Critical Readings

The panel reads "The Boke of Phyllyp Sparowe" by the Tudor poet John Skelton, a poetic champion of Chaucer, and the inventor of Skeltonic verse, a roughly syllabic and strongly rhymed form of English poetry much beloved of the Henrician court.Continue reading

The panel reads three poems by A.E. Housman, the renowned British classicist and poet, and discusses the presence of death in his poetry, the influences of Romanticism, the importance of the speaker's role, and the poetic ironies of his biography.Continue reading

The panel reads Alexander Pope's "Messiah," based upon Virgil's Fourth Eclogue and the biblical Book of Isaiah, with a discussion of its formal qualities, its Late Augustan/pre-Romantic historical context, and its fusion of Classical and Hebraic imagery.Continue reading

The panel reads the final act, reflecting on the role of Brutus as a tragic figure, with attention given to his relationship with Cassius, his misunderstanding of Antony's magnanimity, his stoic leanings, and his role in the final battle at Philippi.Continue reading

The panel reads the fourth act, with special attention to the fraught relationship between Brutus and Cassius, the political situation in the late Roman Republic, and the declining fate of the conspiracy in the wake of Marc Antony's speech to the plebs.Continue reading

The panel discusses the play's self-awareness, its complexity of character, the presence of character flaws which serve to advance the action of the drama, and the contrast between reason and emotion, rhetoric and sophistry, and idealism and pragmatism.Continue reading

The panel discusses the the play's contrasts of public and private settings, its parallelism of scenes and characters (especially Calphurnia and Portia), and how Caesar's hubris, confidence, and superstition ultimately prove to bend the hinge of fate.Continue reading

The panel discusses the first act of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, with attention to Caesar's biographies, the fraught sociopolitical situation in Rome, the thread of ambition that runs through the play, and Cassius' crafty manipulation of Brutus.Continue reading

The panel discusses the biographical details of David Jones, and his participation in the Great War, before reading parts 5–7 of In Parenthesis, with attention to the role of mechanisation and the inversion of traditional forms of warfare and defence.Continue reading

The panel reads Parts 1–4 of David Jones' In Parenthesis, with attention to its Modernist and post-Romantic moves, its structure as a prose poem and its prose style, and its imagistic and impressionistic development of scenes and personal experiences.Continue reading