̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Shakespeare

Shakespeare’s mystery annotator identified as John Milton

ta385 — Tue, 17 Sep 2019 13:33:51 +0000

It is well known that Shakespeare was a huge influence on Milton. From learning how to write nature poetry to creating charismatic villains, Milton’s debt to his forebear continues to fascinate experts. ̽��ֱ��younger poet once praised the 'wonder and astonishment' that this 'great heir of fame' conjured up in his readers.

But now, Jason Scott-Warren from Cambridge’s English Faculty believes he has identified even more tangible evidence of this connection. ̽��ֱ��realisation began when Scott-Warren read an article by Professor Claire Bourne about an anonymous annotator of a Shakespeare First Folio housed in the Free Library of Philadelphia’s Rare Book Department.

Bourne dated the annotator to the mid-17th century and shared images of the handwritten notes. These include suggested corrections, cross-references to other works and the addition of material such as the prologue to Romeo and Juliet. Studying these, Scott-Warren was struck by how closely they resembled known examples of Milton’s handwriting and after identifying numerous compelling similarities, he decided to share his theory in a blog post for Cambridge’s Centre for Material Texts, of which he is Director.

Milton is known to have made similarly intelligent and assiduous annotations in other books that survive from his library, but the evidence that Scott-Warren presents is strictly palaeographical. It includes the observation that in both the First Folio and in Milton’s handwriting, the right foot of an ‘h’ misses the ground before it heads up into an ‘e’.

Even more convincingly, Scott-Warren points out that “Milton has an enlarged italic hand, sometimes rather scratchy, sometimes quite elegant, that he uses for headings and suchlike.” ̽��ֱ��researcher compares, for example, the ‘R’ in the speech-heading for ‘Romeo’ in the Folio to a remarkably similar and distinctive ‘R’ from Milton’s ‘commonplace book’, a handwritten compilation of quotes and notes from the books that he was reading between the 1630s and 1660s.

Scott-Warren offered up his theory tentatively, admitting that further work would be needed to prove it beyond doubt. But several Milton experts from around the world have already expressed their enthusiastic support and offered further evidence.

Dr William Poole from New College Oxford says: “Not only does this hand look like Milton’s, but it behaves like Milton’s writing elsewhere does, doing exactly the things Milton does when he annotates books, and using exactly the same marks.”

"I was gathering evidence with my heart in my mouth,” Scott-Warren says. “Now, every day someone is suggesting a new similarity. I feel 100% sure, but there are still people out there who remain to be convinced.”

As well as displaying many textual annotations, the folio contains line markings which record the annotator’s lively engagement with plays including Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, ̽��ֱ��Tempest and King Lear. Scott-Warren says: “You don’t know why he’s singled out a passage for attention, but it forces you to think your way into Milton’s head and it chimes with a lot of what goes on in his poetry. You can really see him constructing himself through Shakespeare.”

In ̽��ֱ��Tempest, the annotator highlighted the song: 'Come unto these yellow sands, / And then take hands: / Courtsied when you have and kiss’d / ̽��ֱ��wild waves whist.' ̽��ֱ��unusual rhyme, of 'kiss’d' and 'whist', is echoed in Milton’s On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity: ' ̽��ֱ��winds with wonder whist, / Smoothly the waters kist.'

Scott-Warren says: “To see him marking it in the text and responding to it gives you a sense of his sensitivity and alertness to Shakespeare.”

̽��ֱ��First Folio, the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays, was published in 1623, seven years after his death, when Milton himself was fifteen. Around 750 were printed but only 233 are known to survive. Scott-Warren is now intending to collaborate with Professor Bourne on a series of articles about the findings.

John Milton was admitted to Christ's College Cambridge in 1624, gaining his BA in 1628 and his MA in 1632.

A Cambridge literary scholar suggests that the handwriting on a Shakespeare First Folio in Philadelphia matches that of the Paradise Lost poet, John Milton.

It shows you the first-hand encounter between two great writers, which you don’t often get to see

Jason Scott-Warren

Courtesy of the Free Library of Philadephia

̽��ֱ��prologue to Romeo and Juliet, transcribed on the last page of Titus Andronicus because it was omitted from the First Folio. Courtesy of the Free Library of Philadephia

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Into the woods with Shakespeare

amb206 — Sun, 01 Oct 2017 23:00:00 +0000

Fear and forests, writes Shakespeare scholar Professor Anne Barton, go hand in hand. Forests are where we get lost and meet wild men, where chaos rules and anything can happen. Shakespeare uses forest settings, sometimes magical, sometimes menacing, in many of his plays. In As You Like It, the Forest of Arden is a place of freedom, transformation and love – but also hardship for the shepherds who work there. When in Macbeth Birnam Wood does come to Dunsinane, Macbeth knows he is doomed.

Barton, who died in 2013, was Professor of English and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. Her many published works included Essays, Mainly Shakespearean (1994) and Ben Jonson, Dramatist (1984), and she was also an influential editor of Shakespeare’s plays. She was vitally interested in performance and staging, and her work has substantially altered and enriched the ways in which Shakespeare and other early modern dramatists have been understood and performed.

Now Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Press has published ̽��ֱ��Shakespearean Forest, Anne Barton’s final book, based in part on her Clark Lectures in 2003. It has been prepared for publication by Dr Hester Lees-Jeffries, a former research assistant to Barton and now a Shakespeare scholar herself, and a ̽��ֱ�� Lecturer in the Faculty of English. In an editor’s note, Lees-Jeffries describes Barton’s seminars, held in her beautiful rooms at Trinity College, as often intimidating but always with a sense of occasion.

