In the first episode of their new Close Readings series on political poetry, Seamus Perry and Mark Ford look at ‘An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’ by Andrew Marvell, a poem about politics but also political inasmuch as nobody can agree on what it says.
Emily and Tom return to the 8th century BCE to explore Homer’s near contemporary, Hesiod. In Works and Days, Hesiod weaves his curmudgeonly persona into a brilliantly comic narrative that encompasses everything from brotherly bickering to cosmic warfare.
Were the Middle Ages funny? Irina Dumitrescu and Mary Wellesley begin their series in quest of the medieval sense of humour with Chaucer’s 'Miller’s Tale', a story that is surely still (almost) as funny as when it was written six hundred years ago.
Judith Butler joins Adam Shatz for the first episode of Human Conditions to look at Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1946 book Anti-Semite and Jew, originally published in French as Réflexions Sur La Question Juive.
Clare and Colin begin their twelve-part series on satire with the big question: what is satire? Where did it come from? Is it a genre, or more of a style, or an attitude? They then plunge into their first text, the Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus, a prose satire from 1511 that lampoons pretty much the whole of sixteenth century life in the voice of Folly herself.
In the final episode of The Long and Short, we turn to Elizabeth Bowen, widely considered one of the finest writers of the short story. Mark and Seamus unpack ‘the Bowen effect’ and her singularly haunting style: subtle social commentary cut through with humour, and occasionally outright romanticism. A culmination of the short fiction explored in this series, Bowen’s work proves that life ‘with the lid on’ can be just as exhilarating, moving and funny as any sensationalist story.
For the final episode in Among the Ancients, Emily and Tom look at Seneca, whose life is relatively well known to us. For a long time, Seneca the Philosopher was often assumed to be a different person from Seneca the Tragedian, as they seemed such different writers. As a philosopher, he is the main source of what we know about Roman Stoicism, which prioritises virtue and the dispelling of false beliefs. Seneca's dramas, however, are full of extreme emotion and violence.
For the final episode of Medieval Beginnings, Mary and Irina look at by far the most popular text (in its time) of all that have featured in the series: The Travels of Sir John Mandeville. The fictional traveller’s fantastical descriptions of different places, peoples and animals across the Holy Land and Asia are almost certainly drawn mainly from other textual sources, rather than direct experience by the unknown author, and yet the work was often used as a source of reference as well as entertainment or prurient interest.
The eleventh episode of the Long and Short brings us to the present day and the distant past, as we turn to two multivocal, monumental poems by Alice Oswald.
Ovid was perhaps the most prolific poet of Ancient Rome, certainly in the amount of his poetry which has survived (around 30,000 lines). This episode focuses on his 15-book epic, the Metamorphoses, a patchwork of hundreds of stories of transformation, including numerous retellings of famous myths from Apollo and Daphne to the Trojan War.
For sheer scale and spectacle, surely few plays of any period can match The Digby Play of Mary Magdalene. Boasting at least fifty speaking parts, with multiple locations, scaffolds and pyrotechnics, including an ascent into heaven, this wildly ambitious piece of late Medieval theatre mixes traditional hagiographic drama with magical adventure, romance and broad comedy.
In the tenth episode of the Long and Short, Seamus and Mark turn to two figures of the Harlem Renaissance.
Emily and Tom follow Virgil with one of his contemporaries, Horace, whose poetry played an important political role in the early years of Augustan Rome and has had an enormous influence on subsequent European lyric verse.
From the first recorded instance of the word ‘fart’ in English, to nuanced vignettes of sexual power dynamics, the numerous Middle English lyrics that have survived down the centuries, often scribbled in the margins of more ‘serious’ texts, offer a vivid snapshot of everyday medieval life.
Originally conceived as a film script, Gaudete is Ted Hughes’s apocalyptic vision of an English village in the throes of pagan forces. While it may be ‘the weirdest poem by a very weird poet’, as Mark puts it in this episode, Gaudete shines a light on many Hughesian preoccupations and paved the way for his best-selling collection, Birthday Letters. A strange fusion of Twin Peaks and Midsomer Murders, Gaudete is the former Poet Laureate at his most uninhibited and brilliant.