Memorization has played a part in the composition and transmission of British literary texts. This talk will consider the embodied rhythms of poetry from Beowulf (eighth century) to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (fourteenth century), then on to Shakespeare\u2019s Sonnets (1590s), and poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley two hundred years ago. With reference to current work in music and cognitive science, including the timing neurons in the brain, one question will be: can a memorized poem, recited in time, affect the body as it moves in space\u2014as in walking along a footpath, or running? Tom Cable is the Jane Weinert Blumberg Chair Emeritus in English and a founding member of British Studies. He has published books and articles on the rhythms of English poetry from their origins to the present. Since 1978 he has been coauthor of A History of the English Language, now in its sixth edition.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Memorization has played a part in the composition and transmission of British literary texts. This talk will consider the embodied rhythms of poetry from Beowulf (eighth century) to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (fourteenth century), then on to Shakespeare\u2019s Sonnets (1590s), and poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley two hundred years ago. With reference to […]","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":20,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","episode_type":"audio","audio_file":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2018\/03\/18-03-23-BSLS.mp3","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"55.21M","filesize_raw":"57888128","date_recorded":"23-03-2018","explicit":"","block":"","itunes_episode_number":"","itunes_title":"","itunes_season_number":"","itunes_episode_type":""},"tags":[7,16,17,14,15],"categories":[],"series":[2],"class_list":{"0":"post-35","1":"podcast","2":"type-podcast","3":"status-publish","4":"has-post-thumbnail","6":"tag-british","7":"tag-cable","8":"tag-english","9":"tag-shakespeare","10":"tag-tom","11":"series-bsls","12":"entry"},"acf":{"related_episodes":"","hosts":[{"ID":949,"post_author":"10","post_date":"2021-01-20 19:50:06","post_date_gmt":"2021-01-20 19:50:06","post_content":"\n
Wm. Roger Louis is head of the British Studies Lecture Series. He is an American historian and a professor at the University of Texas at Austin<\/a>. Louis is the editor-in-chief of The Oxford History of the British Empire<\/a><\/em>, a former president of the American Historical Association<\/a> (AHA), a former chairman of the U.S. Department of State's Historical Advisory Committee, and a founding director of the AHA's National History Center in Washington, D. C.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Wm. Roger Louis","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"wm-roger-louis","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2021-01-20 19:50:06","post_modified_gmt":"2021-01-20 19:50:06","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/?post_type=speaker&p=949","menu_order":0,"post_type":"speaker","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"guests":[{"ID":781,"post_author":"40","post_date":"2020-06-23 18:50:06","post_date_gmt":"2020-06-23 18:50:06","post_content":"\n Tom Cable is the Jane Weinert Blumberg Chair Emeritus in English and a founding member of British Studies. He has published books and articles on the rhythms of English poetry from their origins to the present. Since 1978 he has been coauthor of A History of the English Language, now in its sixth edition.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Tom Cable","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"tom-cable","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2020-06-23 18:50:06","post_modified_gmt":"2020-06-23 18:50:06","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/?post_type=speaker&p=781","menu_order":0,"post_type":"speaker","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"transcript":" Mr. Tom Cable is a
\n\ue5d4
\nlegendary figure in British studies, British studies seminar. He’s been
\nattending this group. I calculate for 43 years. And so he
\nhas some idea of the weekly sessions and what happens here.
\nI just want to point out that he was a Yale undergraduate. And I believe this was the
\nbeginning of his strong ideas about English poetry.
\nHe studied, among others, under Harold Bloom. I also want to mention
\nthat it was only recently that General Colin Powell mentioned that
\nit was because he had memorized Chaucer, that he’d became a four star
\ngeneral. So I don’t know whether Tom had anything to do with this or not.
\nI do want to read just a brief assessment of his
\nwork. Cable’s discussion moves from
\nthe rhythms of old English poetry and prose to the poetry of Chaucer.
\nHe constantly asks fundamental questions regarding the intentions of the poets.
\nHe provides the foundation for a new understanding of the creation and evolution
\nof English versification from the seventh century to the present.
\nI’ll only add to that that he’s managed to write a book, a textbook on the history of the English language
\nthat manages to make money. This is
\nand I’ll ask James O’LOGHLIN just to say a word on behalf of the English department.
\nI’m lurking back here because I’m going to have to sneak out early and go out to find out who try
\nto practice what that street embodying
\nthe language of Shakespeare. But it’s just an incredible privilege to have
\nstudied and to have taught in the same department as Tom,
\na world famous scholar and historian of the English language, and
\nalso one of the only people who’s committed all of Shakespeare’s sonnets to memory.
