Running With Shakespeare – Tom Cable

Mr. Tom Cable is a

legendary figure in British studies, British studies seminar. He’s been
attending this group. I calculate for 43 years. And so he
has some idea of the weekly sessions and what happens here.
I just want to point out that he was a Yale undergraduate. And I believe this was the
beginning of his strong ideas about English poetry.
He studied, among others, under Harold Bloom. I also want to mention
that it was only recently that General Colin Powell mentioned that
it was because he had memorized Chaucer, that he’d became a four star
general. So I don’t know whether Tom had anything to do with this or not.
I do want to read just a brief assessment of his
work. Cable’s discussion moves from
the rhythms of old English poetry and prose to the poetry of Chaucer.
He constantly asks fundamental questions regarding the intentions of the poets.
He provides the foundation for a new understanding of the creation and evolution
of English versification from the seventh century to the present.
I’ll only add to that that he’s managed to write a book, a textbook on the history of the English language
that manages to make money. This is
and I’ll ask James O’LOGHLIN just to say a word on behalf of the English department.
I’m lurking back here because I’m going to have to sneak out early and go out to find out who try
to practice what that street embodying
the language of Shakespeare. But it’s just an incredible privilege to have
studied and to have taught in the same department as Tom,
a world famous scholar and historian of the English language, and
also one of the only people who’s committed all of Shakespeare’s sonnets to memory.
He’s a tremendous reader of poetry,
from old English to middle English to Shakespeare to the present. So
you’re in for a treat today. Tom
Clancy, thanks to both of you for those introductions. Each of which had
an element of exaggeration. But James and I
used to read Shakespeare on Sunday afternoons with Gareth Morgan.
And this is this perfect here. Yo, yo, yo. Yeah. Right.
And I have I have great memories of those readings. George
Christian has more hand outs. If you don’t. If you do. If you need one.
And I have even more up here because I think
if we’re using this new technology, which we’re just trying out,
you see it’s ink on paper. The only
possible problem is not having enough. And so I’ve never had
too few handouts. My presentation will
break into two unequal parts of about 30 minutes and 10 minutes.
So that 40 minutes total will leave time for discussion. And if you like
comparisons of my experiences with your own as regards
poetry, memory and the embody left the voices from the past.
The first part, we’ll deal with three poetic traditions. I feel pretty
confident about these in chronological order. Beowulf in the 8th Century,
Sagawa in the Green Knight from the 14th Century and Shakespeare’s sonnets from the 15
as we walk along the road and what they do to our bodies or what our bodies
do to them. The poems spanned nine centuries, during which the English language
changed drastically, and so we might expect a different interaction between
our bodies and Beowulf and say, our bodies and sonnet
presented it in public or in private, and I
would be embarrassed to because it might seem loopy.
Except that. Bill, I’m among friends and they only poet in this part will
be Percy Shelley. But I’ll make reference to the two women writers who deeply
influenced him because they figure crucially in what I’m doing with Percy Shelley.
They are Mary Shelley and her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft.
So let’s start with Beowulf.
The first excerpt on your hand out the first eleven lines, a kind of
prolog to the three thousand one hundred ninety two line to the point. You also
have Seamus Heaney’s translation in the old English.
I imagine you won’t recognize many of the words or even their cognates in modern
English. The last four words of the excerpt on the first page
may be more more recognizable, especially if I tell you that the first letter
in now I’m looking at the last four words on the first page of
the last letter, which is called A Thorn and is barred from the runic
alphabet is pronounced as t-h and the digraph that follows is pronounced
as intact. So the first word is flat modern English
in that. And the last four words mean
well in old English. That was God, Keunang. And they mean
that was a good king are as Heaney has it, that was one good king. So
it’s not an accident that those four words form a clause by themselves. You’ll notice that they’re
separated from the first part of the line by a white space. And in fact,
all the other lines have a white space in the middle. That’s a modern editor’s way of
indicating that the poem was composed and possibly memorized by
using the half line as a unit, not the full line. And
that’s not the way it appears in the manuscript. My handout was getting long.
And so what I did was just make copies of a
make a few copies of the first page in Beowulf
and I’ll just ask these around. And
they they looked like they’re written out in prose. And that’s
called vellum was expensive. So but we know from the rhythm and the meter
exactly how to divide that that prose looking
piece into poetry.
