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Hello, we start today with a tale of two Englishmen.For four centuries and counting, William Shakespeare has been included among a small and special group, geniuses who spent their time on earth creating works that continue to astonish.
You could rank his plays with the music of Mozart and the art of Michelangelo, You could line them up with the Egyptian pyramids and the Great Wall of China and the landing on the moon.
Our second Englishman is a man who's lived for almost a century and has spent the majority of those years celebrating Shakespeare.Studying, analyzing, teaching, writing about, lecturing about, and generally elucidating the works of the Great Bard.
We owe a debt to the Shakespeare's of the world, of course, but we also owe a debt, a deep one, to the Sir Stanley Wells' too.We'll talk to Sir Stanley Wells about his new book, What Was Shakespeare Really Like, today on the History of Literature.
Hello, here we go.Welcome to the podcast.I'm Jack Wilson, your host.I'm glad to be with you today.A couple of caveats before we begin.Well, first of all, before we do the caveats. Let's do a shout out.
I'd like to say hello and congratulations to the members of my father's high school class of 1958.They just celebrated their 65th class reunion.
My dad was in charge of organizing the event and he put together a committee of eight to help him make all the arrangements.
Their committee met three times at various restaurants, doing all the planning, making sure that that the big event had everything covered.And then the day came and the total attendance was 10 classmates, 15, including spouses.
My mom is always quick to note.I asked my dad if they thought about inviting those other two schmucks to the planning committee dinners.Why not?Nope, he said.Didn't want to burden them with that. The planning was for them.
Well, the big reunion was not big enough for the buffet that they had considered having.So they were just at a restaurant ordering off the menu.I'm not sure that all the planning committee dinners were all that different, but hey, what do I know?
I wasn't there.So bravo planning committee.I'm glad your efforts paid off and hope to see you all at the 70th. The first caveat is that we had some connectivity issues in our talk with Sir Stanley Wells.I think one says Sir Stanley, not Sir Wells.
And I think sometimes authors prefer to go just by their name, which is how it appears on the book cover, Stanley Wells.But I'm not sure of the protocol and I want to get things right.So I'll just play it safe and say Sir Stanley Wells.
The connectivity issues were unfortunate.The phone kept cutting us off for some reason.In the end, I couldn't bear to make Sir Stanley Wells suffer through any more than I had already put him through.
So I determined to go with what we have and that's what we'll do.It's a bit more fragmentary than some other interviews, but Hmm, maybe that's a superior format.It's more condensed, hopefully punchier.And we'll hit some highlighted topics.
And if you ever feel like you can't quite understand a word or two here and there, don't worry, it gets better. And I'll fill in what we need in terms of commentary.The book by Sir Stanley Wells covers some tantalizing questions.
And let me get to the second caveat.Let me get that out of the way.This isn't a Shakespeare authorship show.I don't mind doing those occasionally when someone brings something. new or interesting to the conversation.
Elizabeth Winkler was here and we spent some time on Shakespeare's authorship and the authorship questions there with a good guest.I like going down that path to see where it takes us.
But I don't want every show about Shakespeare to be a show about Shakespeare's authorship. I want the bulk of them to be about the plays and the poetry.And when someone is a Stratfordian, I'm happy to talk about the Stratfordian Shakespeare.Why not?
I'm as fascinated by that guy as I am about theories to the contrary.I'll follow the guest's lead.Today with Sir Stanley Wells is a Stratfordian show as we ask tantalizing questions about a true genius and an inspired creative figure.
How did he think, feel, and work?What made him laugh?What did he believe about death?What were his relationships like?All great questions, all covered in the book.
There's nobody better positioned to address those issues than Sir Stanley Wells, who's devoted his life to this man and his works. Harriet Walter.Does she need an explanation for our listeners?
Maybe not history of literature listeners, I'm guessing, but just in case she's a favorite of ours.Actor, you may know her best as Fanny Dashwood in Emma Thompson's version of Sense and Sensibility.
Or if you're a Succession fan, she's the British mother of the three main children.Sorry, Connor. one of the great actresses of our era, in my opinion.She says, quote, Stanley Wells doesn't pad anything out with wishful speculation.
