Publications

Wed - May 18, 2005

Sober Scot given a raw deal by history

David Horspool reviews "After Elizabeth" by Leanda de Lisle

The government, in power for years, had become unpopular. Accusations of corruption and a long drawn-out, inconclusive war had taken much of the shine off the once-admired leader. There was talk of rebellion, and everybody knew that it was only a matter of time before the Scottish pretender - clever, serious, sober-suited - would take over. It was merely a question of judging the right moment to express support: too soon, and you risked offending the current leader; too late, and your future loyalty might be doubted.

As Leanda de Lisle shows in her impressively researched first book, it is a misjudgment of history that makes it almost impossible for us to recognise Elizabeth I and her successor, James VI and I, as the old leader and the pretender in this scenario. Elizabeth has remained in the popular imagination as Gloriana, the resolute defender and "bride" of her country who defeated the Armada and encouraged Shakespeare, Drake and Raleigh. But 12 years was a long time in Renaissance politics, and by the turn of the century the Queen was old, stubborn and disliked.

James, on the other hand, was widely seen as a saviour. His most appealing quality for councillors and courtiers was that he was a man. He was also married and, by the time of his accession, had two sons. A king since boyhood, James was the author of an admired book on kingship, the Basilikon Doron, a huntsman and congenial dining companion. It was also thought that, unlike other candidates, the Protestant James was likely to practise religious toleration.

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Mon - May 16, 2005

"THE FAMILIES WHO MADE ROME" by Anthony Majanlahti

REVIEWED BY CHARLES NICHOLL

The Sistine Chapel is famous for its serene architecture and dramatic frescos, and even for its modest-looking but oracular chimney. Much less is generally known about the man who caused it to be built, and after whom it is named: Francesco di Leonardo della Rovere, or Pope Sixtus IV. This lacuna, and many others, can be filled by reading Anthony Majanlahti’s elegant and informative new book. Working on the sound principle that every building tells a story, especially in Rome, he offers an entertaining mix of travelogue and history as he pursues the great families of Renaissance Rome, whose history is entwined in the city’s palaces, churches, colonnades and fountains.

The della Rovere dynasty is one of seven which he treats in detail, and is typical enough in the velocity of its rise to power and wealth, and in the fact that the Church was the route of its upward mobility. Most of these families had one or more popes to their name. Fran-cesco, the future Sixtus IV, sprang from obscure origins in Savona, on the Ligurian coast near Genoa, though he was not the son of an illiterate fisherman: this disciple-like background was a piece of Vatican spin. Sixtus advanced via Padua university and the Franciscan order to a cardinalship, and in August 1471, in his late fifties, was elected pope — a compromise candidate. He crusaded against the Turks, and backed an assassination plot against Lorenzo de’ Medici. When the resulting war with Florence ended in 1480, he made diplomatic amends by inviting artists, including Botticelli and Ghirlandaio, to decorate his new chapel with frescos. He also built the Ponte Sesto across the Tiber, and founded the churches of Santa Maria del Popolo and Santa Maria della Pace.

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Wed - May 11, 2005

SFA professor to talk about translating book

By LYNN WINTHROP

Ann Doyle-Anderson, chair of the Department of Modern Languages at Stephen F. Austin State University, will discuss the process of translating a late-16th-century book on art theory during an "illustrated lecture" scheduled for 7 p.m. Friday (May 13) at the Museum of East Texas.

Anderson and a colleague spent around seven years translating and editing "The Figino, or On the Purpose of Painting: Art Theory in the Late Renaissance," a treatise originally written by by Gregorio Comanini in 1591. Details of two paintings from the period — including Vertumnus: Rudolf II, by Giuseppe Arcimboldo — will be used to help illustrate material discussed during Friday's lecture.

"The Figino" has long been recognized as an important work, one that sheds light on the "intellectual fermentation" of the period due to Comanini's close associations and friendships with artists and scholars of the day. Contradictions of the period, namely the role of the church in determining the ultimate purpose of art, are examined and debated.