The numbers in circles in number one on the handout are my own contribution to the study
of Anglo-Saxon poetics.
There there are implications to that way of looking at it. But
this isn’t the appropriate place for the details. I’ll simply say that I made
the discovery of the eight part structure of the Anglo Saxon line while writing
my dissertation at U.T. in nineteen sixty nine. My
supervising professor was James SLED, who was a well-known
and controversial faculty member. He
was furious when he read my draft and he he said I was brash.
Ruth Layman, who was also on the committee, didn’t like it either,
so I failed my dissertation defense and I was desperate.
It’s seared into my brain because that summer
we were trying to get away to my first job at the University of Illinois. So I rapidly
rewrote the dissertation according to their specifications. When I got to Illinois, I published
a lot to justify my hypothesis and argument and my
former dissertation committee hired me back as an associate professor with tenure. Three years later
in the year sent scholarly opinion has reassured me. This
week I’m writing a proposal for Anbari University Press on early English poetry
and it takes the original theory and my dissertation and my first book as foundational for
everything else. An old English major in rhythm. Finally, I’ll say that
I’ll quit talking about myself in a minute, but I will say that during the 1970s and 1980s,
my research took a wrong track and I misspent the
middle years of my career collaborating with musicians and musicologists.
I was certain that the eight parts of the Anglo-Saxon line had to be ‘cept melodies and chanted
to discrete pitches in order to be perceived. Benjamin Bagby of the ensembles,
the Quincy of which was then in Cologne, now in Paris, came Dalston, and we cooked up a
performance with tunes, and he has performed it ever since at major festivals and venues
around the world. For example, a couple of times at Lincoln Center, a one man
full evening performance of old English with surtitles giving the
translation as at the opera. Unfortunately, subsequent
research by others forced me to reject the tunes in favor of a more subtle rhythm, which I’ll
demonstrate here. Bagby continues to sing it the way we worked out in mid-1990’s.
This is a slower, more stately tempo and at a walking pace each
step falls on a syllable or a syllable equivalent. Let me say that again, because
out of a lot there at the end, each at a walking pace, each
step falls on a single syllable or a syllable equivalent. In a syllable
equivalent can be two syllables or three or half
as many as four or five. Right. But the footfalls
just done on four times and he
chaplin eight times to the line. So
here it. Let me just read you Heaney’s translation
so that you won’t have to be trying to figure out what it
says. So there’s on page two at the top. So the spirit anes and
days gone by and the kings who rule them had courage and greatness. We have heard
of those princes heroic campaigns. There was Sheild Chaifetz and scourge of
many tribes are Ridker a made benches rampaging among foes. This terror
of the whole troops had come for a foundling to start with. He would flourish later on as
his powers waxed and his worth was proved. In the end, each clan on
the outlying coast beyond the HOIL Road had to give in to him and begin to pay tribute.
That was one good king, and there might be people who have come in
later or sitting at the back. And I should point out that George Christian would be happy to give you a handout, which
is, I think, useful when we read this. So if
you need one, kind of make yourself known so that if you’re if you’re walking along and thinking
about Beowulf, you start out with what way ga. See, it’s
it’s the way I’ve got those numbers. They are the way you do your steps in
there. Don Graham said cooling threw
me up on who that have on. Island
off Shield Shafeeq Shaya, a threat to morning to manage the
misstepped Santa †lost scythe on Everest, where
a chef and an atheist who we get hot wax, the walk
and doom. Both got him a huge room sit and draw over
from Rodda, who were on his shoulder. Goan von
Jud. on. That was Gode cunning. So one, two, three, four.
Bagley’s sings that tunes, which are a little embarrassing, but he gets a good I mean
a little embarrassing now, but he gets a good audience response.
The second half of the 14th century saw a flourishing of great poetry
in England. Everyone is familiar with Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in London toward the end of the century,
and some may know the opening lines of the General Prolog. My memory
and my history of the English language class. I always assign students to memorize the first
and as I discovered here, in fact, at lunch was James Scott. I don’t know if he’s here,
but he reminded me that he had taken my history the English language
in 2003 and memorize the lines still knew them. So this happens years later.
I’ll encounter students will come up to me and began a long, hot opera with it. Sure,
as James didn’t do it.
