“Two loves that I have, of comfort and despair”: the drama and architecture of Shakespeare’s sonnets
- Authors: Van Wyk Smith, Malvern
- Date: 2018
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/457486 , vital:75641 , 10.4314/sisa.v31i1.4
- Description: This essay was delivered as the annual Shakespeare Birthday Lecture of the Shakespeare Society of Southern Africa in Grahamstown in 2017. It argues that Shakespeare’s predisposition to recognise and develop the dramatic moment turned his initial interest in the normally static and contemplative sonnet into the components of something more like an oratorio of dramatic variations in sonnet form. The author focuses on four sonnets (18, 30, 116, 129) that stake out the thematic and structural range of the whole sequence, and discusses how the poet explores the compositional and indeed architectonic possibilities inherent in the principles and procedures of pursuing ‘variations on a theme’. The sonnets can thus be understood as an ambitious proto-baroque diptych, the two halves of which were to present an elaborate allegory of love versus lust, trust versus deceit, and innocence versus experience.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2018
“Two loves that I have, of comfort and despair”: the drama and architecture of Shakespeare’s sonnets
- Authors: Van Wyk Smith, Malvern
- Date: 2018
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/457486 , vital:75641 , 10.4314/sisa.v31i1.4
- Description: This essay was delivered as the annual Shakespeare Birthday Lecture of the Shakespeare Society of Southern Africa in Grahamstown in 2017. It argues that Shakespeare’s predisposition to recognise and develop the dramatic moment turned his initial interest in the normally static and contemplative sonnet into the components of something more like an oratorio of dramatic variations in sonnet form. The author focuses on four sonnets (18, 30, 116, 129) that stake out the thematic and structural range of the whole sequence, and discusses how the poet explores the compositional and indeed architectonic possibilities inherent in the principles and procedures of pursuing ‘variations on a theme’. The sonnets can thus be understood as an ambitious proto-baroque diptych, the two halves of which were to present an elaborate allegory of love versus lust, trust versus deceit, and innocence versus experience.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2018
The Africa that Shakespeare imagined; or, notes for aspirant film makers
- Authors: Van Wyk Smith, Malvern
- Date: 2009
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/457472 , vital:75640 , https://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC48130
- Description: The slippery presence of African themes in Shakespeare's plays is a function of the mythic but rapidly changing image of Africa in the England and Europe of his time. In 1888 Gardiner Greene Hubbard, president of the American National Geographic Society, introduced the centenary celebrations of the Society with an address in which he said : "America was explored ; Africa was circumnavigated" (3). He could hardly have summed up the contrast between three to four centuries of American and African discovery more cogently. A few years later, in 1897, C. Raymond Beazley made a similar point about Africa and the East : "Men crept round Africa in face of the Atlantic storms because of the golden East beyond" (3.11). This creeping round and haunting of Africa's shores had, as far as the English were concerned, only developed during Shakespeare's lifetime. Thomas Wyndham, William Hawkins, John Lock and others performed the first English voyages to West Africa (and began the English slave trade) in the decades just before Shakespeare's birth. The first English visit to the Cape of Good Hope was apparently that of Thomas Stevens in 1579 (a year before Drake's visit), but regular English visits to the Cape only began right at the end of the sixteenth century. How much of all this did Shakespeare know about, and is it possible to detect traces of such familiarity in his plays? A tall order, but I think there are some clues.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2009
- Authors: Van Wyk Smith, Malvern
- Date: 2009
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/457472 , vital:75640 , https://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC48130
- Description: The slippery presence of African themes in Shakespeare's plays is a function of the mythic but rapidly changing image of Africa in the England and Europe of his time. In 1888 Gardiner Greene Hubbard, president of the American National Geographic Society, introduced the centenary celebrations of the Society with an address in which he said : "America was explored ; Africa was circumnavigated" (3). He could hardly have summed up the contrast between three to four centuries of American and African discovery more cogently. A few years later, in 1897, C. Raymond Beazley made a similar point about Africa and the East : "Men crept round Africa in face of the Atlantic storms because of the golden East beyond" (3.11). This creeping round and haunting of Africa's shores had, as far as the English were concerned, only developed during Shakespeare's lifetime. Thomas Wyndham, William Hawkins, John Lock and others performed the first English voyages to West Africa (and began the English slave trade) in the decades just before Shakespeare's birth. The first English visit to the Cape of Good Hope was apparently that of Thomas Stevens in 1579 (a year before Drake's visit), but regular English visits to the Cape only began right at the end of the sixteenth century. How much of all this did Shakespeare know about, and is it possible to detect traces of such familiarity in his plays? A tall order, but I think there are some clues.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2009