Woods and forests in the English language

̽��ֱ��six chapters of ̽��ֱ��Shakespearean Forest set the playwright’s work within a historical, social and literary world of forests, as well as exploring the surviving evidence for the ways in which forests might have been staged in the early modern theatre. ̽��ֱ��opening chapter reminds us how big a part woodland plays in the story of the British Isles. ̽��ֱ��English language is rich with references to wood and woods. We talk about ‘not being able to see the wood for the trees’ and ‘not being out of the woods yet’. We ‘touch wood’ to forestall ill fortune.

If Britain is wooded today, it was much more so in Shakespeare’s lifetime. ̽��ֱ��names of these forests and woods entered the lexicon. ̽��ֱ��maiden name of Shakespeare’s mother Anne was Arden. His birthplace, the town of Stratford-upon-Avon, was once surrounded by the ancient woodland of the Forest of Arden. It was even said that a squirrel could jump from tree to tree right across the county of Warwickshire.

But this forest was already in decline in Shakespeare’s time. Trees provided timber for house and ship building, fuel for cooking and heating. In his Description of England in 1587, William Harrison commented that both England and Wales “have sometimes been very well replenished with great woods and groves, although at this time the said commodity be not a little decayed in both”.

Shakespeare wrote for the ‘wooden O’, as the open-air, timber-framed Globe Theatre is described in the Prologue to Henry V. ̽��ֱ��origin of many of our current environmental anxieties can be found in the early modern period, and in the writings of Shakespeare and his contemporaries; they too were concerned by deforestation and pollution. Like the theatre itself, the forest is a place of transformation, growth and change.

Hunters, poachers and wild men of the woods

Forests were all about hunting – a pastime seen as preparation for warfare. Complex laws gave royalty rights and privileges to hunt deer and boar. Elizabeth I was a keen hunter, as well as being readily associated by poets in her courtly cult with Diana, virgin goddess of the hunt. Her successor James’ passion for the chase, writes Barton, “verged on the pathological”. He even insisted on being lowered into the gaping bellies of dead stags in the belief that the blood would strengthen his ankles.

Poaching was widespread and, though illegal, was not regarded as socially disreputable. ̽��ֱ��gentry, and even nobility, engaged in poaching – either for fun or to pursue family vendettas. Popular tradition holds that Shakespeare, too, may have been a poacher in his youth. Barton paints a vivid portrait of a group of poachers as a motley crew of unruly thrill-seekers united by blood-thirsty machismo.

“Heavily armed […] accompanied by a remarkably democratic mixture of friends, eager household servants, and people from the local village (sometimes including the vicar), men who had deer parks of their own, regularly broke into those of their neighbours, viciously assaulting keepers and killing more game than they could carry away.”

More benignly, green men and woodwoses (wild men of the woods) are key characters in the dramatis personae encountered in fields, woods and forests. In medieval churches and cathedrals, leaf masks are carved into stonework as decorative motifs, stubborn leftovers from a pagan past. They are, observes Barton, “reminders that forests are places of transformation, where the boundary between human life and that of animals, plants or trees are likely to become confused, or even obliterated”.

While for other dramatists, wild men were “a vogue that peaked and faded”, writes Barton, “Shakespeare’s interest in wild men seems to have extended throughout his writing career, taking in Oliver [As You Like It], Timon [Timon of Athens], the dancers in Bohemia [ ̽��ֱ��Winter’s Tale], Caliban [ ̽��ֱ��Tempest], Cardenio [ ̽��ֱ��History of Cardenio] and (in a sense) Herne the Hunter in ̽��ֱ��Merry Wives of Windsor.” Elsewhere in the book she explores the various traditions of Robin Hood and Merlin the enchanter, both of whom make appearances in plays by Shakespeare’s contemporaries, including Ben Jonson.

How did Shakespeare bring the forest to his audiences?

A central question of Barton’s work is how Shakespeare might have brought the physicality of forest and woodland to the stage. There is no documentary evidence to show how early performances of Shakespeare’s plays led audiences deep into the woods. ̽��ֱ��only clue comes from the Netherlands in form of an engraving, dated 1635, which shows an elaborate indoor stage at a fair. In the background two tall trees are visible, perhaps waiting their moment in the next scene.

To exemplify the effort and expense invested in creating spectacular entertainment, Barton describes in detail the extraordinary artificial forest commissioned by Henry VIII for a pageant performed to celebrate the birth of a son on New Year’s Day 1511. ‘La Forrest Salvigne’ took the form of a rolling stage (requiring 40 men to propel it) complete with a magnificent forest from which the king and three companions appeared, mounted on horseback and fully armed.

According to meticulous accounts kept by an official, this forest comprised 12 hawthorns, 12 oaks, 12 hazels, 10 maples. 10 birches, 16 dozen fern roots and branches, 60 broom stalks and 16 furze bushes. Also present were 6 fir trees, holly, ivy, fennel stalks and 2,400 acorns and hazelnuts. Most of these items (including the nuts and acorns) were not gathered from the countryside but man-made. As Barton writes: “ ̽��ֱ��individual shapes and sizes of its myriad leaves, for instance, were delicately cut from fine sarsnet, a fine silk material, and then backed with stiffened paper.”

Barton’s interest in the staging of Shakespeare’s plays reflects the way her own life brought together the worlds of theatre and academia, not least in her marriage to the director John Barton. In an afterword to ̽��ֱ��Shakespearean Forest, Shakespeare scholar Professor Peter Holland writes that many of Barton’s students became actors and directors and that many of her research students (including Holland himself) wrote dissertations centrally concerned with the questions of performance in early modern drama.

Holland writes: “Performance inflected her approach to plays and nothing in her writing […] allowed plays to be analysed as if their narratives could be divorced from the rhythms of performance.”