\nHe’s a tremendous reader of poetry,
\nfrom old English to middle English to Shakespeare to the present. So
\nyou’re in for a treat today. Tom
\nClancy, thanks to both of you for those introductions. Each of which had
\nan element of exaggeration. But James and I
\nused to read Shakespeare on Sunday afternoons with Gareth Morgan.
\nAnd this is this perfect here. Yo, yo, yo. Yeah. Right.
\nAnd I have I have great memories of those readings. George
\nChristian has more hand outs. If you don’t. If you do. If you need one.
\nAnd I have even more up here because I think
\nif we’re using this new technology, which we’re just trying out,
\nyou see it’s ink on paper. The only
\npossible problem is not having enough. And so I’ve never had
\ntoo few handouts. My presentation will
\nbreak into two unequal parts of about 30 minutes and 10 minutes.
\nSo that 40 minutes total will leave time for discussion. And if you like
\ncomparisons of my experiences with your own as regards
\npoetry, memory and the embody left the voices from the past.
\nThe first part, we’ll deal with three poetic traditions. I feel pretty
\nconfident about these in chronological order. Beowulf in the 8th Century,
\nSagawa in the Green Knight from the 14th Century and Shakespeare’s sonnets from the 15
\nas we walk along the road and what they do to our bodies or what our bodies
\ndo to them. The poems spanned nine centuries, during which the English language
\nchanged drastically, and so we might expect a different interaction between
\nour bodies and Beowulf and say, our bodies and sonnet
\npresented it in public or in private, and I
\nwould be embarrassed to because it might seem loopy.
\nExcept that. Bill, I’m among friends and they only poet in this part will
\nbe Percy Shelley. But I’ll make reference to the two women writers who deeply
\ninfluenced him because they figure crucially in what I’m doing with Percy Shelley.
\nThey are Mary Shelley and her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft.
\nSo let’s start with Beowulf.
\nThe first excerpt on your hand out the first eleven lines, a kind of
\nprolog to the three thousand one hundred ninety two line to the point. You also
\nhave Seamus Heaney’s translation in the old English.
\nI imagine you won’t recognize many of the words or even their cognates in modern
\nEnglish. The last four words of the excerpt on the first page
\nmay be more more recognizable, especially if I tell you that the first letter
\nin now I’m looking at the last four words on the first page of
\nthe last letter, which is called A Thorn and is barred from the runic
\nalphabet is pronounced as t-h and the digraph that follows is pronounced
\nas intact. So the first word is flat modern English
\nin that. And the last four words mean
\nwell in old English. That was God, Keunang. And they mean
\nthat was a good king are as Heaney has it, that was one good king. So
\nit’s not an accident that those four words form a clause by themselves. You’ll notice that they’re
\nseparated from the first part of the line by a white space. And in fact,
\nall the other lines have a white space in the middle. That’s a modern editor’s way of
\nindicating that the poem was composed and possibly memorized by
\nusing the half line as a unit, not the full line. And
\nthat’s not the way it appears in the manuscript. My handout was getting long.
\nAnd so what I did was just make copies of a
\nmake a few copies of the first page in Beowulf
\nand I’ll just ask these around. And
\nthey they looked like they’re written out in prose. And that’s
\ncalled vellum was expensive. So but we know from the rhythm and the meter
\nexactly how to divide that that prose looking
\npiece into poetry.
\nThe numbers in circles in number one on the handout are my own contribution to the study
\nof Anglo-Saxon poetics.
\nThere there are implications to that way of looking at it. But
\nthis isn’t the appropriate place for the details. I’ll simply say that I made
\nthe discovery of the eight part structure of the Anglo Saxon line while writing
\nmy dissertation at U.T. in nineteen sixty nine. My
\nsupervising professor was James SLED, who was a well-known
\nand controversial faculty member. He
\nwas furious when he read my draft and he he said I was brash.
\nRuth Layman, who was also on the committee, didn’t like it either,
\nso I failed my dissertation defense and I was desperate.
\nIt’s seared into my brain because that summer
\nwe were trying to get away to my first job at the University of Illinois. So I rapidly
\nrewrote the dissertation according to their specifications. When I got to Illinois, I published
\na lot to justify my hypothesis and argument and my
\nformer dissertation committee hired me back as an associate professor with tenure. Three years later
\nin the year sent scholarly opinion has reassured me. This
\nweek I’m writing a proposal for Anbari University Press on early English poetry
\nand it takes the original theory and my dissertation and my first book as foundational for
\neverything else. An old English major in rhythm. Finally, I’ll say that
\nI’ll quit talking about myself in a minute, but I will say that during the 1970s and 1980s,
\nmy research took a wrong track and I misspent the
\nmiddle years of my career collaborating with musicians and musicologists.
