Showing posts with label Samuel Pepys. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Samuel Pepys. Show all posts
Monday, March 28, 2016
Pepys' books
Arnold Hunt on three new Pepys books. I am very keen to read Kate Loveman's, though irked to see that because the CU library has digital access I will not be able to request a "real" copy from BorrowDirect! Here is a good bit from the review, describing the letter C. S. Lewis wrote in support of the publication of an unexpurgated edition of the diary: Lewis’s letter is a fascinating period piece: writing in June 1960, a few months before the Lady Chatterley trial, he urged the Fellows of Magdalene not to be deterred by the risk of public scandal or ridicule. “A spiteful or merely jocular journalist could certainly make us for a week or two very malodorous in the public nostril. But a few weeks, or years, are nothing in the life of the College. I think it would be pusillanimous and unscholarly to delete a syllable on that score.”
Thursday, March 04, 2010
Breaking news
I was at the library just now checking a few quotations in the diary of Samuel Pepys...
Usually I am very tough about including all footnotes from the get-go, but these are some opinions Pepys expressed on several plays by Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet: "the play of itself the worst that ever I heard in my life"; Midsummer Night's Dream: "the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life"; Twelfth Night: "one of the weakest plays that ever I saw on the stage") that I have had in my 18th-century drama lecture notes since time immemorial, and I did not have library access in Cayman as I finished the essay in January (it is a piece on Shakespeare adaptation for the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century).
It has been on my mind, due to Dunnett-reading and the pondering of Dick Francis's mortality, the question of what sort of popular fiction I really would be best suited to write. In fact there are others better suited by intellect and sensibility to write Franciscan thrillers, as sad as it makes me to admit it; but on the other hand I am almost uniquely well-suited to undertake a massive historical narrative of the scope of Dunnett's.
Earlier this morning I was reading a piece in this week's TLS about Louis XIV and thinking what a delightful milieu it would be for a grand historical series, only I am too lazy to read so many sources in French - but handling Pepys reminded me of the true delights of England in the 1660s and 1670s...
I should write a huge series, at the sweet spot between Dorothy Dunnett and Neal Stephenson, set over the first decade of the Restoration! There is theater, there is science, there are political shenanigans and financial developments of great interest, there is the Court and the City - there is Pepys as a source, and Andrew Marvell can be a character - there are all sorts of other delightful sources that I would love to be spending my time reading - there is the fact that my utter deepest passion has always been historical fiction as practiced by Mary Renault, Robert Graves, Gore Vidal - it is moot, because my next year of writing is pretty much already spoken for (the little book on style, the bread and butter of the novel) but it might be that this is my true literary calling!
My heart is pounding in my chest, it seems so momentous!...
What I can do right now: order the eleven volumes of Pepys's diary with the dollars remaining in this year's research budget!
(This edition was attractively reprinted by HarperCollins a decade ago - it may be that I have to order it from the UK, though...)
Usually I am very tough about including all footnotes from the get-go, but these are some opinions Pepys expressed on several plays by Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet: "the play of itself the worst that ever I heard in my life"; Midsummer Night's Dream: "the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life"; Twelfth Night: "one of the weakest plays that ever I saw on the stage") that I have had in my 18th-century drama lecture notes since time immemorial, and I did not have library access in Cayman as I finished the essay in January (it is a piece on Shakespeare adaptation for the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century).
It has been on my mind, due to Dunnett-reading and the pondering of Dick Francis's mortality, the question of what sort of popular fiction I really would be best suited to write. In fact there are others better suited by intellect and sensibility to write Franciscan thrillers, as sad as it makes me to admit it; but on the other hand I am almost uniquely well-suited to undertake a massive historical narrative of the scope of Dunnett's.
Earlier this morning I was reading a piece in this week's TLS about Louis XIV and thinking what a delightful milieu it would be for a grand historical series, only I am too lazy to read so many sources in French - but handling Pepys reminded me of the true delights of England in the 1660s and 1670s...
I should write a huge series, at the sweet spot between Dorothy Dunnett and Neal Stephenson, set over the first decade of the Restoration! There is theater, there is science, there are political shenanigans and financial developments of great interest, there is the Court and the City - there is Pepys as a source, and Andrew Marvell can be a character - there are all sorts of other delightful sources that I would love to be spending my time reading - there is the fact that my utter deepest passion has always been historical fiction as practiced by Mary Renault, Robert Graves, Gore Vidal - it is moot, because my next year of writing is pretty much already spoken for (the little book on style, the bread and butter of the novel) but it might be that this is my true literary calling!
My heart is pounding in my chest, it seems so momentous!...
What I can do right now: order the eleven volumes of Pepys's diary with the dollars remaining in this year's research budget!
(This edition was attractively reprinted by HarperCollins a decade ago - it may be that I have to order it from the UK, though...)
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