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Tue - April 26, 2005

The thigh's the limit

Simon Callow salutes a cultural invasion

Shakespeare Goes to Paris: How the Bard Conquered France
by John Pemble
256pp, Hambledon & London

"O Shakespeare! Shakespeare!" exclaims Lélio in The Return to Life, Berlioz's curious sequel to the Symphonie Fantastique, "how dazzling the impression your genius creates!" In his journal, the composer exclaims, with even less reservation: "Thou alone art the God worthy of artists." Like many of his contemporaries, he had been overwhelmed by his first experience of the plays on stage in English in 1827 and 1828, when a hastily assembled ad hoc company, comprising some of the greatest actors of the day, had performed Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Lear, and Othello at the Odéon Theatre in Paris.

Kemble was too old for Hamlet and Edmund Kean somewhat the worse for wear; the Lear was a comic hopelessly out of his depth, and though Macready did better with his impressive Othello, it was a hitherto undistinguished young Irish actress called Harriet Smithson in the roles of Ophelia and Juliet who swept all before her, establishing Shakespeare as an overwhelming force. Berlioz fell desperately in love with both of them, unrelentingly badgering Smithson into marrying him. The marriage ended disastrously, but his relationship with Shakespeare proved rather more durable. However uneven the standards of the English visitors, and however bastardised the texts they played - using the standard 17th and 18th-century bowdlerisations and rewritten endings - they were a revelation to their audiences, suggesting an approach to theatre, and perhaps to life itself, that set the upcoming generation of young French Romantics on fire.

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Wed - March 9, 2005

The Man Who Wasn't There

by Daniel Swift

Christopher Marlowe's life was short, sharp and irresistible. His fame rests not only on six violently glittering plays written in his 20s but also on the tantalizing story that may be considered his masterpiece, for Marlowe inhabited his time like a player strutting upon an invisible stage. His life was his most remarkable piece of theater.

Everyone imitated Marlowe. His first play, Tamburlaine, was staged when he was 23, and its success can most readily be gauged by its imitators. As David Riggs notes in his new biography, The World of Christopher Marlowe, within the next couple of years three new plays were staged that were more or less direct copies of Marlowe's original, while Shakespeare wrote his early Henry VI plays under the influence of Marlowe's style. A decade later, as the church authorities burned copies of Marlowe's semipornographic love poems in the streets, Shakespeare again returned to imitating his predecessor in As You Like It. Marlowe's contemporaries regarded him with a mixture of awe and fear; as his friend Thomas Nashe wrote, "No leaf he wrote on but was like a burning glass to set on fire all his readers."

We are still Marlowe's readers today: Riggs's biography follows Constance Brown Kuriyama's Christopher Marlowe: A Renaissance Life, published in 2002. The early death of such a man is written in the swagger of his life, and Marlowe's murder at the age of 29 in a bar brawl has been endlessly commemorated in the fantasies of his fans. The movie Shakespeare in Love imagined that Marlowe died for Shakespeare's cowardice; Crimelibrary.com, a website devoted to "criminal minds and methods," includes a feature on Marlowe's death among its litany of serial killers, terrorists and outlaws. Louise Welsh's novel Tamburlaine Must Die is the third book in the past fifteen years to return to the circumstances of the murder, and to spin stories around its fantastic possibilities.

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Mon - March 7, 2005

Will the Real Shakespeare Please Stand Up

By John Gross

Anyone setting out to write a biography of Shakespeare has to weigh two considerations against each other. On the one hand, we do not know all that much about him. On the other hand, we know a great deal. There are no diaries, letters, memoirs, or interviews; most of the surviving documentation is dry and impersonal; major aspects of his life remain a blank. But we do have the plays and the poems—how can they fail to bring us close to the man who wrote them?—and we can build on the knowledge, bequeathed by generations of scholars, of the society in which he lived and moved.