\nI was certain that the eight parts of the Anglo-Saxon line had to be ‘cept melodies and chanted
\nto discrete pitches in order to be perceived. Benjamin Bagby of the ensembles,
\nthe Quincy of which was then in Cologne, now in Paris, came Dalston, and we cooked up a
\nperformance with tunes, and he has performed it ever since at major festivals and venues
\naround the world. For example, a couple of times at Lincoln Center, a one man
\nfull evening performance of old English with surtitles giving the
\ntranslation as at the opera. Unfortunately, subsequent
\nresearch by others forced me to reject the tunes in favor of a more subtle rhythm, which I’ll
\ndemonstrate here. Bagby continues to sing it the way we worked out in mid-1990’s.
\nThis is a slower, more stately tempo and at a walking pace each
\nstep falls on a syllable or a syllable equivalent. Let me say that again, because
\nout of a lot there at the end, each at a walking pace, each
\nstep falls on a single syllable or a syllable equivalent. In a syllable
\nequivalent can be two syllables or three or half
\nas many as four or five. Right. But the footfalls
\njust done on four times and he
\nchaplin eight times to the line. So
\nhere it. Let me just read you Heaney’s translation
\nso that you won’t have to be trying to figure out what it
\nsays. So there’s on page two at the top. So the spirit anes and
\ndays gone by and the kings who rule them had courage and greatness. We have heard
\nof those princes heroic campaigns. There was Sheild Chaifetz and scourge of
\nmany tribes are Ridker a made benches rampaging among foes. This terror
\nof the whole troops had come for a foundling to start with. He would flourish later on as
\nhis powers waxed and his worth was proved. In the end, each clan on
\nthe outlying coast beyond the HOIL Road had to give in to him and begin to pay tribute.
\nThat was one good king, and there might be people who have come in
\nlater or sitting at the back. And I should point out that George Christian would be happy to give you a handout, which
\nis, I think, useful when we read this. So if
\nyou need one, kind of make yourself known so that if you’re if you’re walking along and thinking
\nabout Beowulf, you start out with what way ga. See, it’s
\nit’s the way I’ve got those numbers. They are the way you do your steps in
\nthere. Don Graham said cooling threw
\nme up on who that have on. Island
\noff Shield Shafeeq Shaya, a threat to morning to manage the
\nmisstepped Santa \u00e2\u20ac lost scythe on Everest, where
\na chef and an atheist who we get hot wax, the walk
\nand doom. Both got him a huge room sit and draw over
\nfrom Rodda, who were on his shoulder. Goan von
\nJud. on. That was Gode cunning. So one, two, three, four.
\nBagley’s sings that tunes, which are a little embarrassing, but he gets a good I mean
\na little embarrassing now, but he gets a good audience response.
\nThe second half of the 14th century saw a flourishing of great poetry
\nin England. Everyone is familiar with Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in London toward the end of the century,
\nand some may know the opening lines of the General Prolog. My memory
\nand my history of the English language class. I always assign students to memorize the first
\nand as I discovered here, in fact, at lunch was James Scott. I don’t know if he’s here,
\nbut he reminded me that he had taken my history the English language
\nin 2003 and memorize the lines still knew them. So this happens years later.
\nI’ll encounter students will come up to me and began a long, hot opera with it. Sure,
\nas James didn’t do it.
\nMany people are also aware, although probably more vaguely, that there was a flourishing of poetry contemporary
\nwith Chaucer in the West Midlands and Lancashire, Cheshire, Worcester, for example, Pierce Plowman
\nand start going into Green Knight. This poetry used the liberation as old English
\ndead grass. Chaucer used rhyme, and the rhythm of the line up superficially
\nseems to have much in common with the Anglo-Saxon poetry with just plants that so Chaucer
\nlooked French and Italian for his first forms in the westbend Luhn poets seem to somehow continue
\nto or either continue the native tradition
\nor are to revive it or reinvented, even though the language had changed considerably
\nduring the 12th and 13th century. Not least because of the Norman conquest.
\nAnd here again. OK. OK, I’ll go ahead and say here again,
\nI made a contribution study on that April poetics during the 1980s, another scholar and I,
\nwho was at the University of Virginia, without knowing of the work of the other, discovered that there was a system of
\ncounting syllables and middle English. But it was quite different from the system of counting in old English.