̽��ֱ��Shakespearean Forest by Anne Barton is published by Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Press.

Inset image: map of Warwickshire from ' ̽��ֱ��theatre of the empire of Great Britaine' (1611) (Atlas 2.61.1, Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library)

̽��ֱ��Shakespearean Forest reimagines the real forests that our greatest playwright evoked in his works. ̽��ֱ��final book of renowned scholar, Anne Barton, it explores the changeable and sometimes sinister presence of the forest in literature and culture.

Forests are places of transformation, where the boundary between human life and that of animals, plants or trees are likely to become confused, or even obliterated.

Anne Barton

Glasgow ̽��ֱ�� Archive

Henry Peacham, 'Silvius', from Minerva Britanna (1612)

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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Lines of Thought: Telling the Story of History

Anonymous — Fri, 16 Sep 2016 14:31:13 +0000

Since March, some of the world’s most valuable books and manuscripts have been on display as Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library celebrates its 600th birthday. This fortnight is the last chance to see this once-in-a-lifetime free exhibition of its greatest treasures.

̽��ֱ��objects in Lines of Thought: Discoveries that Changed the World, which will close to the public on September 30, communicate 4,000 years of human thought through the Library’s unique and irreplaceable collections. More than 70 per cent of the exhibits are displayed to the public for the first time.

̽��ֱ��exhibition investigates through six distinct themes how Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library’s eight million books and manuscripts have transformed our understanding of life here on earth and our place among the stars.

In Telling the Story of History, curator John Wells traces the way in which literature has treated the monarchs and heroes of history.

Long before the development of evidence-based history, this was done through story-telling. Stories that elaborate on myths, legends and folk memories accumulate down the years, connecting successive ages with their past, and influencing writers of the present. In the Western European tradition fables inherited from classical antiquity have been passed down the centuries to inspire countless reinventions and retellings. Themes and characters from Homer’s Odyssey, for example, surface again and again in literature, from James Joyce’s Ulysses to Margaret Drabble’s novel ̽��ֱ��gates of ivory.

"Homer stands at the head of the Western European tradition of narrative, and there are no epics older than the Homeric epics – the influence that these texts have had is really quite incalculable," says Wells.

̽��ֱ��plays of William Shakespeare, gathered here in the ‘First Folio’ of 1623, are a highwater mark of imaginative literature. Their fictional depiction of real people and real events, such as Henry V at the Battle of Agincourt, can shape our understanding of historical events.

" ̽��ֱ��'First Folio' of Shakespeare, the collection of his plays which was published soon after his death by his friends John Heminges and Henry Condell, collects many plays which never saw print in Shakespeare's lifetime," explains Wells. "If it hadn't been for the work of Heminges and Condell, so many plays which are at the peak of English literary tradition would simply not be known to us."

"Shakespeare's views and interpretations of his characters really have affected the way in which we now think of historical figures," says Wells.

Fantastical fictional writings such as Dante’s Divine comedy also draw on figures of the past for their protagonists, or use allusion to pass on subtle messages. Folk stories, whether written on ancient papyri or in a modern novel, weave their way through Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library’s collections and through our collective imaginations.

"Our line of thought, which we began with a papyrus fragment of Homer, leads right to the end of the 20th century now with Cambridge-educated novelist Margaret Drabble," says Wells.

"In her novel ̽��ֱ��gates of ivory, Drabble sets her characters against the great sweep of history, and in particular the revolution in Cambodia in the 1970s. ̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ�� Library is actively acquiring the archives of literary authors because we know that they are going to be subjects of study in the years to come - the notes and drafts which are accumulated are sources of scholarship in their own right."

Inset image: Homer, Fragments of the Odyssey, XII, ll. 250–304, Second century CE.

Shakespeare's 'First Folio', Dante's Divine Comedy, and fragments of Homer's Odyssey from the second century CE, are among the objects in our final film celebrating Lines of Thought at Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library.

̽��ֱ��influence that these texts have had is really quite incalculable

John Wells

Lines of Thought: Telling the Story of History

Mr. William Shakespeares comedies, histories, & tragedies: published according to the true originall copies (the ‘First Folio’) London: printed by Isaac Jaggard and Edward Blount, 1623

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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Shakespeare goes to East Africa

amb206 — Fri, 25 Mar 2016 09:00:00 +0000

In 1857 the explorer Captain Richard Francis Burton set out from the East African coast to find the source of the Nile. As his expedition struggled through unmapped bush, men and horses died from starvation and disease – or perished in raids from tribes whose land they crossed. Often hysterical from fever and fear, Burton reduced the baggage carried to ammunition, medicine and materials to trade with locals. But he clung to a few volumes of reading matter. He wrote later: “ ̽��ֱ��few books – Shakespeare, Euclid – which composed my scanty library, we read together again and again.”

Burton wasn’t the only westerner to take a volume of Shakespeare into Africa. Others who did so included the legendary Henry Stanley, John Speke and Thomas Parke. In 1886 the aristocratic Walter Montague Kerr protested at the meagreness of the baggage accompanying him to the lakes of central Africa compared with that of “some expeditions to the dark interior of the continent” but added that he found space for “a small edition of Shakespeare, a Nautical Almanac, logarithmic tables, and Proctor’s Star Atlas”.

In the year that celebrates 400 years since Shakespeare’s death, Dr Edward Wilson-Lee (Faculty of English) takes us thousands of miles south of the poet and playwright’s very English birthplace. In Shakespeare in Swahililand, Wilson-Lee revisits the land of his own childhood to discover, on foot and by train and tuktuk, the often surprising ways in which Shakespeare is woven into the shifting cultures of East Africa.