Having studied Shakespeare's works for longer than any man alive, he is almost uniquely placed to do this detective work.
And Stephen Fry, who wrote the foreword for the book, says, quote, As you read, you are very likely to exclaim, as I did, why the hell didn't my English teacher talk like this?
Actors, directors, producers, lecturers, teachers, students, and all who want to know and understand more, will hug this book to them."So there we go.That's coming up.But first, we need a dose of... I need a dose of Emily Dickinson.
So let's turn to that.This one, the one we have today, is 16 lines, not the magic sonnet number of 14 as we saw last time.And in fact, very interestingly,
It is basically four quatrains smudged together or four lines of four smudged together or even more I would say relevant, pertinent.It's two poems of eight lines each that are run together.
Ordinarily, I don't care about this kind of thing, about form as much as the content.But here, this form point is interesting, I think, because she deliberately did not put white space in between these two groups of eight.
not to mark off the four quatrains or not to mark off the two sections of eight lines, even though thematically, as you'll see, it would make some sense to do that.
The first eight lines are about the sunrise and the second eight lines are about the sunset.And in one draft of the poem, she drew a line between line eight and line nine as if to mark the difference, but in the end,
In the published version, no line or white space appears.There's no break.It's all one poem, and I'll talk about why that matters in a little bit. This is poem 204, and so you can follow along.Amethyst is basically the color of violet.
It's a crystal or quartz stone that can be anything from pale lilac to deep reddish purple, the spectrum of violet colors.Bobolynx are small songbirds.
present in New England, often black with some white feathers running down their back and a yellowish back of the head.And I'll say, you'll hear me say the word style, but that's not style as it's commonly used.
It's spelled S-T-I-L-E, and that refers to an arrangement of steps that allows people, but not animals, to climb over a fence or wall. And a dominee refers to a priest or a clergyman.So, here we go.Poem 204.I'll tell you how the sun rose.
That's the first line.Listen to that confidence.Yes, I'm listening, Queen.I'll tell you how the sun rose, a ribbon at a time. Pause there again.I won't pause for every line, but man, that one is so good.A ribbon at a time.You've seen sunsets.
The horizon changes with sunsets.You get the horizontal if you're really looking at a sunset, right?If you can see the horizon, you get the horizontal slats.
Or even better, ribbons, the colors shifting, climbing one after the other, one at a time, a ribbon at a time.Those are basically two perfect lines, in my humble opinion. I'll tell you how the sun rose, a ribbon at a time.
The steeples swam and amethyst.The news, like squirrels, ran.The hills untied their bonnets.The boba links begun.Then I said softly to myself, that must have been the sun. That's the first eight lines.
I'm tempted to just keep going because there's no white space here.The next line just follows, but I have to pause at least. For the line, the steeple swam and amethyst swimming in color and violet and lilac and deep purpley reds swimming in it.
Those steeples were changing colors along with it as if we're seeing the body in water, swimming, swimming in the color, not like shipwrecked sailors flailing around.
Not like someone drowning, but swimming with some dignity and majesty, like swordfish or like champion swimmers, proud and confident, more at home in the water than they are on land.Steeples that say, yes, we're made for this color.It suits us.
We can wear it.We're worthy of this light.And finally, the light is worthy of us.It's grand, majestic, holy. Let us swim and swim some more until we are finished.That's what I'm imagining the steeples saying as they're swimming in this amethyst.
And then our speaker says softly, we hear about the hills on tying their bonnets, the news running like squirrels, the boba links.We hear the chirping.You see this and sort of You can almost see her gaze, her field of vision.
She's looking at the horizon, then the steeples, then the news running toward her, the hills, the birds.She's zooming in, zooming out.And then she says, that must have been the sun.
That must have been, not that must be, or I'm in the middle of a sunset.It's here and gone, this sunrise.You see the ribbons coming up and now all of a sudden they're gone.The sky is a different color.
The sunrise is no longer detectable as a sunrise.And you say to yourself, I just saw a sunrise, I think.I'm not sure when it ended exactly, but now I know that it has ended. That must have been the sun.And so we pivot to the sunset.