\nWe met each other for the first time at the nineteen eighty five at My Lai convention, where we were on a panel
\ntogether, and rather startlingly for both of us pretended our overlapping
\ndiscoveries to a perplexed audience
\nonce again. A controversy ensued, which I’ll spare you, except to say that
\nit too had a happy ending. And it calls a blanket time. I’ll only
\nsay that there is a precise rhythm to the births, but it is more cerebral than
\nintuitive, and I still find it a hard rhythm to walk to. As with Beowulf or
\nto run to as with Shakespeare, it’s a beautiful
\nrhythm, but I can’t get it in my body as I can. The earlier and
\nlater I find it jerky and stop and go, and
\nand yet I hope eventually to internalize it in a way that makes it
\nfeel more natural. You’ve gotten more’ Boroff. Translation This is when Garwin
\nis riding out into the wilderness to keep his rendezvous with the Green Knight and it’s a beheading game.
\nAnd it could be that going it’s going to be beheaded when he finds the Green Knight.
\nSo it’s a pretty scary passage. And not only that, it’s cold out there
\nand little birds are shivering.
\nWhom by whom? This is a top page three by.
\nI’m out. Next morning he makes his way into a forest fastness, fearsome and wild high hills
\non either hand with horror below oaks, old and huge by the hundreds. Together,
\nthe heysel and the Hawthorn were all intertwined with Roffe raveled Moss that Ryan and like hung
\nwith many birds. Unblind upon bare twigs that peep most
\npiteously for pain of the cold. Good night on Gringa. Let glides there under through many a marsh
\nand mire a man on loan. And so this is a little more recognizable
\nas English. And as I’m sure you have the deuce, the Xs indicate
\nunstressed syllables and the slash marks indicate stressed syllables. And what I would
\nlike to do is for my foot folds to occur on the stress level. But I’m not sure
\nbeing moved on the morning. Marilla. Hey, Raiders into a forest full day that fairly it
\nwas wilda he little pull up at the well. It’s just I’m not going to
\nsee it. He he a healer’s upon which a halva and hope withits
\nunder a poor oak is full. Hoga one hundred took out the hall-style and the Hawthorn Hall at
\nall. Someone with Rockhole Raggett the most riled eyewear. One thing that happens is that
\nit kind of goes fast in the first half line and then puts the brakes on in the
\nsecond hartline. So this too, like old English divided into half lines. I think
\nyou’ve had enough of that. I’m watching my time, just as I’ve never had too few
\nhandouts or never run over my time. I’ve given a paper onto
\nShakespeare many years ago. I realized that I got bored when I went for a three to five mile
\nrun by myself and it would help if I had Shakespeare’s company on the high comeback trail.
\nSo I began memorizing the sonnets by writing them on four by six
\ncards, which I would stick in my pocket. And
\nconveniently each rule for by six card has 14 lines. So
\non these, I’ve been stuck. I’ll do maybe
\nTake a look. And that’s why although Roger asked me to.
\nI’m not very keen to do kind of act lighten Mr. Memory from Hitchcock’s
\nsymbol. But I’ve done it before for this group a couple of times. But
\nthe problem is I get nervous and then I can draw a blank
\nand I feel stand up here humiliated. But
\nif you look at it at a famous one, Sonnet 30, I’ll explain about the icons in a minute.
\nIt’s just to get the structure in mind. It has three quatrains rhyming on alternate lines and
\na closing couplet. And it’s in iambic pentameter, which makes jogging
\nto it very easily especial, especially if you’re a slow runner. As I am, the put
\nthe foot strikes, the ground with each beat are each accented syllable. Sadly to recall
\nduring the many years when Wayne Lesher and I ran decades, actually Wayne
\npull me along faster than my normal pace, and it would have made the iambic
\npentameter too too rushed. However,
\nwhen we ran, we were always busy talking about that part with university in the national scene,
\nand so the more agitated we got, the faster we ran
\nthe eye. And I should also say that Tom Noonan here was my original inspiration
\nfor running in 1980 in the streets of perished in that during the
\nwinter of 1980 and during the spring in the south of France through through the vineyards. And so he got Carol-Lynn
\nmeter running, which I’ve done ever since at that time. Noonan
\nTwo would go along faster than I could go, and it just made Shakespeare too fast.
\nSo.
\nYou can see the poor quatrains. And
\nthey’re the icon on the last line. It’s just kind of spaced funny. I had to do that,
\nas I said. I’ll explain about the dog in a minute.
\nAnd then the closing couplet, but.