Many people are also aware, although probably more vaguely, that there was a flourishing of poetry contemporary
with Chaucer in the West Midlands and Lancashire, Cheshire, Worcester, for example, Pierce Plowman
and start going into Green Knight. This poetry used the liberation as old English
dead grass. Chaucer used rhyme, and the rhythm of the line up superficially
seems to have much in common with the Anglo-Saxon poetry with just plants that so Chaucer
looked French and Italian for his first forms in the westbend Luhn poets seem to somehow continue
to or either continue the native tradition
or are to revive it or reinvented, even though the language had changed considerably
during the 12th and 13th century. Not least because of the Norman conquest.
And here again. OK. OK, I’ll go ahead and say here again,
I made a contribution study on that April poetics during the 1980s, another scholar and I,
who was at the University of Virginia, without knowing of the work of the other, discovered that there was a system of
counting syllables and middle English. But it was quite different from the system of counting in old English.
We met each other for the first time at the nineteen eighty five at My Lai convention, where we were on a panel
together, and rather startlingly for both of us pretended our overlapping
discoveries to a perplexed audience
once again. A controversy ensued, which I’ll spare you, except to say that
it too had a happy ending. And it calls a blanket time. I’ll only
say that there is a precise rhythm to the births, but it is more cerebral than
intuitive, and I still find it a hard rhythm to walk to. As with Beowulf or
to run to as with Shakespeare, it’s a beautiful
rhythm, but I can’t get it in my body as I can. The earlier and
later I find it jerky and stop and go, and
and yet I hope eventually to internalize it in a way that makes it
feel more natural. You’ve gotten more’ Boroff. Translation This is when Garwin
is riding out into the wilderness to keep his rendezvous with the Green Knight and it’s a beheading game.
And it could be that going it’s going to be beheaded when he finds the Green Knight.
So it’s a pretty scary passage. And not only that, it’s cold out there
and little birds are shivering.
Whom by whom? This is a top page three by.
I’m out. Next morning he makes his way into a forest fastness, fearsome and wild high hills
on either hand with horror below oaks, old and huge by the hundreds. Together,
the heysel and the Hawthorn were all intertwined with Roffe raveled Moss that Ryan and like hung
with many birds. Unblind upon bare twigs that peep most
piteously for pain of the cold. Good night on Gringa. Let glides there under through many a marsh
and mire a man on loan. And so this is a little more recognizable
as English. And as I’m sure you have the deuce, the Xs indicate
unstressed syllables and the slash marks indicate stressed syllables. And what I would
like to do is for my foot folds to occur on the stress level. But I’m not sure
being moved on the morning. Marilla. Hey, Raiders into a forest full day that fairly it
was wilda he little pull up at the well. It’s just I’m not going to
see it. He he a healer’s upon which a halva and hope withits
under a poor oak is full. Hoga one hundred took out the hall-style and the Hawthorn Hall at
all. Someone with Rockhole Raggett the most riled eyewear. One thing that happens is that
it kind of goes fast in the first half line and then puts the brakes on in the
second hartline. So this too, like old English divided into half lines. I think
you’ve had enough of that. I’m watching my time, just as I’ve never had too few
handouts or never run over my time. I’ve given a paper onto
Shakespeare many years ago. I realized that I got bored when I went for a three to five mile
run by myself and it would help if I had Shakespeare’s company on the high comeback trail.
So I began memorizing the sonnets by writing them on four by six
cards, which I would stick in my pocket. And
conveniently each rule for by six card has 14 lines. So
on these, I’ve been stuck. I’ll do maybe
Take a look. And that’s why although Roger asked me to.
I’m not very keen to do kind of act lighten Mr. Memory from Hitchcock’s
symbol. But I’ve done it before for this group a couple of times. But
the problem is I get nervous and then I can draw a blank
and I feel stand up here humiliated. But
if you look at it at a famous one, Sonnet 30, I’ll explain about the icons in a minute.
It’s just to get the structure in mind. It has three quatrains rhyming on alternate lines and
a closing couplet. And it’s in iambic pentameter, which makes jogging
to it very easily especial, especially if you’re a slow runner. As I am, the put
the foot strikes, the ground with each beat are each accented syllable. Sadly to recall
during the many years when Wayne Lesher and I ran decades, actually Wayne
pull me along faster than my normal pace, and it would have made the iambic
pentameter too too rushed. However,
when we ran, we were always busy talking about that part with university in the national scene,
and so the more agitated we got, the faster we ran
the eye. And I should also say that Tom Noonan here was my original inspiration
for running in 1980 in the streets of perished in that during the
winter of 1980 and during the spring in the south of France through through the vineyards. And so he got Carol-Lynn
meter running, which I’ve done ever since at that time. Noonan
Two would go along faster than I could go, and it just made Shakespeare too fast.