Given the available evidence, or lack of it, any attempt at a full-length portrait of Shakespeare is bound to involve an exceptional amount of speculation. Even the most cautious biography, once it starts exploring his personality, can hardly help taking on some of the characteristics of a novel. The only alternative—sticking to the established facts and gaps—is, however, arguably more useful. No one did more for the study of Shakespeare’s life in the 20th century than E.K. Chambers in Britain and Samuel Schoenbaum in America. But neither of them wrote a biography (although Schoenbaum had hoped to). Chambers confined himself to William Shakespeare: A Study in Facts and Problems (1930). Schoenbaum distilled his learning into William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life (1975) and various associated volumes.

Meanwhile, there has been a steady procession of popular biographies and general studies that mix narrative and criticism. If anything, the rate at which they have been appearing has increased in recent years. Park Honan’s 1998 biography is one outstanding example, and now Stephen Greenblatt has entered the lists with a study offering an account (much of it hypothetical) of Shakespeare’s outward career, but focusing principally on his inner life.

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Tue - February 15, 2005

Rhetorical Review: The Electronic Review of Books on the History of Rhetoric

Rhetorical Review, The Electronic Review of Books on the History of Rhetoric, volume 3, no. 1 (February 2005) is now available on the internet (http://www.nnrh.dk/RR/index.html). Please find the table of contents below.

It is the purpose of Rhetorical Review to provide information about new publications in the field of the history of rhetoric, and thus contribute to the dissemination and discussion of this research internationally.

We look forward to hearing from you with suggestions for books to be reviewed. Please contact the general editor at our e-mail address (RR@nnrh.dk), if you wish to submit material to Rhetorical Review.

Pernille Harsting, Copenhagen, Denmark (general editor)
Michael Edwards, London, UK
Sari Kivistö, Helsinki, Finland
Tina Skouen, Oslo, Norway (associate editors)

Rhetorical Review, The Electronic Review of Books on the History of Rhetoric
E-mail: RR@nnrh.dk
Homepage: http://www.nnrh.dk/RR/index.html
Postal address: The Nordic Network for the History of Rhetoric; Att.: Pernille Harsting, Postbox 216, DK-1502 Copenhagen V, DENMARK

Contents of Rhetorical Review 3:1 (February 2005):

Claude La Charité, La rhétorique épistolaire de Rabelais (Québec: Éditions Nota bene, 2003) and Luc Vaillancourt, La lettre familière au XVIe siècle: Rhétorique humaniste de l'épistolaire (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2003), reviewed by Judith Rice Henderson.

Laurent Pernot, La Rhétorique dans l’Antiquité (Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 2000), reviewed by Kyrre Vatsend.

Peter Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric: Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), reviewed by Christina Sandhaug.

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Wed - February 2, 2005

The Uncrowned Kings of England by Derek Wilson

REVIEWED BY JOHN GUY

THE UNCROWNED KINGS OF ENGLAND:
The Black Legend of the Dudleys
by Derek Wilson
Constable pp. 416

Historians avidly seek fresh ways of telling stories that people know and care about. Derek Wilson has found a marvellous vehicle for this. His theme is the Dudleys, one of the families closest to four out of five Tudor monarchs. For a century, they bestrode court and country, privy to the innermost controversy. All played for the highest possible stakes and three of them were executed for treason.

Edmund Dudley, a brilliant London lawyer recruited by Henry VII, led the way. The first Tudor’s policy of “law and order” relied on fiscal intimidation. Henry bound over the rich and powerful to “good behaviour” while Dudley trawled for legal infringements. Anyone caught out had to buy an expensive pardon. Dudley and his associate, Richard Empson, were reviled as the Tudor equivalent of the Krays. Wilson claims this is unjust, since Henry VII ordered everything. Probably he did, but Henry VIII won instant popularity for beheading his father’s minions.

Edmund’s son, John, attempted to learn from this. A soldier-courtier, he rose steadily through military service on land and sea. He deftly sidestepped the falls of Anne Boleyn and Thomas Cromwell and was raised to the peerage. Although a man of action and a skilled administrator rather than an intellectual, he enjoyed the company of scholars and converted to Protestantism. Naturally he kept his views quiet. Henry VIII might have quarrelled with the Pope, but he loathed heretics.