\nHere is. OK. I should explain. Now, if if you
\nlook. At the bottom of the next
\npage, page 6, you see arrest versus a firm marda versus a caesura,
\nand so there are pauses in portree, as everyone knows. And the caesura
\nis is a very confused term because it refers both to arrest and from
\nOtta are a hold. An arrest is something is is a part of the rhythm that
\nif you have a conductor, the baton keeps moving, whereas a paramatta
\nas a hold and and and it doesn’t count in
\nthe in the time signature as such. And what I’ve indicated here is that if
\nif you. OK. So if I’m here, I don’t have
\na dog and I’m running along and it’s pretty smooth. When to the sessions of sweet
\nsilent thought, I summon up remembrance of things past. I sigh
\nthe lack of many a thing I stopped. And with all woes new. Well, my dear times
\nwaste. Then count on drowned and I unused to flow for precious friends hid and death
\ndateless night. So it seemed that that foot is hitting
\nabout every six hundred milliseconds, which recent cognitive
\nstudies, science studies have showed is the optimal timing to perceive
\na beat. So so that works very well, and that’s it. You
\nmight also have noticed that I continued to run to run when there were no syllables,
\nright? Or sometimes the foot would fall
\non an unstressed syllable. But that’s OK, because the rhythm is not in the language,
\nit’s in the body. And I guess that’s the main point I want to make in all of this.
\nThe the embodiment of rhythm. The language has to
\nsomehow match up with the internal clock that is always ticking
\nin the brain. And that has its optimal periodicity of six hundred milliseconds.
\nAll right. That makes sense. So I am. And temperature temperatures. Very good for that. If you’re able
\nto keep running. Now, you know, if you have a dog,
\nthe dog might want to stop and survey the scene
\nand smell the flowers and you’re just pulling on it and trying to get it to go along.
\nAnd so that’s what I’ve indicated the end of each quarter and you’re just pulling on this dog. And so that really
\ninterrupted that. That’s that’s our problem of a model. Right. You’re a conductor,
\ntheir targets. And then let’s say, how am I doing? OK.
\nI’ve already mentioned cognitive poetics and you can get a sample of that
\non page five on the connection of beach to the motor system.
\nThere’s so much has been written recently. There are, however, this page five reasons to
\nsuggest that entrainment of auditory neural activity to external rhythms is not sufficient to explain
\nbeat perception. One such reason is that pure perception of a musical beat listening in
\nthe absence of overt movement strongly engages the motor system, including the regions
\nsuch as pree motor cortex, basal ganglia and supplementary motor regions
\nand a bunch of references that are pretty technical. All of this is is beyond my expertise.
\nI’m just taking the summaries of what people of the neuroscientists have done.
\nIn other words, there is an intimate connection between beat perception and motor functions of the brain, and any theory of the
\nperception needs to account for this coupling musical beat perception. And
\nand then under. This is important to beat. Perception is predictive. It’s not completely passive. You’re constructing
\nthe beats and predicting what’s going to come. Musical beat perception involved perceiving
\na periodic pulse inspect temporally complex sound sequences. Listeners often express
\ntheir perception of the pulse by moving rhythmically and synchrony is I’m trying to do
\nhere with the pulse. The hard bop bobbing foot tapping
\nour dance in firmly. The beat is what we tap our foot to when listening to music
\nin the lab toward this rhythmic response. Music can easily be studied by asking people to tap a finger
\nand blah blah blah. So I just give you this to tell you. There’s been an awful lot that’s been studied within
\nthe past 15 to 20 years, much more in music
\nthan in portree. And finally, Sonnet 30.
\nI mean, sonnet 20 in number four. Now what? This
\nis something I just did as long as I’ve been writing these, I’ve just been discovering. I just discovered
\nlast month of 154 sonnets
\nonly does one use its feminine rhymes throughout. A feminine rhyme is on two
\nsyllables of stress, syllable and an unstressed syllable. So you’ve got
\nat the bottom of page three at the end of a line painted Paschen acquainted
\nand so on. Alternate lines. quited fashion rolling. Gage of
\ncontrolling and. I felt
\na feminine rhyme is on. So it’s on the stress, the unstressed syllable, a masculine rhyme
\nis only on a stressed syllable. So here’s what I realized.
\nIf you’re jogging to a line that has feminine rhyme, you have to take a step at
\nthe end of the line that doesn’t fall on any syllable. And you can kind of
\nvisualize a woman’s face with no mate. Nature’s own handpainted has
\nstyle. The master mistress of my passion. That’s where I’d be taking steps. A woman’s gentle
\nheart, but not acquainting shot. See you fill in that. That’s a rest. Not, not, not
\na formatter. And it’s part of the rhythmical structure. And I never noticed that. Apparently,
\nI guess, as I said, because this is the only this the only sonnet that’s completely in
\nfeminine rhythm. And it so happens
\nthat the sonnet is concerned with the meanings of feminine and masculine beyond
\nprosodic usage. It’s concerned with female and male,
\nand it’s addressing the man
\nand taking the kind of development of the developmental physiology of the
\ntime in the womb and saying embryos start out as one or the other. And
\nand in this case, nature asshe with capital
\nin so much like this embryo, that nature being heterosexual,
\nPrecht the embryo out is this on its head, put a put a penis on it. And so you’ve got a
\nlot of pun puns in here like thing.
