Samuel Beckett, the Gate Theatre Dublin, and the contemporary Irish independent theater sector: fragments of performance history

From 1991, when the Dublin Gate Theatre launched their Samuel Beckett Festival featuring nineteen of Beckett’s stage plays, to more recent years, the Gate dominated Irish productions of Beckett’s theater. The Gate Beckett Festival was remounted in 1996 at the Lincoln Center, New York, and at the Barbican Centre, London, in 1999, and individual or grouped productions have toured regularly since then in Ireland and internationally. However, since the Irish premiere of Waiting of Godot at the Pike Theatre in 1955, in addition to several Beckett plays mounted by the National Theatre, many independent Irish theater companies, such as Focus Theatre, Druid Theatre, and more recently Pan Pan Theatre, Blue Raincoat Theatre, The Corn Exchange, and Company SJ (under director Sarah Jane Scaife), have produced Beckett’s drama. While acknowledging earlier Irish productions, this essay will consider the role of the Dublin Gate Beckett Festival and the Beckett Centenary celebrations in Dublin in 2006 in greatly enhancing the marketability of Beckett’s work, and will discuss the proliferation of productions of Beckett’s stage plays (as opposed to stage adaptations of the prose work, which is a topic for another essay) in the independent theater sector in the Republic of Ireland since 2006. In addition to giving an overview of these recent productions, the essay will consider some issues at stake in creating or constructing performance histories

Gallic war songs (II): Marcus Cicero, Quintus Cicero, and Caesar’s invasion of Britain

This article assembles and examines the evidence for the poetic outputs of Marcus and Quintus Cicero related to Caesar’s invasion of Britain. Following the establishment of a relative chronology of the evidence for their work, it is argued that Quintus Cicero most likely produced a fabula praetexta (not an epic poem, as commonly assumed). His brother, in turn, wrote an epic, based on Quintus’ eye-witness reports. Careful analysis of the ancient discourse about this piece reveals insights in Cicero’s poetic workshop and the creation of ‘archival truth’ through narrativising historical events in epic poetry. Finally, a case is made for greater attention to financial affairs between Caesar and the Ciceros that happen to coincide with the drafting process of their respective literary works.

Trans/national dis/connections: silenced networks and strained belongings with reference to Albinia Catherine MacKay and Una Marson

This paper seeks to examine the particular operations of gender and cultural politics that both shaped and restrained possible 'networked' interactions between Jamaican women and their British 'motherlands' during the first forty years of the twentieth century. Paying particular attention to the poetry of Albinia Catherine MacKay (a Scots Creole) and the political journalism of Una Marson (a black Jamaica), I shall seek to examine why both writers speak in and of voices out of place. MacKay's poems work against the critical pull of transnational modernism to reveal aesthetic and cultural isolation through a model of strained belonging in relation to both her Jamaica home and an ancestral Scotland. A small number of poems from her 1912 collection that are dedicated to the historical struggle between the English and Scots for the rule of Scotland and cultural self-determination, some of which are written in a Scottish idiom, may help us to read the complex cultural negotiations that silently inform the seemingly in commensurability of location and locution revealed in these works. In contrast, Marson's journalism, although less known even than her creative writings, is both politically and intellectually radical in its arguments concerning the mutual articulation of race and gender empowerment. However, Marson remains aware of her inability to articulate these convictions with force in a British context and thereby of the way in which speaking out of place also silences her.

The Devil’s Daughters and a question of translation between Occitan and Anglo-Norman French: ‘De las .vii. filhas del diable’ (British Library Add. MS 17920).

The evidence for vernacular-to-vernacular translation is hard to demonstrate in medieval Romance languages. This article analyses a hypothesis published a century ago that there is an identifiable Anglo-Norman source for an Occitan prose text. Both texts spring from a Latin exemplum in which the seven capital vices are personified as the Devil's daughters, married off to seven social categories (the clergy, knights, peasants, etc.). Although the hypothesis is disproved, it remains that the dialogue between Anglo-Norman French and Occitan has been overlooked, and deserves further exploration.