But how he set, I know not.There seemed a purple style that little yellow boys and girls were climbing all the while till when they reached the other side.Let's pause there again.Gorgeous description.Dickinson doesn't just say the sun rose with
The sun rose with beautiful colors, light pinks, yellows, turning everything purpley for a while.And she doesn't say, the sunset, the sky was beautiful, it took my breath away.She describes it in an unusual metaphor.
We have ribbons, we have a set of stairs or steps, purple steps for the sunset, a way to climb a fence or a wall.Again, we see the horizontal nature of the color. As we do when we're lucky enough to see a truly good sunset.
And on the purple style that she sees, there are bits of yellow flashes.They look like boys and girls moving. And then while we have this metaphor going, Dickinson goes in for the kill.
We have three lines left in the poem, but I'm going to repeat the last line we heard to set up this final quatrain.Remember, we've seen little yellow boys and girls climbing these purple steps.Purple steps like the ones you'd find in a field.Right?
With a wall or a fence.Maybe in a pasture. or something else.It's forbidden, right?Something animals are forbidden from crossing this.Maybe it's the difference between civilization and the unknown.Think of it that way.
Till when they reached the other side, a dominion gray put gently up the evening bars and led the flock away. That's how it ends, and led the flock away with a dash at the end, and not a period, not an exclamation mark, a dash trailing off.
That flock of children following the dominee, or priest, or preacher, who's in gray.Our metaphor is working on so many levels here.First, there's just the visual, the color, the sky turns from purple and yellow
to gray as the sun disappears, and then evening or darkness sets in the evening bars.I'm picturing this as the same as a ribbon, a wide, flat beam, a section.One by one, these bars are going up across the sky, closing it off.
The color is gone for the night.But the children, those yellow children are gone too.The religious man in gray, the grayness The grayness of the man on the sunset has led them away.The Lord is their shepherd, after all, and they are his flock.
We know this from the 23rd Psalm.And they're gone, just as we'll all be gone.Gone to somewhere else.A life after this one.A world after this one.And it's religious figures who usher us toward that world. We will be gone to a world after this one.
We hope that's the destination for our flock, just as the destiny of the day is to disappear.Death will follow life as night will follow day.But this is not something to be feared so much as recognized with something like awe and wonder.
The bars are put up gently. This is done with love and purpose, as we imagine that God sends us to death.It might seem horrible and tragic, But no doubt from his perspective there is a reason for it.Maybe it's to bring us to heaven.
Maybe it's to give us the bliss of release from this world.It's not death mowing us all down like the greatest serial killer of all time.It's death as a gentle clergyman saying, it's time dearies, follow me.
I mentioned there not being a break here between the first eight lines and the second eight lines, and I think it's because Dickinson doesn't want us to think about the day at all.The day where we work and live and love and sweat and toil.
We don't see the sun at noon while we're in the fields. We don't see the activity of the day.There's no time for that and no room in the poem.For it, it's all sunrise and sunset, two daily miracles, and they're pressed together.
Just like birth is a mysterious miracle and death is a mysterious miracle too, even if we don't think of it as a miracle.But maybe that's because we spend too much time in the bright light of day.
and not enough time gazing at the purple style, the yellow boys and girls, and the dominion gray putting up the evening bars.That is a miracle too, even if we shiver a little if we look too close at it.
We can say it's tolerable because we know with certainty that we'll get the light and warmth again the next day.
Or we can say it's tolerable even if we don't think that far ahead, even if we just embrace and even celebrate the darkness and the uncertainty of night.
Maybe because we choose to each night, and maybe, as in the case of death, because we have no other choice.That's Emily Dickinson, number 204.Sir Stanley Wells and What Shakespeare Was Really Like. after this.
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Okay, we are honored to be joined now by Professor Sir Stanley Wells, the Honorary President at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, and one of the world's greatest authorities on the life and works of William Shakespeare.
In addition to his many books, he is also the General Editor of the Oxford and Penguin Editions of Shakespeare.He joins us today to discuss his newest book, What Was Shakespeare Really Like?Sir Stanley Wells, welcome to the History of Literature.
