Graduate Lecture Series

Friday 12th February, 1-2pm, GR06/07                                                              Discovering Richard III in Early Modern Legal Writing                                                    Jitka Štollová

The hasty burial of Richard III in Leicester in 1485 gave rise to one of the most fascinating literary-historical afterlives in English history. In the next two centuries, historians, poets, and playwrights examined and re-examined this controversial figure. Shakespeare’s mesmerising king-villain ultimately became the most iconic and influential portrayal: partly thanks to the intrinsic qualities of his play, partly to the rising popularity of Shakespeare, especially from the eighteenth century onwards. As a consequence, Shakespeare’s Richard III became our Richard III. Yet the seventeenth century has much more to say on this character.

My talk will focus on the representation of Richard III in seventeenth-century legal writing. This century witnessed vivid debates about the limits of royal and parliamentary powers under the Stuart kings, culminating in the conflict of both parties in the Civil Wars. The figure of Richard III became a field of theoretical study about the definition of tyranny and usurpation. But rather than simply confirming these labels, seventeenth-century legal scholarship found new perspectives for assessing this monarch and his rule. My talk will trace the influence of this revision in seventeenth-century authors, and will locate the position of Shakespeare’s Richard III in these debates.

This lecture is particularly relevant for the following papers: Part I, Paper 4 (English Literature and its Contexts, 1500-1700); Part I, Paper 5 (Shakespeare); Part II, Paper 7 (Early Modern Drama 1588-1642).

Graduate Lecture Series

Screenshot 2016-02-04 10.52.49Friday 5th February, 1-2pm (GR06/07)                         ‘Let me honour your repentance’: Financial Excess and Repentance in Early Modern Drama                      Ezra Horbury

The early modern prodigal, who finds his ancestor in Luke 15.11­-32, is a character marked by excessive expenditure, rebellion, and riot. Most often a youth and almost exclusively male, the prodigal is one of the most popular archetypes in early modern drama. This type appears across scores of plays, such as Quicksilver of Eastward Ho, Young Lionel of The English Traveller, Bassanio of The Merchant of Venice, and both Hal and Falstaff of the Henry IVs. Prodigals were troubling, timely figures that variably reinforced and subverted a range of early modern mores. This lecture examines examples of the archetype at the height of its popularity in the work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries in order to provide students with a preliminary but concrete understanding of prodigals, prodigality, and the social anxieties with which these characters engage.

While prodigal excess is frequently represented as socially disruptive, these plays also demonstrate that it cannot be unproblematically condemned. Excessive trespasses must be forgiven and the prodigal redeemed to restore social order, but distrust concerning the predictable nature of repentance besets these depictions of Christian closure. This lecture also explores the uneasiness present in Calvinist understandings of repentance and opens lines of inquiry for those who wish to interrogate early modern repentance on a broader level.

This lecture will also be of especial interest to those who wish to learn more about dynamics of authority and rebellion in the family, the morality of excess and moderation, and Calvinist thought in early modern drama and culture.
This lecture will be relevant to Part I students taking ‘Paper 4: English Literature and its Contexts, 1500­-1700’ and ‘Paper 5: Shakespeare’. For Part II students, it will be relevant to ‘Paper 7: Early Modern Drama 1588­-1642’. It may also be of interest to students taking ‘Paper 17: Shakespeare in Performance’.

IMAGE: EEBO, STC 597:06

Graduate Lecture Series

Friday 29th January, 1pm GR06/7.

Conor Leahy (St. John’s) will give a lecture entitled ‘Gavin Douglas and the History of Landscape Poetry’; a brief abstract follows. All are welcome.