While Victorian explorers took the complete works as a weighty talisman of civilisation, Wilson-Lee travels lightly. With his own volume of Shakespeare in an old leather shooting bag, he flits between libraries, archives and institutes in a world of 100 million Swahili speakers. Along the way he meets a colourful cast of characters: painters, actors, soldiers, a teenage prostitute, intellectuals, readers, thinkers.

̽��ֱ��earliest performance of a Shakespeare play in Africa is said to have taken place aboard a sailing ship during the playwright’s own life time. An article published early in the 19th century, reportedly based on a captain’s dairy, claims that the crew of the Dragon, a vessel sent in search of spices by the India Company, performed two Shakespeare plays in September 1607. While the ship was anchored north-west of Madagascar, its crew performed the ‘TRAGEDY OF HAMLET’.

Supporting evidence for these early stagings is fragile. But, though fanciful, these reports do suggest an early and uncanny link between Shakespeare and East Africa. For hard facts, however, we jump to 1867 when the English missionary Edward Steere printed Swahili translations of four of Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare. Written in 1807, these tales were abridged, and widely popular, versions of the plays written to help young audiences grasp some of the more complex twists and turns.

Strange and wonderful things happen when Shakespeare crosses continents. Titles are misspelt ( ̽��ֱ��Merchant of Venus); plots are subverted to suit political agendas; and sometimes the players don’t realise they are performing Shakespeare at all. Wilson-Lee applauds this fluidity with glee: it echoes Shakespeare’s own pilfering of character and storyline. “Shakespeare himself showed no hesitation in borrowing from foreign cultures,” he writes, “and he based many of his own works on stories derived from the Italians and French as well as from classical Latin and Greek culture.”

Educated in mission schools, where the study of English literature stood at the centre of the syllabus, the East African leaders who sparked the region’s independence movements had an easy familiarity with Shakespeare. According to his daughter, Jomo Kenyatta, father of modern Kenya, counted his volumes of Shakespeare among his favourite books and often recited from them. In 1948 Appollo Milton Obote, later to become Uganda’s first president, played the title role in Julius Caesar in a performance at Makerere ̽��ֱ�� in Kampala.

̽��ֱ��Indian diaspora was just as deeply touched by Shakespeare. Such was the fervour with which Shakespeare was embraced by the immigrant community, who were at the turn of the 20th century building the East African railways, and much more, that between in the 18 months from February 1915, there were no fewer than 15 Hindustani productions of Shakespeare plays in Kenya – more than in London’s West End during the same period.

When independence from colonialism came, enthusiasm for Shakespeare did not wane. As caretaker and then President of Tanganyika (Tanzania), Julius Nyerere spent his days forming a new nation and his evenings working on a translation of Julius Caesar. ̽��ֱ��puzzle of Nyerere’s choice of play lies, Wilson-Lee suggests, lies in its concern with the consequences of past upheavals, something Nyerere knew all about. He is quoted from an interview: “When hunting there is no problem… Problems start when the animal had died, that’s when the fighting starts.”

Criss-crossing East Africa, Wilson-Lee is often frustrated in his quest for material evidence of a once-thriving tradition of Shakespearean theatre. Of burgeoning colonial Mombasa, he writes: “As is so often the case, in the rush to record what seemed important at the time, much of what must have given the fledgling city its flavour was simply treated as unimportant and ephemeral, leaving future ages with a somewhat sterile version of the lives lived by these early settlers.”

With his own boyhood, “in a jumble of places filled with things from elsewhere”, Wilson-Lee has no such problem. And it’s his experience as a child growing up in Kenya, some two decades after its independence, that makes Shakespeare in Swahililand so compelling. Born to conservationist parents, he was brought up in the Nairobi suburb of Karen, a place that takes its name from Karen Blixen, author of best-selling Out of Africa. She was a huge fan of Shakespeare.

At home in Karen during the school holidays, Wilson-Lee unlocks the door to a dusty storeroom. Inside is a mishmash of belongings left by previous occupants of the house: zebra skins, animal skulls, tribal shields and masks, crested brass buttons long separated from their uniforms, and bell pulls that would once have summoned servants. He delights in this invitation to the world of make-believe. Only later, as an adult and a scholar, is he able to understand just how charged with meaning these items are.

Wilson-Lee’s book is more than travelogue-cum-memoir. Unique in its subject matter, and the way it blends history, politics and literature, his writing is rooted in Shakespearean scholarship. With his guidance, we see the African experiences of colonialism and independence – the relationship, for example, between master and servant, the lettered and unlettered – through Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets. These universal themes of power and inheritance, love and loss, clashes between old worlds and new, are, after all, what make Shakespeare resonate on a world stage.

Shakespeare in Swahililand is imbued with a sense of time running out. It is Wilson-Lee’s mission to capture, before it is too late, the vestiges of an era in which Shakespeare was performed by pupils in East Africa’s elite fee-paying schools, by students in the gleaming new university of Makerere in Uganda, and by Indian railway workers in corrugated iron sheds. Wilson-Lee argues, however, that this sense of the elusive, of knowledge just beyond our grasp, is central to the power of Shakespeare’s own poetic explorations.

Shakespeare in Swahiland by Edward Wilson-Lee is published by William Collins (2016)

On the eve of the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, Dr Edward Wilson-Lee explores the remarkable ways in which the works of England’s greatest poet-playwright are woven into the merging cultures of East Africa. In his debut book, Shakespeare in Swahililand, Wilson-Lee gives a compelling account of an era in which Shakespeare took centre stage.

Shakespeare showed no hesitation in borrowing from foreign cultures, and he based many of his own works on stories derived from the Italians and French as well as from classical Latin and Greek culture.