Thank you.It's a pleasure to be with you.
So I'd like to start with your background, if I may.When did your interest in Shakespeare begin?
Well, I first got interested in Shakespeare when I was a schoolboy a long time ago, in 1993 now, so that was in the 1930s.I had a very good schoolmaster who read Shakespeare very well in classroom and also who introduced us as pupils to
to the place and to be able to go to the theater.And I was able, in Hull, in Yorkshire, where I lived, to see a touring company run by a great Shakespeare actor of his time called Donald Orford.
And those were my introductory experiences with Shakespeare.
And did it click immediately?Did you sense that Shakespeare was going to be a lifelong passion for you?
No, I wouldn't say I thought it was going to be a lifelong passion, but I have many interests.I'm very interested in music as well, for example.
But at the same time, I recognize a relationship with Shakespeare, which carried on when I went to university.
I chose to go to London, to University College London, partly because I knew that I'd be able to go to the theatres and see, as I did see, for example,
Okay, that's the first place where our phone connection was disrupted, which is very unfortunate, but we all do the best we can.This is 93-year-old Sir Stanley Wells telling us about his earliest experiences with Shakespeare in the 1930s.
In the part lost to technological disruption, he went on to say that he saw Laurence Olivier on the stage as Richard III and as Antony to Vivien Leigh's Cleopatra. I guess I will someday have a few stories like this.
I saw Sir Patrick Stewart once as Macbeth in Brooklyn and Christopher Plummer as Lear in a performance in Stratford, Ontario.Not too shabby, but Olivier and Vivian Leigh must have been phenomenal.
And Sir Stanley also... I said I'd call him Sir Stanley Wells, didn't I?Sir Stanley Wells also celebrated his 21st birthday by seeing Alec Guinness as Hamlet.What a time to be in London going to the theater.What a time to be alive.
So let's turn now to my next question.The audio in this section is a little patchy, a little tough in patches at least, but hang in there, dear listeners.Things will get better.
So you have, because of your decades really working with Shakespeare, you have this unique perspective.And I'm curious if you've seen that the way Shakespeare is treated in our society or our approach to Shakespeare, has that changed over time?
Have you noticed a difference in the way we think of Shakespeare and his works?
I think there have been some differences.I think perhaps others we're more likely to think of Shakespeare in politicized terms, to look at his work in our own society, to try to see ourselves in him.
It goes back a long way, too, because in the 1950s, for example, when I was a boy, Shakespeare was being used for political purposes, particularly for productions to propagate alternative views, and also, paradoxically, prominent revolutionary views.
So Shakespeare has always been susceptible to political and contemporizing interpretation, I think.
Right, right.So in some ways, the more it changes, the more it stays the same.He's always reflecting the era in which he's... Yes, I think that's true.
It's partly because of his preference to interpretation, which is
Right.OK, so let's turn to the book.What was Shakespeare really like?Was this written for a general audience or Shakespeare aficionados?
Well, it's written for people interested in Shakespeare.It's a curious genesis.It was originally written as lectures to be given in person here for the public. But because of the pandemic, they had to be bought and given online instead of in person.
Then they had it brought into the book it is now.So the audience that it was aimed at was people who were interested in Shakespeare, but not totally, not specialists in any sense, no.It's a book, practically everything I've written, actually,
has been written for, except what I've been writing on technical masters.So I have written sometimes, some of my books are concerned with editorial masters, for example, which is a more rather limited interest.
But I believe in communicating, I believe in getting in touch with people, interesting people, entertaining people, as well as, I hope, illuminating the topics I'm talking about.
Right.Well, I've gone through it and I can tell the listeners that it is very readable and very accessible.And it certainly is something that speaks to me.And I'm a fan, but not an expert.
Well, you're the ideal reader for it.
Okay.So you walk through four questions and I take it these sort of came out of the four lectures that you were giving and now they're the four chapters in the book.So let's walk through them one by one.And the first one is,
How can we even hope to know what he's like?Shakespeare famously has a sort of absence of biographical detail, and some might say, why do we need to do this at all?Why not let the plays speak for themselves?