John Dudley stretched his wings in Edward VI’s reign, allying with Archbishop Cranmer to make the Protestant Reformation official.

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Mon - January 31, 2005

The Ugly Truth

Umberto Eco's primer on European aesthetics, On Beauty, leaves Mike Phillips wanting more

On Beauty: A History of a Western Idea
edited by Umberto Eco
438pp, Secker & Warburg

Umberto Eco is notorious as the Italian professor of semiotics who wrote a bestseller, The Name of the Rose, which sparked off a host of imitators and invigorated interest in the study of medieval art and culture. In addition to all that, he has been an editor in TV and publishing, a columnist for an avant garde monthly, and a prolific essayist. If there is such a thing as a renaissance man, Eco is it.

On Beauty is an encyclopedia of images and ideas about beauty ranging from ancient Greece to the present day. It begins with 20 pages of reproductions of paintings and photographs, representing an enormous range of cultural icons, from Bronzini's Allegory of Venus to characteristic snapshots of David Beckham and George Clooney. More paintings decorate the next 400 pages of quotations from philosophers and writers - Plato, Boccaccio, San Bernardo. Kant, Heine, et al. The book is arranged according to various themes rather than chronologically, although, given the fact that it begins with the aesthetic ideals of ancient Greece and ends with pop art and the mass media, the chronology seems self-evident. On the other hand, as Eco points out in his introduction, "this is a history of Beauty and not a history of art (or of literature or music)". He goes on to ask the obvious question - "why is this history of Beauty documented solely through works of art?" - and he replies by claiming that "over the centuries it was artists, poets, and novelists who told us about the things they considered beautiful and they were the ones who left us examples. Peasants, masons, bakers or tailors also made things that they probably saw as beautiful, but only a very few of these artefacts remain."

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Tue - January 11, 2005

Michelangelo and the Reinvention of the Human Body by James Hall

REVIEWED BY WALDEMAR JANUSZCZAK

The modern world has been so horrible to the creative greats of the Renaissance, understanding them only in its sordid ways, dumbing them down to its level. Look what it has done to poor Leonardo. Thanks to Dan Brown’s stupendously popular transformation of Leonardo’s art into the sorts of pseudo-mystical clues you find in a Harry Potter story, da Vinci has become the focus of a world-wide cult of believers in a huge dollop of new-age claptrap. But at least Leonardo gets talked about and thought about. Michelangelo, as a rule, doesn’t. Yes, we see those famous fingers of Adam regularly enough, tacked onto the fronts of late-night art documentaries and the like. And yes, the art-history industry continues to churn out long-winded adjustments to the details of Michelangelo’s career. But none of it adds up to a genuinely fresh insight, or a campaign for modern pertinence.

So I opened this book as if it were an eagerly awaited Christmas present. God, I was keen. The book’s central premise was such a tasty one. James Hall believes that Michelangelo is as relevant today as he ever was. “If we really want to understand our own culture, we need to understand Michelangelo” he insists at the outset. It’s a bold claim, repeated exactly in the blurb. I was, therefore, hoping that this aggressively revisionist tome would rescue Michelangelo from the makers of ornate BBC documentaries about men in tights and give us, instead, a proper artistic hero — timeless, universal, relevant, re-understood.

Foolish me. The opening claim turns out to be the book’s finest moment. Hall’s focus is on Michelangelo’s treatment of the human body. It is certainly true that “the body” is one of the most reliable obsessions of contemporary art, and that countless, tediously sensational explorations of it have been mounted in recent years by puerile and sex-obsessed modern imaginations. Blood, gore, penises, breasts and orifices are the bread and butter of the contemporary cultural feast. It is also true that, 500 years ago, Michelangelo demanded that new attention be paid to the human body by making it the primary focus of his art as well. So the opportunity exists to play snap across the ages and to see Michelangelo as some sort of direct precursor of our own modern body-maniacs. And Hall, alas, has seized it.