Africa as Renaissance: grotesque John Skelton's 1485 version of Diodorus Siculus
- Authors: Van Wyk Smith, Malvern
- Date: 2001
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/457446 , vital:75638 , https://journals.co.za/doi/pdf/10.10520/AJA1011582X_161
- Description: Diodorus Siculus was a Sicilian Greek who round about the middle of the century before ChrISt'S birth began a mammoth history of the Mediterranean world that in its complete state of 40 books, mostly now lost, stretched from the legendary past down to Diodorus's own times. Of his Bibliotheca Historica, or Library of History, now only Books 1-5 and 11-20 survive, plus some fragments and paraphrases in other collections. The survival of the first five books, however, is particularly fortunate for my purposes, for this is the part in which Diodorus offers a seamless blend of legend and history to explain the origins of the peoples of the Mediterranean and adjacent parts.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2001
- Authors: Van Wyk Smith, Malvern
- Date: 2001
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/457446 , vital:75638 , https://journals.co.za/doi/pdf/10.10520/AJA1011582X_161
- Description: Diodorus Siculus was a Sicilian Greek who round about the middle of the century before ChrISt'S birth began a mammoth history of the Mediterranean world that in its complete state of 40 books, mostly now lost, stretched from the legendary past down to Diodorus's own times. Of his Bibliotheca Historica, or Library of History, now only Books 1-5 and 11-20 survive, plus some fragments and paraphrases in other collections. The survival of the first five books, however, is particularly fortunate for my purposes, for this is the part in which Diodorus offers a seamless blend of legend and history to explain the origins of the peoples of the Mediterranean and adjacent parts.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2001
Othello and the Narrative of Africa
- Authors: Van Wyk Smith, Malvern
- Date: 1990
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/457457 , vital:75639 , https://hdl.handle.net/10520/AJA1011582X_181
- Description: Although Othello is where I want to start and where I hope to end, my proper aim is the more general one of Africa as seen through Elizabe-than eyes. I shall use a particular moment in the playas a crux upon which to develop a broad-ranging examination of what Elizabethans knew about Africa, or what they thought they knew about Africa, or, bet-ter still, how they understood what they thought they knew about Africa. The incident is Othello's appearance before the Venetian court where, accused by Desdemona's father that he had suborned her judgement with" charms... conjuration... and mighty magic"(1.3. 91-92), Othello proposes to unfold" a round unvarnished tale" to prove his veracity, his nobility and, most importantly, his common humanity with the Vene-tians. The speech contains such" round unvarnished" matters as the cannibals that each other eat, The anthropophagi, and men whose heads Do grow beneath their shoulders.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1990
- Authors: Van Wyk Smith, Malvern
- Date: 1990
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/457457 , vital:75639 , https://hdl.handle.net/10520/AJA1011582X_181
- Description: Although Othello is where I want to start and where I hope to end, my proper aim is the more general one of Africa as seen through Elizabe-than eyes. I shall use a particular moment in the playas a crux upon which to develop a broad-ranging examination of what Elizabethans knew about Africa, or what they thought they knew about Africa, or, bet-ter still, how they understood what they thought they knew about Africa. The incident is Othello's appearance before the Venetian court where, accused by Desdemona's father that he had suborned her judgement with" charms... conjuration... and mighty magic"(1.3. 91-92), Othello proposes to unfold" a round unvarnished tale" to prove his veracity, his nobility and, most importantly, his common humanity with the Vene-tians. The speech contains such" round unvarnished" matters as the cannibals that each other eat, The anthropophagi, and men whose heads Do grow beneath their shoulders.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1990
What literature? : inaugural lecture delivered at Rhodes University
- Authors: Van Wyk Smith, Malvern
- Date: 1981
- Language: English
- Type: Text
- Identifier: vital:676 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1020745 , ISBN 0868100692
