, Jonathan Wordsworth and Robert Woof. Heaney spoke of the Wordsworthianness of his poems and I suggested to him that his title, Seeing Things, was a clear Wordsworthian hommage: a collapsing of the famous line from 'Tintern Abbey': 'We see into the life of things'. Heaney said that of course it was, but that until this moment he had not seen that it was.

Hughes & Plath

Over the last four years I have been reading every word that Ted Hughes published (more than a hundred books) and the tens of thousands of pages of manuscript drafts, letters and journals that he sold to Emory University in Atlanta and that, more recently, his widow sold to the British Library in London. This is arguably the most complete archive of a poetic imagination in the entire history of English literature. For a long time I was undecided as to whether to write a literary critical book or a biography, but over Christmas I came to the conclusion that the life and the work are so inextricably intertwined that it must be a biography – albeit a very literary one. So the time came to test the water, to put a toe in the water. And where better to begin than with his diary for the week of Sylvia Plath’s death. And so: this week’s TLS, where I was kindly given the amount of space that is only very rarely accorded to a single review essay (thnak you, Alan Jenkins). After all those years in which Hughes was demonised – even accused by one notorious radical feminist of being Plath’s “murderer” – it was astonishing to discover how hard he worked to save the marriage in that final week before she took her life. How many times have we read about him “deserting” Sylvia and “going off to live with Assia Wevill”? Never again. The blame game should now be over. Never presume to look inside a marriage or a separation until you’ve heard both sides of the story in full (and there is more, much more, to tell on both sides). But what his diary also reveals, of course, is the unbelievably awful effect on human behaviour of what in the piece I call “the volatility of manic depression.” It probably wouldn’t have happened with today’s more sophisticated anti-depressive medication. But then would we have had Ariel if Sylvia Plath had been stabilised by lithium?

New Sappho Poem

Amazing that an apparently authentic new Sappho poem has been discovered this late in the day: excellent TLS article here. But knowing the history of Shakespearean forgeries (John S's 'spiritual testimony', the imaginary performance of Hamlet off the coast of Sierra Leone in 1607 ...), one always wonders. Assume the article will be in this week's print TLS. Which will also include a long commentary piece regarding which my breath is, er, bated.

I rather like that this blog has almost no followers. 'Fit audience, though few'. Makes it more of a diary space, place for private musing.

Discuss. As they say in the examination question paper.

Interesting interview with George Lakoff in Guardian online:

It is, plainly, the longstanding failure to protect nature that powers Lakoff's exasperation with liberals. "They don't understand their own moral system or the other guy's, they don't know what's at stake, they don't know about framing, they don't know about metaphors, they don't understand the extent to which emotion is rational, they don't understand how vital emotion is, they try to hide their emotion. They do everything wrong because they're miseducated. And they're proud of that miseducation. Oxford philosophy reigns supreme, right? Oxford philosophy is killing the world."

Do we agree? I do want to return to writing some literary ecotheory some time. Though actually the position here - anti-Cartesian most obviously - is not so far from the place I currently am in my account of the thought of Ted Hughes, that great ecowarrior and ecoworrier.

Robben Island 'Bible'

A timely poignancy to "the valiant never taste of death but once": CNN story.

How stories grow

I'm always interested in the question of when and why a "literary" story makes it off the review pages, or indeed out of the academic world, into the "news" sphere. The "new scene by Shakespeare" versus "possible new attribution to Fletcher" scenario ... An under-estimated aspect is the desire of an individual, either regional or freelance, journalist to place a story nationally. It was thanks to Dalya Alberge's interest and tenacity that Collaborative Plays by Shakespeare and Others briefly became a news story. By the same account, my other half, Paula Byrne, had an interesting experience this week: answered a question about the Jane Austen banknote at the Isle of Wight Literary Festival (not exactly the buzzing heart of breaking news), pointing out that it is the "airbrushed" Victorian engraving, not the original portrait (or caricature?) by her sister. An enterprising local journo from Radio Solent is there. She does an interview with Paula for her local station, but then, presumably in order to give good profile to Solent within the fragile ecology of local radio, suggests to Radio Five Live that this could also be worth an interview. Next thing, it is the Today programme, stories in almost every national newspaper and a global twitterstorm. The mediation of author pictures (cf. Chandos versus Droeshout, whether Cobb Portrait really is Sir Thomas Overbury etc. etc.) is a fascinating subject, but of course the "mainstream media" is only interested if (a) there is a controversy, and (b) it's about a big name - Austen or Shakespeare (as opposed to, say, Burney or Fletcher - my candidate for the sitter in the "Sanders Portrait").

Shakespeare's Mucedorus?