Edward Wilson-Lee

Apollo Milton Obote, future President of Uganda, playing Julius Caesar at Makerere ̽��ֱ�� in 1948

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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Lines of Thought: Discoveries that Changed the World

sjr81 — Thu, 10 Mar 2016 08:36:45 +0000

Lines of Thought: Discoveries that Changed the World, opens free to the public this Friday (March 11) and celebrates 4,000 years of recorded thought through the Library’s unique and irreplaceable collections. More than 70 per cent of the exhibits are displayed to the public for the first time in this exhibition.

Tracing the connections between Darwin and DNA, Newton and Hawking, and 3,000-year-old Chinese oracle bones and Twitter, the exhibition investigates, through six distinct themes, how Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library’s millions of books and manuscripts have transformed our understanding of life here on earth and our place among the stars.

̽��ֱ��iconic Giles Gilbert Scott building, opened in the 1930s, now holds more than eight million books, journals, maps and magazines – as well as some of the world's most iconic scientific, literary and cultural treasures.

̽��ֱ��new exhibition puts on display Newton’s own annotated copy of Principia Mathematica, Darwin’s papers on evolution, 3,000-year-old Chinese oracle bones, a cuneiform tablet from 2,000BC, and the earliest reliable text for 20 of Shakespeare’s plays.

Other items going on display include:

Edmund Halley’s handwritten notebook/sketches of Halley’s Comet (1682)
Stephen Hawking’s draft typescript of A Brief History of Time
Darwin’s first pencil sketch of Species Theory and his Primate Tree
A 2nd century AD fragment of Homer’s Odyssey.
̽��ֱ��Nash Papyrus – a 2,000-year-old copy of the Ten Commandments
Codex Bezae – 5th century New Testament, crucial to our understanding of ̽��ֱ��Bible.
A hand-coloured copy of Vesalius’ 1543 Epitome – one of the most influential works in western medicine
̽��ֱ��earliest known record of a human dissection in England (1564)
A Babylonian tablet dated 2039 BCE (the oldest object in the library)
̽��ֱ��Gutenberg Bible – the earliest substantive printed book in Western Europe (1455)
̽��ֱ��Book of Deer, 10th century gospel book: thought to be the oldest Scottish book and the first example of written Gaelic
̽��ֱ��first catalogue listing the contents of the Library in 1424, barely a decade after it was first identified in the wills of William Loring and William Hunden

̽��ֱ��six Lines of Thought featured in the exhibition are: From clay tablets to Twitter feed (Revolutions in human communication); ̽��ֱ��evolution of genetics (From Darwin to DNA); Beginning with the word (Communicating faith); On the shoulders of giants (Understanding gravity); Eternal lines (Telling the story of history) and Illustrating anatomy (Understanding the body).

̽��ֱ�� Librarian Anne Jarvis said: “It’s extraordinary to think that the ̽��ֱ�� Library, which started in 1416 as a small collection of manuscripts locked in wooden chests, has now grown into a global institution housing eight million books and manuscripts, billions of words, and millions of images, all communicating thousands of years of human thought.

“Our spectacular exhibition showcases six key concepts in human history that have been critical in shaping the world and culture we know today, illustrating the myriad lines of thought that take us back into the past, and forward to tomorrow’s research, innovation and literature.”

̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ�� Library, which is older than both the British Library and the Vatican Library, has more than 125 miles of shelving and more than two million books immediately available to readers – making it the largest open-access library in Europe.

̽��ֱ��first Line of Thought featured in the exhibition: From clay tablet to Twitter begins with a tiny 4,000-year-old tablet used as a receipt for wool, evidence of an advanced civilisation using a cuneiform script and Sumerian language, probably written in Girsu (Southern Iraq) and precisely dated to 2039BCE. ̽��ֱ��tablet is on public display for the first time in this exhibition.

From there, it charts the many and varied revolutions in communications throughout history, taking in Chinese oracle bones, the Gutenberg Bible, a palm leaf manuscript written in 1015AD, newspapers, chapbooks and 20th century Penguin paperbacks, before ending with a book containing Shakespeare’s Hamlet written in tweets.

Objects going on display for the first time during Lines of Thought include: the Book of Deer, Vesalius’s 3D manikin of the human body, William Morris’s extensively annotated proofs of his edition of Beowulf, a wonderful caricature of Darwin, and works by Copernicus, Galileo and Jocelyn Bell Burnell, the discoverer of pulsars.

“For six centuries, the collections of Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library have challenged and changed the world around us,” added Jarvis. “Across science, literature and the arts, the millions of books, manuscripts and digital archives we hold have altered the very fabric of our understanding.

To celebrate the Library’s 600th anniversary, the Library has selected one iconic item from each theme within the exhibition to be digitised and made available within a free iPad app, Words that Changed the World. Readers can turn the pages of these masterworks of culture and science, from cover to cover, accompanied by ̽��ֱ�� experts explaining their importance and giving contextual information.

Lines of Thought: Discoveries that Changed the World opens to the public on Friday, March 11, 2016 and runs until Friday, September 30, 2016. Entry is free.

̽��ֱ��exhibition is also available to view online, and items from the exhibition have also been digitised and made available on the Cambridge Digital Library.

Some of the world’s most valuable books and manuscripts – texts which have altered the very fabric of our understanding – will go on display in Cambridge this week as Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library celebrates its 600th birthday with a once-in-a-lifetime exhibition of its greatest treasures.

What started in 1416 as a small collection of manuscripts locked in wooden chests, has now grown into a global institution housing eight million books and manuscripts, billions of words, and millions of images, all communicating thousands of years of human thought.