‘Gavin Douglas and the History of Landscape Poetry’

‘All the traditions of late medieval poetic landscape flow together and coalesce, miraculously, in Gavin Douglas.’ So wrote Derek Pearsall and Elizabeth Salter in their 1971 study, Landscapes and Seasons of the Medieval World. Along with Robert Henryson and William Dunbar, Gavin Douglas (c.1476-1522) helped transform the Scots vernacular into a major European literary language. His pioneering translation of Virgil’s Aeneid (1513) into ‘the langage of Scottis natioun’ was praised by Ezra Pound as being ‘better than the original’, while his magnificent descriptions of the Scottish landscape make him (according to Alastair Fowler) ‘effectively…the inventor of nature poetry’.

My lecture seeks to place the poetry of Gavin Douglas in the wider contexts of late medieval landscape writing. My discussion will range from well-known works such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Chaucer’s dream poems, to some lesser-known but fascinating pieces,such as Mum and the Sothsegger and the Middle English On Husbondrie. I will examine how the qualities of perspective and spatial consistency developed fitfully and unpredictably in fourteenth and fifteenth century writing, but I will also discuss how descriptions of landscape could have a shifting range of associations in the context of any given work.

Douglas himself could draw upon a diverse tradition of Scottish and English landscape poetry, both for specific details and for structural coherence. In his panoramic descriptions of nature (Prologues VII, XII, and XIII of his Eneados) we find the use of materials as varied as Robert Henryson’s Fables and Testament of Cresseid, Virgil’s Georgics, Chaucer’s House of Fame, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and even Douglas’s own dream vision The Palice of Honour (1501). The breadth and sensitivity of his reading allowed Douglas to look searchingly and with fresh insight at the natural world, and to write some of the most vivid and original poetry of the late Middle Ages.

This lecture is of interest to students working on the following papers: Part I, Paper 3 (English Literature 1300-1550) Part II, Paper 5 (Chaucer) Part II, Paper 6 (Medieval Supernatural)

Events This Week

Monday 25th January

CMT Inaugural Exhibition Launch Party, 10.15-11.15am, English Faculty first floor landing. Come and help us celebrate the arrival of the CMT’s new exhibition cases with coffee and cake.

Tuesday 26th January

Renaissance Graduate Seminar, 5.15pm, GR06/7
Professor Nigel Smith (Princeton University)
Transvernacular Poetry and the Rise of English Literature in Early Modern Europe

Sandars Lectures, Writing and Reading History in Renaiassance England: Some Cambridge Examples’5pm, McCrum Lecture Theatre, Bene’t Street                                  Professor Anthony Grafton (Princeton University)                                                         John Caius: history as argument

Clark Lectures ‘The Art of Invention’, 5pm, Mill Lane Lecture Rooms                                    Professor Mary Carruthers (New York University)                                                                 Disquiet, Dislocation, Performance: Augustine’s Conversion

 Wednesday 27th January

Early Modern Interdisciplinary Seminar, 12pm SR24                                                 Jennifer Bishop (Sidney Sussex, Cambridge):                                                            Making a record of the self: some autobiographical traces of London clerks

Sandars Lectures, Writing and Reading History in Renaiassance England: Some Cambridge Examples’5pm, McCrum Lecture Theatre, Bene’t Street                                  Professor Anthony Grafton (Princeton University)                                                         Matthew Parker: history as archive

Early Modern British and Irish Seminar, 5.15pm, Graham Storey Room, Trinity Hall      Greg Salazar (Selwyn),
Ecclesiastical Licensing, Religious Censorship, and the Regulation of Consensus in Early Stuart England

Thursday 28th January

 Sandars Lectures, Writing and Reading History in Renaiassance England: Some Cambridge Examples’5pm, McCrum Lecture Theatre, Bene’t Street                                  Professor Anthony Grafton (Princeton University)                                                        Adam Winthrop: history as resource

Friday 29th January

 Graduate Lecture Series, 1pm, GR06/07                                                                   Conor Leahy                                                                                                              Gavin Douglas and the History of Landscape Poetry

Saturday 30th January

Renaissance Revenge: In and Out of Time                                                                            2-6pm Birkbeck, 43 Gordon Square, Room 112

If you would like to advertise an early modern event here please email ab2126.