So.
You can see the poor quatrains. And
they’re the icon on the last line. It’s just kind of spaced funny. I had to do that,
as I said. I’ll explain about the dog in a minute.
And then the closing couplet, but.
Here is. OK. I should explain. Now, if if you
look. At the bottom of the next
page, page 6, you see arrest versus a firm marda versus a caesura,
and so there are pauses in portree, as everyone knows. And the caesura
is is a very confused term because it refers both to arrest and from
Otta are a hold. An arrest is something is is a part of the rhythm that
if you have a conductor, the baton keeps moving, whereas a paramatta
as a hold and and and it doesn’t count in
the in the time signature as such. And what I’ve indicated here is that if
if you. OK. So if I’m here, I don’t have
a dog and I’m running along and it’s pretty smooth. When to the sessions of sweet
silent thought, I summon up remembrance of things past. I sigh
the lack of many a thing I stopped. And with all woes new. Well, my dear times
waste. Then count on drowned and I unused to flow for precious friends hid and death
dateless night. So it seemed that that foot is hitting
about every six hundred milliseconds, which recent cognitive
studies, science studies have showed is the optimal timing to perceive
a beat. So so that works very well, and that’s it. You
might also have noticed that I continued to run to run when there were no syllables,
right? Or sometimes the foot would fall
on an unstressed syllable. But that’s OK, because the rhythm is not in the language,
it’s in the body. And I guess that’s the main point I want to make in all of this.
The the embodiment of rhythm. The language has to
somehow match up with the internal clock that is always ticking
in the brain. And that has its optimal periodicity of six hundred milliseconds.
All right. That makes sense. So I am. And temperature temperatures. Very good for that. If you’re able
to keep running. Now, you know, if you have a dog,
the dog might want to stop and survey the scene
and smell the flowers and you’re just pulling on it and trying to get it to go along.
And so that’s what I’ve indicated the end of each quarter and you’re just pulling on this dog. And so that really
interrupted that. That’s that’s our problem of a model. Right. You’re a conductor,
their targets. And then let’s say, how am I doing? OK.
I’ve already mentioned cognitive poetics and you can get a sample of that
on page five on the connection of beach to the motor system.
There’s so much has been written recently. There are, however, this page five reasons to
suggest that entrainment of auditory neural activity to external rhythms is not sufficient to explain
beat perception. One such reason is that pure perception of a musical beat listening in
the absence of overt movement strongly engages the motor system, including the regions
such as pree motor cortex, basal ganglia and supplementary motor regions
and a bunch of references that are pretty technical. All of this is is beyond my expertise.
I’m just taking the summaries of what people of the neuroscientists have done.
In other words, there is an intimate connection between beat perception and motor functions of the brain, and any theory of the
perception needs to account for this coupling musical beat perception. And
and then under. This is important to beat. Perception is predictive. It’s not completely passive. You’re constructing
the beats and predicting what’s going to come. Musical beat perception involved perceiving
a periodic pulse inspect temporally complex sound sequences. Listeners often express
their perception of the pulse by moving rhythmically and synchrony is I’m trying to do
here with the pulse. The hard bop bobbing foot tapping
our dance in firmly. The beat is what we tap our foot to when listening to music
in the lab toward this rhythmic response. Music can easily be studied by asking people to tap a finger
and blah blah blah. So I just give you this to tell you. There’s been an awful lot that’s been studied within
the past 15 to 20 years, much more in music
than in portree. And finally, Sonnet 30.
I mean, sonnet 20 in number four. Now what? This
is something I just did as long as I’ve been writing these, I’ve just been discovering. I just discovered
last month of 154 sonnets
only does one use its feminine rhymes throughout. A feminine rhyme is on two
syllables of stress, syllable and an unstressed syllable. So you’ve got
at the bottom of page three at the end of a line painted Paschen acquainted
and so on. Alternate lines. quited fashion rolling. Gage of
controlling and. I felt
a feminine rhyme is on. So it’s on the stress, the unstressed syllable, a masculine rhyme
is only on a stressed syllable. So here’s what I realized.
