“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/10962/453963 , vital:75301 , https://doi.org/10.1080/10130950.2007.9674885
- 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/10962/453963 , vital:75301 , https://doi.org/10.1080/10130950.2007.9674885
- 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
D.H. Lawrence around the world: South African perspectives, (Eds.) Jim Phelps and Nigel Bell : book review
- Authors: van Wyk Smith, Malvern
- Date: 2007
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:6121 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1004702
- Description: The book as a whole provides a scholarly overview of the central position held by the works and ideas of the English writer D. H. Lawrence in the curricula, teaching philosophies and world views of South African university English Departments in the early latter half of the twentieth century. If this suggests something of a resurrectionary enterprise - the informing spirit of the collection, Christina van Heyningen, died some decades ago - it is also true that the names of contributors read like a roll call of those South African and immigrant British academics who from the 1950s to the 1970s made some of our English Departments notable leaders in their field. Essays, old and new, have been carefully chosen and juxtaposed to reveal how and why the teaching of internationally significant literature (in this case the writings of D. H. Lawrence) was in those years deemed to form an essential part of the training of a maturing critical faculty with which to confront not just English literature and cognate academic subjects, but the complex world of adult human experience itself.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2007
- Authors: van Wyk Smith, Malvern
- Date: 2007
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:6121 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1004702
- Description: The book as a whole provides a scholarly overview of the central position held by the works and ideas of the English writer D. H. Lawrence in the curricula, teaching philosophies and world views of South African university English Departments in the early latter half of the twentieth century. If this suggests something of a resurrectionary enterprise - the informing spirit of the collection, Christina van Heyningen, died some decades ago - it is also true that the names of contributors read like a roll call of those South African and immigrant British academics who from the 1950s to the 1970s made some of our English Departments notable leaders in their field. Essays, old and new, have been carefully chosen and juxtaposed to reveal how and why the teaching of internationally significant literature (in this case the writings of D. H. Lawrence) was in those years deemed to form an essential part of the training of a maturing critical faculty with which to confront not just English literature and cognate academic subjects, but the complex world of adult human experience itself.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2007
The Boers and the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902) in the twentieth-century moral imaginary
- Authors: van Wyk Smith, Malvern
- Date: 2003
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:6120 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1004700
- Description: In 1891 Lord Randolph Churchill, father of the more famous Winston, visited South Africa and the soon-to-be Rhodesia on a trip that was intended to combine big-game hunting with the even more exciting prospects of entering the gold mining business. During the eight months of the visit, Churchill contributed a series of letters to the Daily Graphic on his thoughts and experiences, in one of which he had this to say about the Boers: The Boer farmer personifies useless idleness. Occupying a farm of from six thousand to ten thousand acres, he contents himself with raising a herd of a few hundred head of cattle, which are left almost entirely to the care of the natives whom he employs. It may be asserted, generally with truth, that he never plants a tree, never digs a well, never makes a road, never grows a blade of corn…. He passes his day doing absolutely nothing beyond smoking and drinking coffee. He is perfectly uneducated. With the exception of the Bible, every word of which in its most literal interpretation he believes with fanatical credulity, he never opens a book, he never even reads a newspaper. His simple ignorance is unfathomable, and this in stolid composure he shares with his wife, his sons, his daughters, being proud that his children should grow up as ignorant, as uncultivated, as hopelessly unprogressive as himself. In the winter time he moves with his herd of cattle into the better pastures and milder climate of the low country veldt, and lives as idly and uselessly in his waggon as he does in his farmhouse. The summer sees him returning home, and so on [sic], year after year, generation after generation, the Boer farmer drags out the most ignoble existence ever experienced by a race with any pretensions to civilization. (94–95) The piece caused an outcry, and when a year later Churchill republished the letters as Men, Mines and Animals in South Africa (1892), he attempted to exonerate himself by claiming that these views were intended “to be exclusively confined to…the Dutch population of the Transvaal,” not “generally to the Dutch in South Africa” and went on: “The Dutch settlers in Cape Colony are as worthy of praise as their relatives, the Transvaal Boers, are of blame. The former, loyal, thrifty, industrious, hospitable, liberal are and will, I trust, remain the back-bone of our great colony at the Cape of Good Hope”
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2003
- Authors: van Wyk Smith, Malvern
- Date: 2003
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:6120 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1004700
- Description: In 1891 Lord Randolph Churchill, father of the more famous Winston, visited South Africa and the soon-to-be Rhodesia on a trip that was intended to combine big-game hunting with the even more exciting prospects of entering the gold mining business. During the eight months of the visit, Churchill contributed a series of letters to the Daily Graphic on his thoughts and experiences, in one of which he had this to say about the Boers: The Boer farmer personifies useless idleness. Occupying a farm of from six thousand to ten thousand acres, he contents himself with raising a herd of a few hundred head of cattle, which are left almost entirely to the care of the natives whom he employs. It may be asserted, generally with truth, that he never plants a tree, never digs a well, never makes a road, never grows a blade of corn…. He passes his day doing absolutely nothing beyond smoking and drinking coffee. He is perfectly uneducated. With the exception of the Bible, every word of which in its most literal interpretation he believes with fanatical credulity, he never opens a book, he never even reads a newspaper. His simple ignorance is unfathomable, and this in stolid composure he shares with his wife, his sons, his daughters, being proud that his children should grow up as ignorant, as uncultivated, as hopelessly unprogressive as himself. In the winter time he moves with his herd of cattle into the better pastures and milder climate of the low country veldt, and lives as idly and uselessly in his waggon as he does in his farmhouse. The summer sees him returning home, and so on [sic], year after year, generation after generation, the Boer farmer drags out the most ignoble existence ever experienced by a race with any pretensions to civilization. (94–95) The piece caused an outcry, and when a year later Churchill republished the letters as Men, Mines and Animals in South Africa (1892), he attempted to exonerate himself by claiming that these views were intended “to be exclusively confined to…the Dutch population of the Transvaal,” not “generally to the Dutch in South Africa” and went on: “The Dutch settlers in Cape Colony are as worthy of praise as their relatives, the Transvaal Boers, are of blame. The former, loyal, thrifty, industrious, hospitable, liberal are and will, I trust, remain the back-bone of our great colony at the Cape of Good Hope”
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2003
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