Anne Jarvis

Lines of Thought: Discoveries that Changed the World

Graham CopeKoga

Priceless treasures: in a shot commissioned to celebrate Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library’s 600th anniversary, Professor Stephen Hawking is pictured with Newton’s annotated first edition of Principia Mathematica.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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Newton, Darwin, Shakespeare – and an envelope of ectoplasm: Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library at 600

sjr81 — Wed, 23 Dec 2015 09:45:45 +0000

Older than the British Library and the Vatican Library, Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library was first mentioned by name in two wills dated March 1416 and its most valuable contents stored in the wooden chest pictured above. ̽��ֱ��library now holds nine million books, journals, maps and magazines – as well as some of the world's most iconic scientific, literary and cultural treasures.

Its priceless collections include Newton’s own annotated copy of Principia Mathematica, Darwin’s papers on evolution, 3000-year-old Chinese oracle bones, a cuneiform tablet from 2000BC, and the earliest reliable text for 20 of Shakespeare’s plays.

But is also home to a bizarre assembly of non-book curiosities, collected over centuries, including a jar of ectoplasm, a trumpet for hearing spirits and a statue of the Virgin Mary, miraculously saved from an earthquake on Martinique.

Since 1710, Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library has also been entitled to one copy of each and every publication in the UK and Ireland under Legal Deposit – meaning the greatest works of more than four millennia of recorded thought sit alongside copies of Woman’s Own and the Beano on more than 100 miles of shelves. With two million of its volumes on open display, readers have the largest open-access collection in Europe immediately available to them.

To celebrate the Library’s 600th birthday, a spectacular free exhibition, Lines of Thought, will open on March 11, 2016. Featuring some of Cambridge’s most iconic and best-known treasures, it investigates through six distinct themes how both Cambridge and its collections have changed the world and will continue to do so in the digital era.

As well as the iconic Newton, Darwin and Shakespeare artefacts mentioned above, items going on display include:

Edmund Halley’s handwritten notebook/sketches of Halley’s Comet (1682)
Stephen Hawking’s draft typescript of A Brief History of Time
Darwin’s first pencil sketch of Species Theory and his Primate Tree
A second century AD fragment of Homer’s Odyssey.
̽��ֱ��Nash Papyrus – a 2,000-year-old copy of the Ten Commandments
Codex Bezae – 5th New Testament, crucial to our understanding of ̽��ֱ��Bible.
A hand-coloured copy of Vesalius’ 1543 Epitome – one of the most influential work in western medicine
A written record of the earliest known human dissection in England (1564)
A Babylonian tablet dated 2039 BCE (the oldest object in the library)
̽��ֱ��Gutenberg Bible – the earliest substantive printed book in Western Europe (1454)
̽��ֱ��first catalogue listing the contents of the Library in 1424, barely a decade after it was first identified in the wills of William Loryng and William Hunden

As well as Lines of Thought, 2016 will also see dozens of celebratory events including the library’s 17-storey tower being lit up as part of the e-Luminate Festival in February. Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library is also producing a free iPad app giving readers the chance to interact with digitised copies of six of the most revolutionary texts held in its collections. ̽��ֱ��app analyses the context of the six era-defining works, including Darwin's family copy of On the origin of species, Newton's annotated copy of Principia Mathematica, and William Tyndale's translation of the New Testament into English, an undertaking which led to his execution for heresy.

From October 2016, an exhibition featuring some of the ̽��ֱ�� Library’s most unusual curiosities and oddities will replace Lines of Thought as the second major exhibition of the sexcentenary.

Over the past 600 years, Cambridge has accumulated an extraordinary collection of objects, often arriving at the library as part of bequests and donations. Some of the library’s more unusual artefacts include children’s games, ration books, passports, prisoner art and Soviet cigarettes and cigars.

̽��ֱ�� Librarian Anne Jarvis said: “For six centuries, the collections of Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library have challenged and changed the world around us. Across science, literature and the arts, the millions of books, manuscripts and digital archives we hold have altered the very fabric of our understanding. Thousands of lines of thoughts run through them, back into the past, and forward into tomorrow. Our 600th anniversary is a chance to celebrate one of the world’s oldest and greatest research libraries, and to look forward to its future.

“Only in Cambridge, can you find Newton’s greatest works sitting alongside Darwin’s most important papers on evolution, or Sassoon’s wartime poetry books taking their place next to the Gutenberg Bible and the archive of Margaret Drabble. Our aim now, through our Digital Library, is to share as many of these great collections as widely as possible so that anyone, anywhere in the world, can stand on the shoulders of these giants.”

In 2016, Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library will celebrate 600 years as one of the world's greatest libraries with a spectacular exhibition of priceless treasures – and a second show throwing light on its more weird and wonderful collections.

For six centuries, the collections of Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library have challenged and changed the world around us. Across science, literature and the arts, the millions of books, manuscripts and digital archives we hold have altered the very fabric of our understanding.

Anne Jarvis

Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library

Detail from Vesalius' Epitome, one of the most influential works in western medicine

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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Children's literature comes of age

bjb42 — Sat, 01 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Understanding the messages and ideas that children pick up from books is an important part of understanding children’s education, as Professor Maria Nikolajeva, Director of Cambridge’s new Centre for Children’s Literature, explained: ‘Children can struggle with fundamental questions of life and death, good and evil, what it means to be a human being, and many will carry ideologies they pick up from picturebooks, fairytales, novels, animation and poetry through to adulthood. Any starting point that has the capacity to shape young people’s development deserves serious consideration.’

‘Children frequently perceive literature and art differently from their parents and teachers, who may have lost the open, immediate and joyful experience of the world that children have,’ added Professor Nikolajeva. ‘A better understanding of the significance of children’s literature and other cultural sources in broad terms can be used to improve children’s education and development.’

