Early Modern Whale

The effect of too much (and too easily accessed) information on practical criticism. I was preparing a class on some Coleridge poems,...

Another busy week, with some first year teaching again outside my usual Renaissance repertoire. Wordsworth this time, 'The Leech-Gathere...

One of my students is writing a third year dissertation on sleep in Shakespeare: not dreams, just images of plain sleep. I've a feeling ...

A busy week for me, but teaching prompted me to look at texts I’d never read before – Nahum Tate’s absurd version of Richard II briefly en...

The eleventh of the eleventh, and Remembrance Sunday tomorrow, prompts me to post this drawing by my maternal grandfather, Harry Handforth, ...

I’ve been asked to declare myself. As ever, I wrap myself in the cloak of literature (maybe a little less tightly), and offer by way of repl...

I’ve been reading the Miscellany Poems (1691) of Thomas Heyrick. In themselves, quite interesting, but surpassed in artistry by his prefa...

I ought to be forging ahead marking essays (thirty-odd first year students falling over themselves in an effort to sound like Emeritus Profe...

I was looking at John Dowland's First Book of Songes , and noticed that it concludes with 'an invention by the sayd Author for two t...

My latest bad 17th century poet is Hugh Crompton (and to say so means starting just like the 'snotty Zoilus' he heared would read hi...

I’ve been doing a lot of teaching, and among my texts, the very familiar Witch of Edmonton . Doing this prompted me to do what I haven’t pre...

I’ve been reading a minor and belated Scottish demonologist, John Bell, who produced two brief pamphlets, in 1697 and 1700. Opinions may hav...

Item 1. June 19 th , 1909 . Dear Sir, ...

A Latin vocabulary for computer terms: http://www.obta.uw.edu.pl/%7Edraco/docs/voccomp.html I am spending too much time at the claviatura , ...

Back in 2002 I did an edition of Donne for Wordsworth Classics, wrapping Introduction and Notes round a slightly modified Grierson text. The...

My last posting about demonic children naturally led my thoughts on to the apple of his father's eye, Timmo, and here he is in the hirsu...

A busy week for me, with a return to teaching, and four lectures to give: and hence, no mid-week surfacing by the whale. I gave one session ...

I have been clearing from my son’s room the books he has now outgrown – down to the Amnesty International bookshop with them al...

"Here lyeth Elizabeth Chute, Daughter of George Chute Knight and Dame Anne his wife, whoe lived 3 yeares and 6 monthes and dyed the 18t...

I missed my favourite, large-size teacup this morning, and eventually found it upside down on my son's desk, imprisoning a wretched cran...