- Description: Inaugural lecture delivered at Rhodes University , Rhodes University Libraries (Digitisation)
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1981
- Authors: Van Wyk Smith, Malvern
- Date: 1981
- Language: English
- Type: Text
- Identifier: vital:676 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1020745 , ISBN 0868100692
- Description: Inaugural lecture delivered at Rhodes University , Rhodes University Libraries (Digitisation)
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1981
Drummer Hodge : the poetry of the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902)
- Authors: Van Wyk Smith, Malvern
- Date: 1976
- Subjects: War poetry -- History and criticism South African War, 1899-1902 -- Literature and the war South African War, 1899-1902 -- Art and the war
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Doctoral , PhD
- Identifier: vital:2252 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1003919
- Description: From Preface: This is not a history of the Boer War; nor is it an exclusively literary study of the poetry of that war. If the work that follows has to be defined generically at all, it may be called an exercise in cultural history. It attempts to assess the impact of a particular war on the literary culture, especially the poetry, of both the participants and the observers, whether in South Africa, in Britain and the rest of the English-speaking world, or in Europe. An assumption made throughout this study is that war poetry is not only verse written by men who are or have been under fire. Just as 'War poetry is not to be confused with political, polemical, or patriotic verse, although it can contain elements of all of these, so it is also the work of observers at home as much as that of soldiers at the front. It follows that I have not allowed myself the academic luxury of selecting, on the basis of literary merit only, a handful of outstanding war poems for rigorous analysis and discussion. "Doggerel can express the heart" wrote one of these late-Victorian soldierly versifiers, and I have roamed widely in the attempt to assemble the material which, I believe, records the full range of the impact that the Boer War made not only on Briton and Boer, but on the worId at large. A major thesis of this study is that the Boer War marked the clear emergence of the kind of war poetry which we have come to associate almost exclusively with the First World War. Poems in the style and spirit of "The Charge of the Light Brigade" were written in profusion, but the work which serves as this study's masthead, Hardy's "Drummer Hodge," clearly has --like many of its contemporaries-- more in common with Owen's verse than with Tennyson's. The reasons for the appearance of such poetry are discussed in Chapter 1; the rest of the book provides the evidence of it.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1976
- Authors: Van Wyk Smith, Malvern
- Date: 1976
- Subjects: War poetry -- History and criticism South African War, 1899-1902 -- Literature and the war South African War, 1899-1902 -- Art and the war
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Doctoral , PhD
- Identifier: vital:2252 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1003919
- Description: From Preface: This is not a history of the Boer War; nor is it an exclusively literary study of the poetry of that war. If the work that follows has to be defined generically at all, it may be called an exercise in cultural history. It attempts to assess the impact of a particular war on the literary culture, especially the poetry, of both the participants and the observers, whether in South Africa, in Britain and the rest of the English-speaking world, or in Europe. An assumption made throughout this study is that war poetry is not only verse written by men who are or have been under fire. Just as 'War poetry is not to be confused with political, polemical, or patriotic verse, although it can contain elements of all of these, so it is also the work of observers at home as much as that of soldiers at the front. It follows that I have not allowed myself the academic luxury of selecting, on the basis of literary merit only, a handful of outstanding war poems for rigorous analysis and discussion. "Doggerel can express the heart" wrote one of these late-Victorian soldierly versifiers, and I have roamed widely in the attempt to assemble the material which, I believe, records the full range of the impact that the Boer War made not only on Briton and Boer, but on the worId at large. A major thesis of this study is that the Boer War marked the clear emergence of the kind of war poetry which we have come to associate almost exclusively with the First World War. Poems in the style and spirit of "The Charge of the Light Brigade" were written in profusion, but the work which serves as this study's masthead, Hardy's "Drummer Hodge," clearly has --like many of its contemporaries-- more in common with Owen's verse than with Tennyson's. The reasons for the appearance of such poetry are discussed in Chapter 1; the rest of the book provides the evidence of it.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1976
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