Why do we care about who Shakespeare the author was?
Yeah, well there are two questions that are on there.One is why do we care what he was like anyway?And I think the answer really is natural curiosity.
If we admire people, if we admire great figures of the past, whether for example Michelangelo or whatever, it's natural for us as human beings to know what they were like as human beings. So that's part of it, I think.What was the other question?
The second question I think would be, how can we know?
How can we know?Well, there are various ways in which we can think about it.We could look, for example, at his attitude to work.We can think about that in relation to the amount of work that he did, the number of plays that he wrote, the
the regularity with which he wrote plays, we think about the ambition with which his plays demonstrate, the fact that he gets more and more, I would think, more and more passionate in his engagement with human activity.
In the later plays, as he is in the early ones, for example, We can think also about what other people said about him.We have some opinions on what other people said about him.We can think about his business dealings.
We can see that Trayton, he was a good businessman.We'd see this from the purchases that he made in Stratford, the amount of land that he bought
Once again, we were cut off at that point, alas.And the good news is he's previewing the kinds of things you can expect from his book.How do you know what Shakespeare was like?
You can look at the kind of land he bought, his attitude toward work, and evidence such as that.And there's some evidence, but not a lot.And so my next question was, well, what can we learn about Shakespeare, the person from his plays?
It's easy to say, for example, that he loved language and that he understood human nature, but are there any characters who seem to represent Shakespeare for us in some ways?And if so, which ones should we look to?
Let's take our last break and then come back with his answer.
Do you think we can discern his personality from the characters that he writes, or is he too judicious and fair-minded, or do you see any of his characters as kind of a stand-in for the real Shakespeare?
Well, I think it's possible to glimpse Shakespeare in the plays.I mean, above all, of course, he is a dramatist projecting himself into the minds and the emotions of the characters he's writing about.
But sometimes I think he comes through himself a bit.I think we can see something of Shakespeare.I would say in Benedict, for example, in Hamlet, and perhaps in Prosper in The Tempest, too.
I don't think we can see any biographical writing, any autobiographical resonances there.But just perhaps a bit in the cast of mind.
These are characters who are within the plays, who are, to some extent, observers of life around them, as, of course, Shakespeare was.So yeah, I think we can sometimes see something of him in this.
Sometimes his own ideas come through, but of course, then again, one goes back again to the sonnets, the sonnets are the place where he is writing most personally.
Right.OK, so let's jump to the sonnets.That was question number three.What is it about the sonnets that make them such rich territory?Why do you think he was writing?How do we know that this is not a character he was putting on, I guess?
How do you know that it's him?
Well, how we know is, I suppose you've got to say it's partly intuition.We have a volume called Shakespeare's Sonnets, published in 1609.It's a third-person volume in the sense that it's not sonnets by William Shakespeare.
He doesn't appear to have made any effort to get the sonnets into print himself, and the dedication is not by Shakespeare, it's by the publisher of the volume.I think the sonnets were published surreptitiously.
I don't think Shakespeare wanted them to be published.I think he put them all together.He must have had a manuscript.
I've compared it to a schoolboy collecting stamps almost, as if he was collecting, he must have had a manuscript volume containing poems written over a period of between 20 and 30 years.
because two of the sonnets are clearly schoolboy exercises, translations from Latin, the two last printed of the sonnets.
One of them is a wooing sonnet to Anne Hathaway, it comes on her name, Hathaway, and that clearly is therefore a sonnet written when he was only a boy of about 18 when he was wooing Anne.He was married early, as you know.
And yet other sonnets clearly were written in the later periods. So I think Shakespeare wrote all these songs, collected them.Some of them were public poems.Some of them were written to particular individuals, I believe.
Others were very, very private poems, indeed, private meditations, which is part of why I think this is important, because he puns on his own name several times.He puns on his name, Will,
And it ends with the words, my name is Will, which is a very clear indication indeed of authorship that William Shakespeare had written at that time.So I think the sonnets are very, very revealing indeed.
I recently published, along with my friend Paul Edmondson, we published a volume called All the Sonnets of Shakespeare, in which for the first time ever, the sonnets are arranged not in the order in which they were printed in 1609,
but insofar as we can discover a chronological composition.And I think that's very revealing.It does show you something about the development of Shakespeare's mind, of his art, and also of his life.