If you’re jogging to a line that has feminine rhyme, you have to take a step at
the end of the line that doesn’t fall on any syllable. And you can kind of
visualize a woman’s face with no mate. Nature’s own handpainted has
style. The master mistress of my passion. That’s where I’d be taking steps. A woman’s gentle
heart, but not acquainting shot. See you fill in that. That’s a rest. Not, not, not
a formatter. And it’s part of the rhythmical structure. And I never noticed that. Apparently,
I guess, as I said, because this is the only this the only sonnet that’s completely in
feminine rhythm. And it so happens
that the sonnet is concerned with the meanings of feminine and masculine beyond
prosodic usage. It’s concerned with female and male,
and it’s addressing the man
and taking the kind of development of the developmental physiology of the
time in the womb and saying embryos start out as one or the other. And
and in this case, nature asshe with capital
in so much like this embryo, that nature being heterosexual,
Precht the embryo out is this on its head, put a put a penis on it. And so you’ve got a
lot of pun puns in here like thing.
No, I like a thing can refer to both male and
female genitals. And and I’ll let you figure out in
the third line about on page 3 what pun is and acquainted. Quite
so. So
if I can do this right, I’ll I’ll have a plot falling at the underline a woman’s face
with. Oh. And also that doesn’t keep you from having steps that
it would be like a player piano. If if you had a hit a syllable with every step. But there
are some places where you have to have a step in order for the rhythm
to work a woman’s face with nature’s own handpainted. See, right there
has now the master mistress of my passion, a woman’s gentle heart, but acquainted
with shift and changes as Volkman passion say. Because if you didn’t do that,
you’d have to unstressed syllables coming together and past or try syllabic foot. And Shakespeare just doesn’t
do that. It would undercut the rhyme. A woman’s face with nature’s own hand paint painter test style.
So you can’t do that. The master mistress on my passion alone. See?
OK. Anybody have any questions about any of that?
Because we’re coming. Coming to
a kind of conclusion, anybody have any questions about? Well, I’ll ask her questions later.
Sorry, I didn’t read all of the all of the bit. And I had another
page of stuff of samples, of studies from cognitive science. But pollsters measure at the bottom
of page five is interesting because it was. It’s not it’s no longer in fashion.
But it was at this time that the ports were trying to work out a stable system of English rhythm
before Spencer and Sydney and certainly before Shakespeare.
And so pollsters measure I love this kind of Edwardian period
state statement by George Saint-Marie that jog trot out at the butter woman’s right to market.
And it’s it’s it’s pretty deadening and it has
its lines of six beats alternating with line seven beats. So it’s three and three and then
seven. And within between those three and three, you have to have a
arrest. Pause. Now, have I found a way to weep and, well, my fill
now can I in my doleful days and so content my will the way to weep enough
for such as list Aweil. Well, is this to go aboard the ship for pleasure. Pleasure Barratt’s
sail. So can you hear that? Dun dun dun. Just doing the beach. Dun dun dun
dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun.
So then it turns out that this pollsters measure taps into the hardwiring
of mammals for sexual reproduction. And it’s especially obvious in
rabbits which reproduce sexually
rabbits.
So show rabbits are hardwired
to do pollsters measure, which I don’t think related to the
Easter Bunny one.
One, two, three. One, two, three,
three. One, two, three, four, five.
Watch out. Yeah. Watch out for the bunnies
and watch out for the butter women. OK. So
I’m running about five minutes over. What I wanted. But I’m going to move
into the shorter part of my talk and that should take only ten minutes.
Which may it may seem unrelated to memorization, but it all connects. It involves the internalization
of rhythms and other linguistic features, including verbal melodies that someone else
has produced. My first experience was with this was in the 1970s when I became the coauthor
of Our Bawls A History of the English Language, which Ball wrote in the 1930s
before I was born in a style rather different from my own. And it was the book from which I learned
the subject as a graduate student. However, Ball was
a man who spent his whole life in Philadelphia, where I had never been, and he had lived there during the first
part of the 20th century, which was already history to me. So I had to tune
in to the style of this guy and weave my sentences in and out of his, and the text cannot
suffer express senses of my own. It had to be seamless and
there were different ways that I got into into internalizing his prose. For one thing,
I found that I had to give up listening to music while I was reading and writing because the stronger
melodies and rhythms of Beethoven or Brahms would just cut across the more
subtle verbal melodies. Never since I’ve had to read and write in silence. I took up yoga
and meditation in order to be passive and to receive it. And
and I got I got pretty good at becoming another voice
and and I would send a ball was
in his 80s. Then I would send him drafts and sometimes he would comment on the content,
learning to make it more conservative than I’d made it. But he never commented on the style,
never made corrections or at any semicolon earning or self-taught. I’m pretty pretty well internalized
it. Which relates.