̽��ֱ��Cambridge/Homerton Research and Teaching Centre for Children’s Literature has been launched to consolidate and focus the research on children’s books and other cultural sources that has been ongoing for more than 30 years at Homerton College and later at the Faculty of Education. This long tradition has earned both institutions a strong national and international profile as a children’s literature research community of excellence.

Rich seams of investigation

̽��ֱ��goal of research at the Centre is to understand the ideas that children garner through books and other media in these early years, and to use this understanding to help educators make the best use of their materials. This can only be achieved through serious and thorough studies of the texts themselves, their history, themes, structures and social context.

Children’s literature is investigated with the same approaches used by academics studying any other type of literature or art. Indeed, research at the Centre draws on ideas from many areas, including literary criticism, art criticism, childhood studies, cultural studies, psychology, sociology and pedagogy.

This richness of approaches and materials makes children’s literature a particularly exciting area of study. ‘Yet the specific characteristics of children’s literature compared with other literature cannot be ignored,’ said Professor Nikolajeva. ‘Books, films and other cultural media are produced by one social group, the adults, for another social group, the children, and often have educational and instructive purposes. It thus becomes a vehicle of power, a socialisation device that has been employed by adults for centuries. Understanding these mechanisms is a cornerstone of any inquiry into children’s literature.’

Children’s literature is also an important part of our cultural heritage, something that is shared not only between children and adults, but also with people all over the world, as the best children’s books are translated and cross national borders. In recent years, the rising number of books that appeal both to children and adults, such as Philip Pullman’sHis Dark Materialstrilogy, is offering a new dimension for analysing the characteristics of books that are able to bridge this divide, a phenomenon that was last prominent in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Fresh approaches

̽��ֱ��Centre comprises about a dozen academics whose collective research covers texts that represent the widest possible span of reading ages and genres, from picturebooks through to teenage fiction, from fairy tales and fantasy to school stories and adventure, as well as film, comics, graphic novels and video games. In addition to this unique portfolio, the Centre combines theoretical expertise with empirical research in the field, mostly in schools.

Current research topics range from Victorian poetry to the role of nature in Walt Disney’s animation; from what girls read in the 19th century to young children’s understanding of visual texts; from early science books for children to adaptations of Shakespeare; and from young readers’ literature preferences in Lebanon to the image of adolescence in contemporary film. Graduate students also bring their own insights and innovative approaches to the field, as do visiting scholars from all over the world.

̽��ֱ��aim is for the Centre’s research to underpin educational thinking, policy and practice in relation to the importance of children’s literature. ̽��ֱ��scholars are confident that their endeavours can make a difference. ‘At the heart of what we do,’ said Professor Nikolajeva, ‘is a desire to understand how we can best help future generations of children to learn.’

For more information about research at the Faculty of Education, please visit www.educ.cam.ac.uk/centres/childrensliterature/

A new Centre for Children’s Literature is providing a focus for research on how children are shaped by early encounters with books and film.

Books, films and other cultural media are produced by one social group, the adults, for another social group, the children, and often have educational and instructive purposes.

Professor Maria Nikolajeva

mrsdkrebs from Flickr

Children's Literature

PLACE in the wider Faculty

̽��ֱ��Faculty of Education is one of the leading departments of education internationally, and has been repeatedly evaluated as the best nationally, for its commitment to teacher education, development of research-based policy and practice, and educational research of the highest quality.

Its academic staff, numbering more than 80, work within five academic groups that focus on many aspects of understanding and improving education, whether it’s redesigning school science and mathematics teaching, conducting the Cambridge Review of Primary Education, understanding the neuroscience of learning difficulties, evaluating the contribution made to learning by different types of leaders, or investigating how education affects the lives of people living in poorer communities around the world.

̽��ֱ��recently launched Centre for Children’s Literature is hosted by the Pedagogy, Language, Arts and Culture in Education (PLACE) academic group. This multidisciplinary group brings together specialists in arts and creativity, drama and media, modern and second language learning, history, English, geography, philosophy and religious studies. As Professor Maria Nikolajeva, Chair of PLACE, explained, this breadth is significantly benefitting collaborations. ‘In finding synergy between interests and expertise, we are discovering a new research space that can answer questions in different ways.’

An example of this activity is an interdisciplinary research project involving specialists in children’s literature, English, the curriculum and geography, which is investigating how children perceive their identities through the place they live in, using a variety of activities such as reading, creative writing, studying local history and map drawing.

Two schools in East Anglia are taking part in the study. ‘Although only 10 miles from each other, they are worlds apart,’ said Professor Nikolajeva. ‘ ̽��ֱ��urban school has a 95% Pakistani intake and the rural school has many pupils from families that have gone to the same school for generations. This research should raise fascinating differences and similarities in how children understand and learn about their own sense of belonging.’ ̽��ֱ��project builds on recent moves in the statutory curriculum to re-emphasise a cross-curricular approach to classroom teaching; research results will feed back into teaching practice.

For more information about the Centre, please visit www.educ.cam.ac.uk/centres/childrensliterature/ or contact Professor Maria Nikolajeva (mn351 AT cam DOT ac DOT uk) at the Faculty of Education. ̽��ֱ��Centre for Children’s Literature is seeking additional funding for research

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Shakespeare's medieval world

bjb42 — Sat, 01 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

A number of universities have chairs in early modern literature, a few in Middle English; Cambridge is unusual in combining the two, in the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance English originally set up for C.S. Lewis. His example of working across the periods has been followed by many of its later occupants, even though most scholars are cautious about crossing the invisible boundary between them. As the current holder of the Chair, I was delighted to be commissioned to write a book on Shakespeare and the Medieval World. Although we think of Shakespeare as quintessentially belonging to the English Renaissance, his world was still largely a medieval one.