\nNo, I like a thing can refer to both male and
\nfemale genitals. And and I’ll let you figure out in
\nthe third line about on page 3 what pun is and acquainted. Quite
\nso. So
\nif I can do this right, I’ll I’ll have a plot falling at the underline a woman’s face
\nwith. Oh. And also that doesn’t keep you from having steps that
\nit would be like a player piano. If if you had a hit a syllable with every step. But there
\nare some places where you have to have a step in order for the rhythm
\nto work a woman’s face with nature’s own handpainted. See, right there
\nhas now the master mistress of my passion, a woman’s gentle heart, but acquainted
\nwith shift and changes as Volkman passion say. Because if you didn’t do that,
\nyou’d have to unstressed syllables coming together and past or try syllabic foot. And Shakespeare just doesn’t
\ndo that. It would undercut the rhyme. A woman’s face with nature’s own hand paint painter test style.
\nSo you can’t do that. The master mistress on my passion alone. See?
\nOK. Anybody have any questions about any of that?
\nBecause we’re coming. Coming to
\na kind of conclusion, anybody have any questions about? Well, I’ll ask her questions later.
\nSorry, I didn’t read all of the all of the bit. And I had another
\npage of stuff of samples, of studies from cognitive science. But pollsters measure at the bottom
\nof page five is interesting because it was. It’s not it’s no longer in fashion.
\nBut it was at this time that the ports were trying to work out a stable system of English rhythm
\nbefore Spencer and Sydney and certainly before Shakespeare.
\nAnd so pollsters measure I love this kind of Edwardian period
\nstate statement by George Saint-Marie that jog trot out at the butter woman’s right to market.
\nAnd it’s it’s it’s pretty deadening and it has
\nits lines of six beats alternating with line seven beats. So it’s three and three and then
\nseven. And within between those three and three, you have to have a
\narrest. Pause. Now, have I found a way to weep and, well, my fill
\nnow can I in my doleful days and so content my will the way to weep enough
\nfor such as list Aweil. Well, is this to go aboard the ship for pleasure. Pleasure Barratt’s
\nsail. So can you hear that? Dun dun dun. Just doing the beach. Dun dun dun
\ndun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun.
\nSo then it turns out that this pollsters measure taps into the hardwiring
\nof mammals for sexual reproduction. And it’s especially obvious in
\nrabbits which reproduce sexually
\nrabbits.
\nSo show rabbits are hardwired
\nto do pollsters measure, which I don’t think related to the
\nEaster Bunny one.
\nOne, two, three. One, two, three,
\nthree. One, two, three, four, five.
\nWatch out. Yeah. Watch out for the bunnies
\nand watch out for the butter women. OK. So
\nI’m running about five minutes over. What I wanted. But I’m going to move
\ninto the shorter part of my talk and that should take only ten minutes.
\nWhich may it may seem unrelated to memorization, but it all connects. It involves the internalization
\nof rhythms and other linguistic features, including verbal melodies that someone else
\nhas produced. My first experience was with this was in the 1970s when I became the coauthor
\nof Our Bawls A History of the English Language, which Ball wrote in the 1930s
\nbefore I was born in a style rather different from my own. And it was the book from which I learned
\nthe subject as a graduate student. However, Ball was
\na man who spent his whole life in Philadelphia, where I had never been, and he had lived there during the first
\npart of the 20th century, which was already history to me. So I had to tune
\nin to the style of this guy and weave my sentences in and out of his, and the text cannot
\nsuffer express senses of my own. It had to be seamless and
\nthere were different ways that I got into into internalizing his prose. For one thing,
\nI found that I had to give up listening to music while I was reading and writing because the stronger
\nmelodies and rhythms of Beethoven or Brahms would just cut across the more
\nsubtle verbal melodies. Never since I’ve had to read and write in silence. I took up yoga
\nand meditation in order to be passive and to receive it. And
\nand I got I got pretty good at becoming another voice
\nand and I would send a ball was
\nin his 80s. Then I would send him drafts and sometimes he would comment on the content,
\nlearning to make it more conservative than I’d made it. But he never commented on the style,
\nnever made corrections or at any semicolon earning or self-taught. I’m pretty pretty well internalized
\nit. Which relates.
\nOK. So before we get Shelly and I just just wanted to add, this is probably
\nrecall this from Joanna Hitchcock, who told me about it at the Christmas party.