Right.So what type of person emerges from the sonnets?
Well, a man with a sense of humor, a man with a clear self-investigative quality, a man who thought deeply about life around him, but also about his own responses to life, a man who loved other people, who loved, and I think we have to say it on the evidence of solids,
that Shakespeare was bisexual because one of them writes and talks about him as loving two people.Two loves I have, he says, of comfort and despair.
He seems to have been anguished sometimes about his private life, worried about his conduct in relation to other people.So I think this is deeply revealing.One of the sonnets is a religious sonnet.
Only one is a poem that shows a religious sensibility, so that's interesting to have that poem.And one or two of them seem to me to be addressed to individuals who we might have to identify.
I suspect some of them are addressed to the Earl of Southampton, Henry Rinsley, to whom he definitely addressed his narrative poems, such as Adonis and the Rape of
published respectively in 1593 and 1594, with very revealing personal dedications printed of them.Shakespeare had a lifelong relationship of some sort, or a close relationship.
That's fairly conjectural, but it is clear that these are genuinely personal poems.They're not poems like some of the sommeteers
writing in the early years of his career, like Sydney and others, which are written to, some of them to, fictional, all to women, and usually in a rather idealized fashion.
There's an emotional reality about Shakespeare's sonnets that sets them off very much from all his sonneteers, except John Donne, though he writes partly in lyric form in his songs.
Interestingly, his personal poems were not published until after he died. I suspect that Shakespeare would have been happier if he'd obviously been published after he had died, too.
And you give a kind of general view of Shakespeare as being successful on the outside, externally successful, but full of some turmoil on the inside.And I wasn't sure if that was personal turmoil or creative turmoil or both.
Well, there is a good deal of personal turmoil evident in the solace, I think it's creative as well.I mean, he was really a pretty fluent writer, it would appear.I mean, he writes an average of two plays a year, so he works hard.
You can tell that because some of the plays great deal of very serious reading.I make a point about that in my book, that he was writing with big books in front of him sometimes.
Holland Shedd's Chronicles, for example, is an enormously heavy, big book.He used the Bible a lot.He wrote a lot.Most of his books are written, of course, from pre-existing stories.A lot of them set in Italy.
That's where a lot of the stories of the period came from. translations from Biondello, for example.It's part of why a lot of his plays have his settings.But he worked very hard in the writing of his plays to
One way to look at Shakespeare, I think, is to say, well, he may have been generous and big-hearted and empathetic in his works, but he might not have been that way in real life.Do you think that's a view that's supportable by what we know?
Well, there is some evidence that he sometimes put himself first.Yeah.I mean, that he wanted to make as much money as he could.He doesn't seem to have given away a great deal of money, as far as we can tell.
There is a bequest in this world to the poor people of Stratford of £10, which is quite a large sum in our terms.I think he had his own interests, and the interests of his family, it has to be said, too.Of course, he had a personal tragedy,
in the death of his son, Hamlet, which has become the subject of a very popular book and play just recently, a book called Hamlet by Margaret Farrell, a novel which has been turned into a play that's being performed currently by the Royal Shakespeare Company.
We don't know much about those children.We know practically nothing about them, really, except the dates of their births and burials, which, of course, we've helped into the imagination. of creative artists, but clearly it was a heavy blow for him.
His later life with the daughters, Susanna and Judith, does suggest a deep care for his family, and he makes careful bequests to them, careful provision for them in his will.
Mm-hmm.Does he have any other faults or flaws, or do you find him to be an admirable, you know, a sort of genius we can all admire?
Well, I think he was an admirable man, but I think he was human like the rest of us.He was hard-working, undoubtedly.He was dedicated to his work.And if you compare him with some of the other playwrights and artists of his time.
If you compare him, for example, with Robert Greene or Marlowe, fairly irregular lives.There's nothing very much irregular about Shakespeare.He doesn't turn up in court cases the way some of his contemporaries like Ben Jonson does, for example.
Johnson, who was imprisoned for killing a man.
