It’s all about the hang. Displaying a work of art draws
attention to its context. This unlabelled sculpture in Senate House highlights the circuit breaker. They embody the tension in the building between art and function.
I’m on my way to the exhibition Shakespeare: Metamorphosis.
Sir Peter Hall described Shakespeare as the heavyweight champion of the world: no one can go the distance with him. Someone who took exception to Shakespeare’s immortality was Tolstoy. In Tolstoy on Shakespeare (1906), he complains of ‘an irresistible repulsion and tedium’.
Eh? Watch out for that train, Anna.
He does a hatchet job on King
Lear, complaining that ‘all the characters speak in a way in which no
living men ever did or could speak.’
He sees veneration of Shakespeare as ‘an hypnotic state’, dismisses the oeuvre as ‘trivial and immoral…aiming merely at the recreation and amusement of the spectators’ and blames the Germans for bigging up the Bard.
George Orwell, writing while engaged in wartime propaganda, steps in to referee. His essay Tolstoy and Shakespeare describes Tolstoy’s carping as ‘one of the greatest pieces of moral, non-aesthetic criticism – anti-aesthetic criticism, one might say – that have ever been written’ but points out that Tolstoy is on the ropes. ‘Tolstoy criticises Shakespeare not as a poet, but as a thinker and a teacher…’ but ‘Every piece of writing has its propaganda aspect, and yet in any book or poem or play or what not that is to endure there has to be a residuum of something that simply is not affected by its moral or meaning – a residuum of something we can only call art.’
He sees veneration of Shakespeare as ‘an hypnotic state’, dismisses the oeuvre as ‘trivial and immoral…aiming merely at the recreation and amusement of the spectators’ and blames the Germans for bigging up the Bard.
George Orwell, writing while engaged in wartime propaganda, steps in to referee. His essay Tolstoy and Shakespeare describes Tolstoy’s carping as ‘one of the greatest pieces of moral, non-aesthetic criticism – anti-aesthetic criticism, one might say – that have ever been written’ but points out that Tolstoy is on the ropes. ‘Tolstoy criticises Shakespeare not as a poet, but as a thinker and a teacher…’ but ‘Every piece of writing has its propaganda aspect, and yet in any book or poem or play or what not that is to endure there has to be a residuum of something that simply is not affected by its moral or meaning – a residuum of something we can only call art.’
Senate House was Orwell's model for the Ministry of Truth in Nineteen Eighty-Four. The Senate House Library website
refers to ‘our infamous Room 101’. But that’s just propaganda. The
inspiration for the room which contains the worst thing in the world was not
here but in Portland Place where Orwell got bored out of his skull in committee
meetings. Still, to reflect the room’s overtones of psychological manipulation,
the exhibition links it to Othello.
Its usual tenants have been dislodged.
The best way to prepare for this beautifully presented compilation
of Senate House Library treasures is to look at the engaging miniature films under
the Timeline heading made by the curators, Dr Karen Attar and Dr Richard Espley.
The exhibition celebrates how Shakespeare thrives on reinvention, his and ours. And it’s a stonking
display of world-class scholarly librarianship, past and present, in an age when public libraries
are being dumped on volunteers.
Elegant captions steer you from early sources to the digital era. A taster showcase three floors below starts with Ovid’s Metamorphoses – one of Shakespeare’s lifelong sources, now required to carry trigger warnings for a certain type of student.
Elegant captions steer you from early sources to the digital era. A taster showcase three floors below starts with Ovid’s Metamorphoses – one of Shakespeare’s lifelong sources, now required to carry trigger warnings for a certain type of student.
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
...Augustus De Morgan, mathematician...
…and, tucked away, the radical philosopher Jeremy Bentham. His real preserved head and, separately, his auto-icon (the dapperly dressed, waxen-headed skeleton) are up the road in UCL.
This bust is inscribed with his motto, plurimorum maxima felicitas – literally, ‘of the most, the biggest happiness’. As Bentham put it, ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation.’
He also pointed out
that the smaller the majority, the greater the infelicity. And so we totter towards a referendum – still clutching for moral support at the genius
of our global propagandist, our agent of soft power rooted in
Stratford-upon-Avon.
For details of Shakespeare: Metamorphosis and related events, please see the Senate
House Library website. Back at the kitchen table, something is forming: I have an exhibition in Senate House starting in June, under the auspices of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies.
Luxurious polymathic cruise through the bibliomanic stews of senate house; I can hear the clattery whisper of triffidic librarians in shadowed doorways: "Lookin' for a good read dearie?"
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