Entre histoire et fiction: la représentation du règne d'Arthur dans le manuscrit enluminé du Brut en prose, Londres, Lambeth Palace 6 (c. 1480)

The manuscript London, Lambeth Palace 6, contains the Middle English prose Brut, a text which benefited from a great popularity throughout the fifteenth century. It was copied by an English scribe and richly illuminated by the Master of Edward IV and his assistants at Bruges around 1480. This article studies the representation and integration of the reign of Arthur in the historical framework of the Brut or Chronicles of England, including its fictional aspects: Arthur emerges as a historical character but also as a chivalric and mythical figure. The analysis covers the miniatures ranging from the plot leading to the conception of Arthur to the end of his reign (fols. 36-66). The textual and iconographic choices of the prose Bruts are highlighted by comparisons with Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae, Wace’s Brut, and later prose rewritings in the Lancelot-Grail romance cycle, especially Merlin and its Vulgate Sequel. They show the continuous interest raised by Arthur in the aristocratic and royal circles of late fifteenth century England and the relationship be¬tween continental and insular historiographical, literary and artistic traditions.

The Vida of Queen Fredegund in Tote Listoire de France: vernacular translation and genre in thirteenth-century French and Occitan literature

This article examines the role that translation may have played in the development of medieval vernacular literature. It analyses an extract of an early 13th-c. translation into a hybrid French-Occitan vernacular of an 8th-c. historical text, the 'Liber Historiae Francorum'. The translation coincides with the adoption of narrative prose both in Old French and in Occitan literature, which reflects a growing interest in historical writings. The second half of the article compares the anecdote with the narrative structures and content of one of the troubadour 'vidas' and 'razos' - biographical texts in prose that emerged in the same period and regions as this translation. The article concludes by suggesting that the new vernacular genre shares narrative features with the early medieval Latin text that are preserved in its translation.

Geoffrey Hill and performative utterance

Utterance of a sentence in poetry can be performative, and explicitly so. The best-known of Geoffrey Hill’s critical essays denies this, but his own poetry demonstrates it. I clarify these claims and explain why they matter. What Hill denies illuminates anxieties about responsibility and commitment that poets and critics share with philosophers. What Hill demonstrates affords opportunities for mutual benefit between philosophy and criticism.

Undying voices: the poetry of Roman Britain

An anthology (comprising introduction, text, translation, and notes) of Britain's most ancient (surviving) poetry (Latin/Greek, with an English translation).

The petrified muse

Archive of blogs and other information about Classical prose, poetry, epigraphy and the Carmina Epigraphica.

Virgil's fourth Eclogue and the visual arts

Virgil's poetry has frequently appeared in illustrated editions, and has regularly provided subjects for other works of art, including some of the most celebrated masterpieces of the western tradition. In view of its constant appropriation in literary contexts over the course of the centuries, we might expect the famous fourth Eclogue (the so-called ‘messianic’ eclogue) to have exerted more of an impact on visual culture than it appears to have done. This paper considers some of the possible reasons for the apparent scarcity of engagement with Virgil's poem beyond the literary sphere, and examines the uses to which the poet's text is put when it does make an appearance in visual media — perhaps more often than has sometimes been supposed.

'Salve, magna parens': Virgil’s 'laudes Italiae' in Renaissance Italy and beyond

This article traces three major strands in the reception of the address to Italy at the end of Virgil’s laudes Italiae in Book II of the Georgics. The first is the adoption of phrasing from these lines as the basis for expressions of devotion to the writer’s country (and for panegyric of contemporary rulers), or in inverted form to lament the present state of the author’s homeland; the second is the appropriation of Virgil’s hymnic apostrophe to his patria in poems on religious themes, where language from this passage is harnessed to invoke the supreme deity or the Virgin Mary, another magna parens; and the third is the use of Virgilian terminology to celebrate Virgil himself as the mighty parent of poetry and poets, whose words (including those of the lines under discussion) have inspired the literary endeavours of his successors across Europe and beyond throughout subsequent centuries.