What, then, is the claim? Other than that the stage direction "being pursued with a bear" in a King's Men revival of 1610 cannot be entirely unconnected with Shakespeare ...
The new claim, made in Collaborative Plays by Shakespeare and Others, is that the following scene in the revised Mucedorus is either Shakespeare or someone else - Fletcher, perhaps - writing very self-consciously in the style of Shakespeare:

[SCENE 10]

Sound music

Enter the King of Valencia, Anselmo, Roderigo, Lord Barachius, with others

VALENCIA Enough of music, it but adds to torment:

            Delights to vexèd spirits are as dates

            Set to a sickly man, which rather cloy than comfort.

            Let me entreat you to entreat no more.

RODERIGO Let your strings sleep: have done there!     Let the music cease

VALENCIA Mirth, to a soul disturbed, are embers turned,

            Which sudden gleam with molestation,

            But sooner lose their light for’t.

’Tis gold bestowed upon a rioter

Which not relieves, but murders him:

’Tis a drug given to the healthful,

Which infects not cures.

How can a father that hath lost his son—

A prince both wise, virtuous and valiant—

Take pleasure in the idle acts of time?

No, no: till Mucedorus I shall see again

All joy is comfortless, all pleasures pain.

ANSELMO Your son, my lord, is well.

VALENCIA I prithee, speak that thrice.

ANSELMO The prince, your son, is safe.

VALENCIA O, where, Anselmo? Surfeit me with that.

ANSELMO In Aragon, my liege,

And at his parture, bound my secrecy,

By his affectious love, not to disclose it.

But care of him and pity of your age

Makes my tongue blab what my breast vowed, concealment.

VALENCIA Thou not deceiv’st me: I ever thought thee

            What I find thee now, an upright, loyal man.

            But what desire or young-fed humour

            Nursed within the brain

Drew him so privately to Aragon?

ANSELMO A forcing adamant:

            Love mixed with fear and doubtful jealousy,

            Whether report gilded a worthless trunk,

            Or Amadine deserved her high extolment.

VALENCIA See our provision be in readiness:

            Collect us followers of the comeliest hue

            For our chief guardians: we will thither wend.

            The crystal eye of heaven shall not thrice wink

            Nor the green flood six times his shoulders turn,

            Till we salute the Aragonian king.

            Music speak loudly now, the season’s apt,

            For former dolours are in pleasure wrapped.

Tchaikovsky's Byron

Itching to write my book on Romanticism, when I finally have time to finish the one on Ted Hughes. The cult of Byron will be a major part of it: had the pleasure of doing some work for this in the form of research on 19th century composers and their Byronmania (Berlioz, Schumann, Liszt), culminating in Tchaikovsky's Manfred symphony - brilliantly performed at last night's prom. Edited version of pre-show discussion was broadcast in the interval. Discussion of Byron in second half of this. Probably only on "Listen Again" for a week. But there is so much more to say ...

Defence of the Humanities

Never have time to blog these days, with so many other duties - and several writing projects horrendously behind. But I do still keep on the lookout for powerful defences of the humanities, and this is certainly one - rhetorically speaking, if nothing else: commencement address at Brandeis by Leon Wieseltier.

Shakespeare Authorship

This, surely, is one of the great contributions to The Shakespeare Authorship Debate:
http://www.newyorker.com/humor/2011/11/21/111121sh_shouts_idle

The End of the University as we know it?

Several of the reviews of Stefan Collini's recent polemical book What are Universities For? suggested that it had missed a trick by ignoring the real threat to the university as we know it, which is not the British Coalition government's funding reforms for teaching but the global - and, of course, California-led - phenomenon of the virtual university. I reflected on this in the latter part of an essay in Standpoint magazine last April.

As the saying goes: we have seen the future and it works ... or does it? This long article in Guardian Online is the fullest journalistic explanation I've yet seen of what is happening. But it's striking that if you go to Khan Academy, edX, Udacity and the rest, the Humanities hardly get a look in. I completely get how Artificial Intelligence, Chemistry and How to Build a Search Engine can be delivered online, but what will the late 21st century virtual Humanities classroom look like? I remember sitting in a Cambridge lecture room as an undergraduate, with 200 others, being dazzled by the brilliance of Christopher Ricks, Jeremy Prynne or Frank Kermode. You could reproduce that online, though perhaps without the buzz of the lecturer's charismatic presence (which Ricks and Prynne had, but Kermode didn't, so maybe charisma isn't all). I remember teaching Shakespeare to a class of 40 at UCLA: a mix of lecture and discussion, with people putting their hands up. You could do this online pretty easily: 40 Skype connections, 40 little screens and a controlled click to allow the questions to be asked one at a time. But what would an Oxbridge style one on one tutorial, the historic apex of higher education, look like online?

Random Penguin

As an author published by Penguin in UK and Random House in USA, the press speculation on a merger between the two could not fail to interest me ... so I checked out the Guardian report at which point there was that perennial temptation to look down at the Reader Comments, which I did, and one of which raised a big smile: "Simply to have a company called 'Random Penguin' would be reason enough to merge, pleeeeeease do it."