Subtle glimpses of a changing time

Research is most often a process of discovering what’s there. That may be achieved by new technology, from Galileo’s telescope to the electron microscope, or simply by looking at things from a new angle or seeing them differently. Shakespeare’s medieval world is of the second kind.

We have, for instance, a number of early 17th-century engravings of London that are regularly reproduced in histories of the early modern city or books on Elizabethan drama. Apart from the newly-built theatres on the south bank, however, almost everything in the pictures is medieval: the great hulk of old St Paul’s towering over the city, the serrated skyline of the towers and spires of the parish churches, the bridge (completed in 1209) with its display of traitors’ heads, William the Conqueror’s Tower. They show, in fact, not so much ‘Shakespeare’s London’ as ‘Medieval London in the age of Shakespeare’.

Staging the world

̽��ֱ��same principles apply to drama. Many of the great cycles of Biblical mystery plays, which we think of as medieval, continued to be performed until half-way through Queen Elizabeth’s reign, a couple of them (both now lost) into the reign of King James I. Coventry, not far from Stratford, had one of the best known; it was last performed in 1579, when Shakespeare was 14 years old. His plays contain a number of allusions to the cycle plays – ‘out-Heroding Herod’ is the most famous of them – and most of them bear a particularly close relationship to what is known of the Coventry cycle. It can’t be proved that he saw it, but of the many unknowns in his life, that he did so is one of the safer conjectures.

̽��ֱ��cycle plays, furthermore, offered a model of theatre that was at the opposite extreme from the Classical Latin drama that was taught in the schools and imitated by humanist playwrights. It was insistently inclusive. ̽��ֱ��motto traditionally ascribed to the Globe, ‘Totus mundus agit histrionem’ (something between ‘all the world’s a stage’ and ‘everyone acts a part’), declared that the theatre was as large as the world: the maxim first appears in the 12th-century writer John of Salisbury, whose works were regularly reprinted in the Renaissance and were known, among others, to Ben Jonson.

̽��ֱ��theorists might insist that kings and clowns should never share a stage, but it was the very point of the Biblical plays that both kings and shepherds came to the newborn Christ. They did not separate out comedy and tragedy, both newly-imported terms: they offered an all-embracing play, in which black humour and deep grief could mix in the Passion sequences. They had no qualms about presenting a vast range of time and space on stage, from the Fall of the Angels to the Last Judgement, in ways that can make Shakespeare’s embrace of Rome and Egypt within a single play, or a time span that allows for babies to grow to adulthood, seem quite modest. And above all, they acted their action. Classical and humanist drama relied on messengers to report what was happening outside the single location it allowed itself, and especially any kind of violence. Medieval and Shakespearean drama performed it, blood and all.

Those ideas are so familiar now – so much part of what plays do – that it is easy to forget how much they needed to be asserted. Some, such as the mixing of tragedy and comedy, incited bitter hostility among Elizabethan theorists and have continued to cause unease for much longer (hence the notion of ‘comic relief’: it’s more complicated, and more profound, than that). ̽��ֱ��dramatists for the public theatres, like their medieval forebears, assumed that the stage had the same freedom of representation that we now accord to the cinema screen. No one expects the screen to obey the Aristotelean principles for the stage rediscovered around 1500 – that it should show only one place, or that the action shown on it should approximate to real time; both are possible, but exceptional. Medieval principles of theatre gave Shakespeare and his fellow playwrights the freedom that the neo-Classicists wanted to forbid.

What Shakespeare read

‘Medieval Shakespeare’ extends not just to his theatre, but to his reading, and to what he wrote about. Not only his plays on English history, but Macbeth, Hamlet and Lear draw on history or legendary history as it was carried forward from the Middle Ages.

̽��ֱ��story of Hamlet was first written down around 1200, and was in oral tradition before that. Lear was invented by Geoffrey of Monmouth in his History of the Kings of Britain(c. 1136), and Holinshed’s great Chronicles, the Elizabethans’ encylopaedic history of their real and supposed past, took the story from there. Lear’s Tom o’ Bedlam quotes from a folktale, and from one of the medieval verse romances that in cheap print provided the 16th century with much of its pulp fiction. ̽��ֱ��Trojan Troilus and Cressida draws on Chaucer and Caxton much more than on Homer; Chaucer is the sole source for ̽��ֱ��Two Noble Kinsmen, a collaboration with John Fletcher, and is the major inspiration for A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Chaucer’s contemporary John Gower, whose tomb faces the grave of Shakespeare’s brother in what was once the parish church for the Globe and is now Southwark Cathedral, is both the source for the story of Pericles and appears on stage as its presenter. Around half of Shakespeare’s plays have direct or indirect medieval sources, and they are a minor presence in many more.

None of this means that Shakespeare was a medieval writer: he changed everything he touched, whether inherited or new. But it is only possible to measure what he achieved, or even to see it clearly, when we recognise how much the Middle Ages gave the world’s greatest playwright to work on.

For more information, contact Professor Helen Cooper (ehc31@cam.ac.uk) at the Faculty of English or Magdalene College.

Medieval culture pervaded Shakespeare's life and work. Professor Helen Cooper examines its influence on the work of the world's greatest playwright.

Although we think of Shakespeare as quintessentially belonging to the English Renaissance, his world was still largely a medieval one.

Professor Helen Cooper

ell brown from Flickr

Statue of William Shakespeare at the centre of Leicester Square Gardens, London

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