You write very movingly about your feelings of gratitude to Shakespeare.What are you grateful for?
Well, for intellectual interest, for emotional interest, for practical things, in a sense, because I've made my life out of writing about Shakespeare, lecturing about it.
of all, I think, for the imaginative enrichment that his plays and his sonnets afford.
In the same way, I'm grateful to, say, Hubert of Mertz's or Beethoven among the great composers or the great musicians, or to Dickens and Gerald Slim, for example, among other writers.
I think it's natural for us to give gratitude to figures of the past authors who are working now, the artists who are working now, for the ways in which they've enriched our lives and enhanced our experiences.
The book is called What Was Shakespeare Really Like?The author is one of the leading Shakespeare scholars of our time.Sir Stanley Wells, thank you so much for joining me on the History of Literature.
Okay.And again, my apologies for the audio.
We tried four different times and we just couldn't quite get that clear connection, but I thought it was worth sharing the interview anyway, because everything we can get from Sir Stanley Wells is worth having.That last answer was so good.
We look to the authors of the past, Shakespeare and Dickens and Jane Austen and musicians and composers, Beethoven and Mozart, and to contemporary artists too, to enhance our lives.And for that, We are grateful.
I'll add some gratitude toward authors and lecturers like Sir Stanley Wells, 93 and still going strong.
We're getting closer to the holidays, and this is a book to consider picking up for that Shakespeare fan in your life, or to put on your own list, your wish list, of books you would like to read.What was Shakespeare really like?
You heard a little of it today, and the book will tell you all the rest. We have a little extra time, so let's hear from another one of our esteemed guests.This time it's David Ellis, who was here for a discussion of Lord Byron.
After we spoke, I asked him to select a book that would serve as the last book he will ever read.Here was his response.Let's do the special question.
Oh, dear, yes. Yeah, I was very interested by it, because I was thinking, I've taught for a while in Australia.And when I was there, there was a professor in Melbourne, who was much loved and much admired, who was dying.
And people said that as he was dying, he was having words worth prelude.But when I thought about the question, I thought, well, if you're dying, you're not going to be in a good state to read much.But I assumed
that it would be an audiobook, perhaps, that she would go for.And then I had to think, well, what would it be?And I really have no idea.But I'm very fond of Dr. Johnson.
And it struck me that, depending on your mood, his poem, The Vanity of Human Wishes, might be appropriate.Nor think the doom of man reversed for thee, as if you would. And then that will be pretty miserable, I think.
So it'd be nice to have read you parts of Henry IV, I and II, Falstaff.And of course, then if you really wanted to press the melancholic pedal, you could have the hostess of account of the death of Paul South.But again, not sure, not sure.
But the variety of human wishes, as we look around the world, I don't know about your world, but in this country. It would be an appropriate text, I think.
It sounds like you're thinking of your favorite text, but then you're having some second thoughts, thinking, well, maybe that wouldn't be so good for the final book.
Well, I was thinking, no, nobody ought to listen to this because it's too downbeat.You want something a bit more cheerful.
Okay.David Ellis, thank you for joining me on the History of Literature.
Thank you for having me, and yes, happy reading of Byron.
OK, there we go.My thanks to Sir Stanley Wells for joining me and to David Ellis for that cameo appearance.And of course, to Emily Dickinson for being her usual inspiring self.
We'll be back next time with a look at Anna Sewell, the author of children's classic Black Beauty, who had a surprising life.At least it was surprising to me.I knew almost nothing about her.
The book's publishing career was also full of twists and turns. We'll be traveling to New England or I guess to New York and to Sleepy Hollow to check out Washington Irving and the Headless Horseman soon.It's a good October episode.
Homer and his Iliad might storm onto our stage later in the month.And we have some other good episodes planned as well.Happy October, everyone.I'm Jack Wilson.Thank you for listening.And we'll see you next time.
Hey, Play On Podcast listeners, if you enjoyed that episode of The History of Literature and you want more fascinating conversations about authors like Shakespeare and David Ellis, follow The History of Literature on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite listening app.
Tell them Michael at Play On Podcasts sent you.
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