OK. So before we get Shelly and I just just wanted to add, this is probably
recall this from Joanna Hitchcock, who told me about it at the Christmas party.
It’s fine. My. It’s fine. It’s by John Hollander
called committed to memory. One hundred points memorized. Did I recall it from me? Sorry.
And Hollander was actually my teacher as an undergraduate who
through whom I decided to become an English major because he liked to do kind
of. He was a poet, and that was good. He liked to do linguistics, which was
I realized later was kind of amateurish. And he liked music. So he did all all these all these things.
So after I took his course, I decided become an English major. And so in
this, he got he he had. And his introduction,
he talks about how it’s a lot easier to memorize
and meter than otherwise. And a number of questions guided the choosing here. For one thing,
the free verse, a modernist. And later, Port Portrait’s very much harder to memorize than the act central
verse of nursery rhyme and other popular song or the ACT central syllabic verse, so-called
iambic trochaic dactyl and so forth. Of literary portray in English from Charles her own.
And so that that should be almost self-evident. I can expand on it, if you like, but
on the last page you have the most
the beginning of a list of the 500 most popular poems, and all of
those are either and meter are as and overbaked something or very
close to a meter. But here is what what else he says. And this kind of gets to the to the
Sheli part in reciting a poem aloud. You’re not like an actor coming to understand
and then to feel yourself in a dramatic part, a fictional person. Let me read that again. You’re not
like that in reciting a poem aloud. You are not like an actor coming to understand and
then to feel yourself in a dramatic part, a fictional person. It’s rather
that you come to understand and then to be the voice of the point itself.
So with Shelly and an extension of the idea of the embodiment of another’s consciousness
a couple of months ago was the bicentennial of the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which appeared
in January 1818. And in four years we’ll come to the bicentennial
of Percy Shellie’s death, his drowning in Italy and the Bay of La Rayce.
So this year, there’s more than the usual amount of attention to the Shellie’s and newspaper features.
And in places like The New Yorker and the portree Foundation Web site. Coincidentally,
I began turning my attention to the Chalets and Biron and their circle of friends in
Pisa. About a year and a half ago. And what I’m going to describe
will probably sound eccentric and pointless, but it’s it’s
something I’ve thought about ever since I took a course in graduate school here
with William Pratt titled Byron and Shelley. And it’s my current consuming passion. So
here’s the deal. When Shelley drowned, he left an incomplete poem
titled The Triumph of Life at round five hundred forty four lines before it
broke off the last line being then what is life? I cried.
I have always thought I’d be a great challenge to try to answer Shelly’s question by completing
his poem two centuries later. Shelly now is not the most sympathetic
poet to work with. Keats would be a lot more pleasant. Shelly never got beyond his male
adolescent fantasies and he doesn’t treat women well. There was much about
him that was pathetic, irritating and downright sordid.
Byron, his close friend, friendless, unspeakable in his most
deprived period. Byron claimed I’ve had sex with 200 women in Venice during 18 months
and 18, 17, 18, 18, including mothers and daughters.
But back to the point then. What is life?
I cried. We’re not actually the last word, Shelly wrote. They were the last words, as Mary Shelley
represented him in the volume of posthumous poems published in 1924. There were
four or five additional lines and fragments which Mary Shelley ignored as she began
devoting the rest of her life to creating Percy Shelley as she
wanted him to be remembered. And her efforts were successful from the 19th century, understanding
of her husband as ethereal and angelic and not the
jerk that he was. Their marriage was in trouble at the time
of his death, largely because of Percy Shelley’s narcissism, selfishness and
insensitivity, not to mention his many mistresses. However,
her preface to the posthumous poems goes on about his admirable qualities, his
fearless enthusiasm, and the cause which he considered the most sacred upon earth, the improvement
of the moral and physical state of mankind. Now, the problem is a person can be so concerned
with the state of mankind that they can
be uncaring, cruel to the people around
them, so that when she says no man was ever more devoted than heed
to the endeavor of making those around him happy. That’s just false. So she wrote The
Triumph for Life. What’s his last word? And was left and so unfinished. A state that I arranged it in its
present form with great difficulty. Now we have to admire Mary Schelling for her valiant
efforts. And there may be something, however, of Victor Frankenstein
in her creation of a different person after his death.