"All's Will, Ends Well"

Being Shakespeare has transferred to New York and it is fascinating to see that the critics have a completely different take on the show from that of their counterparts who have seen it across the UK and in the West End. They all love it, but they all focus on the Authorship Question: New York Times ("Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury, the defense calls Simon Callow"), The New York Post ("All's Will, Ends Well"), New York Daily News, Washington Post ("makes it cool again to be smart"), Huffington Post ("restoring King Shakespeare"). The show never directly addresses it, though the programme note confronts it head-on. We didn't create the piece with the authorship dispute in mind, though the title under which it was first staged, The Man from Stratford, was a deliberate poke in the eye of the doubters. And last year's risible-if-good-to-look-at movie Anonymous, which maybe didn't bomb quite so much in the US as it did in the UK, has made it timely - "Eat your heart out, Roland Emmerich," as one of those smart Yankee reviewers puts it.

RSC Shakespeare Edition Update

Since I have so little time to blog, I thought I'd keep this space ticking over by cross-posting one of my even more infrequent additions to the blog of the RSC Shakespeare Edition:

We have just received the completed text of our final director interview - fittingly, from RSC Artistic Director Michael Boyd himself, on his epic production of the three parts of Henry VI. A few high res pictures still to come from the archive, but otherwise everything is on course for delivery of the last batch of individual volumes. If all goes well in production, our ten year task will be over. We began work shortly before Michael became Artistic Director; we published the Complete Works in 2007, at the climax of the extraordinary RSC Complete Works Festival, and we will bring the Individual Titles to completion as the RSC-produced World Shakespeare Festival gets under way in London in April 2012.

Since the RSC has nearly always produced the Henry VI plays as a cycle, we were always keen to publish all three parts in a single volume.The question then arose as to whether there should be any other joint titles or double volumes. We seriously explored the idea of doing Henry IV Part 1 as both a double volume with Part 2, in the Folio texts, and an individual volume of Part One alone in its Quarto text. This would have got round one of my few regrets about our Folio-based editorial policy: the watering-down of Falstaff's magnificent oaths and exclamations. I argued that theatregoers, who often get treated to paired productions of the two parts (most recently at the Globe), would like the double volume but that students doing Part One as a set text (it is prescribed far more often than Part Two) would like the singleton. But the publishers did not buy this argument.

The publishers' decision is always final: especially now the world of print publishing is so much tougher than it was ten years ago when we began. Being brutally realistic, we had to ask: how many copies will be sold of a solo volume of Timon of Athens or King John? We seriously considered not doing some of the plays in this format (and have, indeed, with regret decided not to do The Two Noble Kinsmen, on the grounds that it contains a fair bit more Fletcher than Shakespeare). A compromise was eventually reached: we are putting King John and Henry VIII together in a single volume -- the two "non-cyclical" histories, paired provocatively together (i.e. the two that are not part of a sequence of four plays, as all the other English histories are). I think it works, not least because they are both plays in which religion and politics go together: King John gives an important part to the dispute with a papal envoy, while Henry VIII turns on the break from Rome. Maybe we should have boldly called them "Two Reformation Histories".

The solution for Timon, meanwhile, was to pair it with Titus. "Two classical plays", bringing together Athens and Rome, the great warrior turning on the city and the great philanthropist turning on his friends. Titus has become a much studied, sold, produced and discussed play: we hope it will help Timon along. The pairing also avoided another publishing problem: Jonathan Bate edited Quarto Titus for the Arden Shakespeare series and there was a non-compete clause in the contract: he could not edit the play again in a single volume for a different publisher. Whilst we could have argued that an edition of Folio Titus was a different play, that might have been pushing it a bit.

Questions of this sort around publishing agreements also explain the non-appearance (yet) of e-books. We have a complex arrangement whereby Random House hold US rights and Macmillan publish us in UK/Europe/Commonwealth. But the enforcement of regional rights in e-books is much harder to sustain, so discussions are ongoing. There are various other rights and related issues to be ironed out, as well as technical ones. Thanks for patience ...

On the matter of "Shakespeare & Fletcher", now I'm off (at last) to watch Cardenio. And any readers who have stayed with this blog despite its long silences may like to watch this space for an announcement coming soon regarding Shakespeare's Collaborative Plays.

University Matters

In preparation for my new role as head of an Oxford college, this occasional blog will now address matters of general higher education interest as well as more literary thoughts. There is a very interesting piece on the BBC website about the huge variation in regional origin of students at top universities. This is arguably as significant--and certainly it is less widely recognized and written about--than the much discussed question of state versus independent school admissions. The article suggests that there are deep cultural and aspirational variations and expectations between many in the north and the south. And of course that has a long history. One of the best ways of understanding that history is by means of literature--novels such as Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South and Disraeli's Sybil or The Two Nations come to mind. Indeed, Disraeli is a figure who is relevant today in all sorts of respects.