\nIt’s fine. My. It’s fine. It’s by John Hollander
\ncalled committed to memory. One hundred points memorized. Did I recall it from me? Sorry.
\nAnd Hollander was actually my teacher as an undergraduate who
\nthrough whom I decided to become an English major because he liked to do kind
\nof. He was a poet, and that was good. He liked to do linguistics, which was
\nI realized later was kind of amateurish. And he liked music. So he did all all these all these things.
\nSo after I took his course, I decided become an English major. And so in
\nthis, he got he he had. And his introduction,
\nhe talks about how it’s a lot easier to memorize
\nand meter than otherwise. And a number of questions guided the choosing here. For one thing,
\nthe free verse, a modernist. And later, Port Portrait’s very much harder to memorize than the act central
\nverse of nursery rhyme and other popular song or the ACT central syllabic verse, so-called
\niambic trochaic dactyl and so forth. Of literary portray in English from Charles her own.
\nAnd so that that should be almost self-evident. I can expand on it, if you like, but
\non the last page you have the most
\nthe beginning of a list of the 500 most popular poems, and all of
\nthose are either and meter are as and overbaked something or very
\nclose to a meter. But here is what what else he says. And this kind of gets to the to the
\nSheli part in reciting a poem aloud. You’re not like an actor coming to understand
\nand then to feel yourself in a dramatic part, a fictional person. Let me read that again. You’re not
\nlike that in reciting a poem aloud. You are not like an actor coming to understand and
\nthen to feel yourself in a dramatic part, a fictional person. It’s rather
\nthat you come to understand and then to be the voice of the point itself.
\nSo with Shelly and an extension of the idea of the embodiment of another’s consciousness
\na couple of months ago was the bicentennial of the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which appeared
\nin January 1818. And in four years we’ll come to the bicentennial
\nof Percy Shellie’s death, his drowning in Italy and the Bay of La Rayce.
\nSo this year, there’s more than the usual amount of attention to the Shellie’s and newspaper features.
\nAnd in places like The New Yorker and the portree Foundation Web site. Coincidentally,
\nI began turning my attention to the Chalets and Biron and their circle of friends in
\nPisa. About a year and a half ago. And what I’m going to describe
\nwill probably sound eccentric and pointless, but it’s it’s
\nsomething I’ve thought about ever since I took a course in graduate school here
\nwith William Pratt titled Byron and Shelley. And it’s my current consuming passion. So
\nhere’s the deal. When Shelley drowned, he left an incomplete poem
\ntitled The Triumph of Life at round five hundred forty four lines before it
\nbroke off the last line being then what is life? I cried.
\nI have always thought I’d be a great challenge to try to answer Shelly’s question by completing
\nhis poem two centuries later. Shelly now is not the most sympathetic
\npoet to work with. Keats would be a lot more pleasant. Shelly never got beyond his male
\nadolescent fantasies and he doesn’t treat women well. There was much about
\nhim that was pathetic, irritating and downright sordid.
\nByron, his close friend, friendless, unspeakable in his most
\ndeprived period. Byron claimed I’ve had sex with 200 women in Venice during 18 months
\nand 18, 17, 18, 18, including mothers and daughters.
\nBut back to the point then. What is life?
\nI cried. We’re not actually the last word, Shelly wrote. They were the last words, as Mary Shelley
\nrepresented him in the volume of posthumous poems published in 1924. There were
\nfour or five additional lines and fragments which Mary Shelley ignored as she began
\ndevoting the rest of her life to creating Percy Shelley as she
\nwanted him to be remembered. And her efforts were successful from the 19th century, understanding
\nof her husband as ethereal and angelic and not the
\njerk that he was. Their marriage was in trouble at the time
\nof his death, largely because of Percy Shelley’s narcissism, selfishness and
\ninsensitivity, not to mention his many mistresses. However,
\nher preface to the posthumous poems goes on about his admirable qualities, his
\nfearless enthusiasm, and the cause which he considered the most sacred upon earth, the improvement
\nof the moral and physical state of mankind. Now, the problem is a person can be so concerned
\nwith the state of mankind that they can
\nbe uncaring, cruel to the people around
\nthem, so that when she says no man was ever more devoted than heed
\nto the endeavor of making those around him happy. That’s just false. So she wrote The
\nTriumph for Life. What’s his last word? And was left and so unfinished. A state that I arranged it in its
\npresent form with great difficulty. Now we have to admire Mary Schelling for her valiant
\nefforts. And there may be something, however, of Victor Frankenstein
\nin her creation of a different person after his death.
\nThere is actually much more of Percy Shelley and Victor Frankenstein, which
\nmust have been intentional on Mary Shelley’s part, but we don’t have time for that.