There is actually much more of Percy Shelley and Victor Frankenstein, which
must have been intentional on Mary Shelley’s part, but we don’t have time for that.
There’s also the problem that Mary created her version of Percy Shelley by just striking
the referring to people. It’s a real problem here because you don’t want to be sexist,
but it can get very confusing if you say to Shelley. And you know, whether whether it’s
a man trying to keep it by destroying the pages of journals
and correspondence. And we would find that reprehensible. But it may have been shot at Mary Shelley’s way
of surviving. As for his last poem. It was
not only that Mary edited it, but it has been said that her 18 20 second novel, The Last
Man, was her way of completing the triumph of life in prose.
All right. It may be actually her best novel, despite Frankensteins
legendary status and its endurance as a cultural landmark. It concerns Lionel
Verney, the last man living on earth after a global catastrophe.
It’s set in the 21st century and in a scary way, it seems very timely.
Anyway, I’ve been working on a conclusion of the triumph of life that is more
optimistic and which James B airy in his two
thousand eight very thorough biography, thinks that
it would have turned out more optimistic than than what we have
writing in terms of Rema is slow going. I was hoping
I’ve got 50 or 60 lines. I was hoping to get enough to run by Sam Baker before this. But just I just
have to keep working at it. What makes the task even slower going is that I would like it to be
a conclusion that Shelley could have written from aspects of his own life, not just what a 21st
century academic would write, even if it grows organically out of what is already
there. And there are several themes here that connect with actually what we were talking
about at at at lunch, whether whether you think about a work
in its biographical and historical context are as the old new critics did.
Separated from its context. And what I would like to do if I finish this is really a habit
grow out of Shelley’s life. And this is where Mary Wollstonecraft comes in.
She is part of the historical context of Shelley’s point by way of Rousseau, who figures prominently
in the point and also in Wollstonecraft Vindication of the Rights of woman. In 1792,
which influenced both Mary and Percy Shelley, that
their courtship while Percy Shelley was still married, was at her partly at
her tomb in the St Pancras churchyard, where they would read her work. So Wollstonecraft
attitude toward Rousseau and her statements of vindication
and in her letters are so complex and apparently contradictory that I’ve spent months trying to understand the workings
of her mind. And I’ve copied the many pages of my own handwriting of the vindication
of the rights. A woman Russo’s idea for the education of girls was to
raise them to be croquettes and to be pleasurable to men. Wollstonecraft, as you
can imagine, reacted strongly against this philosophy. Throughout the book. But the same
time, her letter showed a very complex attitude towards sex. Her letters to her lover,
the American Gilbert Enlai, are passionate, as are her letters to her eventual husband at the end
of her life. William Godwin And just despite what seems her rather austere
attempt and a vindication of the rights of woman to deny sexual desire
to women, Mary Wollstonecraft was a passionate and highly
sexual person. But her description of
the contemporary women around her sounds like what Rousseau would have
written or what he or what he wanted as a swooning croquettes and Jezebel’s and lanterns
and silly, simpering, lisping flirts. And of course, her
point is that men are to blame for this. Women are simply reflecting what men are asking
them to do. And she also complains
about women novelists writing romances that were essentially producing pornography.
She was hard on women, but I’ll just toss out this idea. I think Mary Wollstonecraft
would have been less interested in the political movements, the demonstrations, the campaign for the right to
vote and the legal struggles in the 19th and 20th centuries. She would have supported it, of course, but I think
children more interested in looking beyond all this to the kind of cultural
changes we have actually seen in the United States and Britain
during the past six months. And in any event, this interpretation figures
and my continuation of Shelley’s point, it’s it’s not only
my own. I actually got this idea from a wonderful biography
by lindvall Lyndall Gordon and.
I think, well, I’m I’m out of time. I was going to say something about the new
criticism ill and the thick historical biographical
scholarship at U.T. in the in the 1960s.
But that might be a little too academic and I’d be interested in hearing what
other people I’m signing up. Thanks.