\nThere’s also the problem that Mary created her version of Percy Shelley by just striking
\nthe referring to people. It’s a real problem here because you don’t want to be sexist,
\nbut it can get very confusing if you say to Shelley. And you know, whether whether it’s
\na man trying to keep it by destroying the pages of journals
\nand correspondence. And we would find that reprehensible. But it may have been shot at Mary Shelley’s way
\nof surviving. As for his last poem. It was
\nnot only that Mary edited it, but it has been said that her 18 20 second novel, The Last
\nMan, was her way of completing the triumph of life in prose.
\nAll right. It may be actually her best novel, despite Frankensteins
\nlegendary status and its endurance as a cultural landmark. It concerns Lionel
\nVerney, the last man living on earth after a global catastrophe.
\nIt’s set in the 21st century and in a scary way, it seems very timely.
\nAnyway, I’ve been working on a conclusion of the triumph of life that is more
\noptimistic and which James B airy in his two
\nthousand eight very thorough biography, thinks that
\nit would have turned out more optimistic than than what we have
\nwriting in terms of Rema is slow going. I was hoping
\nI’ve got 50 or 60 lines. I was hoping to get enough to run by Sam Baker before this. But just I just
\nhave to keep working at it. What makes the task even slower going is that I would like it to be
\na conclusion that Shelley could have written from aspects of his own life, not just what a 21st
\ncentury academic would write, even if it grows organically out of what is already
\nthere. And there are several themes here that connect with actually what we were talking
\nabout at at at lunch, whether whether you think about a work
\nin its biographical and historical context are as the old new critics did.
\nSeparated from its context. And what I would like to do if I finish this is really a habit
\ngrow out of Shelley’s life. And this is where Mary Wollstonecraft comes in.
\nShe is part of the historical context of Shelley’s point by way of Rousseau, who figures prominently
\nin the point and also in Wollstonecraft Vindication of the Rights of woman. In 1792,
\nwhich influenced both Mary and Percy Shelley, that
\ntheir courtship while Percy Shelley was still married, was at her partly at
\nher tomb in the St Pancras churchyard, where they would read her work. So Wollstonecraft
\nattitude toward Rousseau and her statements of vindication
\nand in her letters are so complex and apparently contradictory that I’ve spent months trying to understand the workings
\nof her mind. And I’ve copied the many pages of my own handwriting of the vindication
\nof the rights. A woman Russo’s idea for the education of girls was to
\nraise them to be croquettes and to be pleasurable to men. Wollstonecraft, as you
\ncan imagine, reacted strongly against this philosophy. Throughout the book. But the same
\ntime, her letter showed a very complex attitude towards sex. Her letters to her lover,
\nthe American Gilbert Enlai, are passionate, as are her letters to her eventual husband at the end
\nof her life. William Godwin And just despite what seems her rather austere
\nattempt and a vindication of the rights of woman to deny sexual desire
\nto women, Mary Wollstonecraft was a passionate and highly
\nsexual person. But her description of
\nthe contemporary women around her sounds like what Rousseau would have
\nwritten or what he or what he wanted as a swooning croquettes and Jezebel’s and lanterns
\nand silly, simpering, lisping flirts. And of course, her
\npoint is that men are to blame for this. Women are simply reflecting what men are asking
\nthem to do. And she also complains
\nabout women novelists writing romances that were essentially producing pornography.
\nShe was hard on women, but I’ll just toss out this idea. I think Mary Wollstonecraft
\nwould have been less interested in the political movements, the demonstrations, the campaign for the right to
\nvote and the legal struggles in the 19th and 20th centuries. She would have supported it, of course, but I think
\nchildren more interested in looking beyond all this to the kind of cultural
\nchanges we have actually seen in the United States and Britain
\nduring the past six months. And in any event, this interpretation figures
\nand my continuation of Shelley’s point, it’s it’s not only
\nmy own. I actually got this idea from a wonderful biography
\nby lindvall Lyndall Gordon and.
\nI think, well, I’m I’m out of time. I was going to say something about the new
\ncriticism ill and the thick historical biographical
\nscholarship at U.T. in the in the 1960s.
\nBut that might be a little too academic and I’d be interested in hearing what
\nother people I’m signing up. Thanks.<\/p>\n"},"episode_featured_image":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2017\/09\/louis-wm-roger-350_2-e1504902352406.jpg","episode_player_image":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2017\/09\/british-studies.png","download_link":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/podcast-download\/35\/running-with-shakespeare-tom-cable.mp3","player_link":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/podcast-player\/35\/running-with-shakespeare-tom-cable.mp3","audio_player":"