The Literature and Theatre Collection is an essential resource for libraries, researchers, and teaching staff at universities. This collection encompasses a wide range of themes, including literary movements, author studies, Shakespeare, the gothic, postcolonialism, literary theory, the Renaissance, theatre and performance, and writing as an act of resistance. Alongside history, literature is Manchester University Press’s fl agship subject, making this collection indispensable for institutions off ering literature and theatre courses.
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| Interventions: Rethinking the Nineteenth Century |
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| Revels Plays: Companion Library |
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| Shakespeare in Performance |
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| Total collection | 416 |
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Literature and theatre collection
Reiterations and quasi-repetitions of words play dangerously close to dull redundancy; they are potential ‘dead ends’. This chapter’s four sections, the first on repeating figures and the latter three on tautologies, look at the expressions of language’s limitations in Hill’s poetry, focusing particularly on The Triumph of Love (1998), The Orchards of Syon (2002), and The Book of Baruch by the Gnostic Justin (2019). With the help of a Chestertonian allusion to Aristotle’s sense of meson, or balance, the first section argues that repeating figures can present discrete rebalances of language, which aim to transcend the corrupt histories of words. The next three sections are devoted to tautologies, in which a superficial balance of words is already evident. After a preliminary investigation of the link between tautology, infancy, and speechlessness, with reference to Tennyson, the second section claims that tautologies, for Hill especially, are the closest thing in language to expressions of ‘mute desire’. The third section examines the ‘evenness’ of tautologies, understood as necessary for the potential transcendence of their expression; and the fourth section, following this logic of tautologies to its intended end, considers Hill’s tautology as a childlike plea to God for reconciliation.
Lastly, there are two short ‘Endnotes’, which constitute a last reflection on the book’s intentions; and on the ends of Hill’s poetry taken as a whole.
The fifth and final chapter is on the forms of Hill’s poems: do they arrive at ends; and if so what are they? The chapter’s introductory section attends to the notion of the ‘ideal’ in Hill’s thought. Quoting at length from remarks Hill made in 2008 and in 2016 at his last public reading, it relates the ideal shaping of the poem to what Hill calls its ‘necessary closure’. The chapter goes on to examine four of Hill’s forms: unrhymed sonnets; versets; clavics; and sapphics. The first two of these appear in Hill’s early work (1968–1971), the latter two in his late work (2007–2012). Hill’s use of each is distinctive; together, they illustrate Hill’s resourceful and attentive handling of various forms to reach, or deflect from, a sense of closure. There is a closing discussion of the thought of ‘yearning’, which is taken as fundamental to Hill’s end-directed language and forms. What F. H. Bradley calls ‘the idea of perfection’ is deemed an essential stimulus not only of the sapphic’s short final line but of Hill’s poetry as a whole. The chapter ends with a summary of the nature of forms in Hill’s early and late work, including the pointedly unbounded end of his posthumous collection, The Book of Baruch by the Gnostic Justin.
‘The lure of conclusion with no notion where to begin’. The idea of the end is an essential motivic force, even a place to begin, in the poetry of Geoffrey Hill (1932–2016). During his life, many echoed Harold Bloom’s description of Hill as the ‘greatest living poet in the English language’. Yet little has been written about the ends that Hill’s poems forge; or those that they seek. This book shows that Hill’s poems are characteristically ‘end-directed’. They tend towards consummations of all kinds: from the marriages of meanings in puns, or of words in repeating figures and rhymes, to syntactical and formal finalities. The recognition of failure to reach such ends provides its own impetus to Hill’s work. This study of Hill’s ends is, appropriately, the first to take account of Hill’s last works: not only the concluding books collected in Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952–2012, but also The Book of Baruch by the Gnostic Justin (2019). The book is a significant contribution to the study of Hill, offering a new thematic reading of his entire body of work. By using Hill’s work as an example, the book also touches on questions of poetry’s ultimate value. What do the technical and formal features of poems entail for their aesthetic finishedness; and for their final worth? What are poetry’s ends and where does it wish to end up?
The book begins with a quotation from one of Hill’s early notebooks, which induces a short meditation on the myths surrounding words. The second section discusses the critical context of the book; and the third gives a sense of the book’s uses of the word end, referring to a few writers whose thoughts on poetry’s purposes are relevant both to Hill’s writing and to the book’s approach: namely Aristotle, Sidney, and David Jones (via Rowan Williams). The fourth and fifth sections explain the structure of the book and the thoughts behind its title.
The first chapter is on Hill’s puns. The pun is in one sense a very minimal linguistic end, bringing together disparate meanings or connotations in a single word or phrase. The first section of the chapter cites a wide range of puns from Hill’s poetry in order to establish the characteristics of the figure for Hill and how these change over the course of his career. The second section begins by considering the implications of the pun’s ‘ambiguity’, its capacity to represent doubled or coupled ‘reality’. Referring to Empson, Weil, and T. S. Eliot, it asks why an ‘accurate’ ambiguity may be poetically and ethically desirable; and discusses the ‘[r]e-cognition’ that may follow. The final section of the chapter analyses Hill’s puns in light of two persistent themes, which themselves have affinities with puns: sexual love and alchemy. Looking predominantly at poems from Scenes from Comus (2005) and Oraclau | Oracles (2007–2012), and noting the debts owed to both Donne and Jung, this section regards the pun as both witness and minister to Hill’s ‘alchemic-carnal’ marriages of meanings.
The third chapter deals with Hill’s rhymes. The rhyme is a significant end-point of poetry, coupling words that are often otherwise unfamiliar to each other. This chapter starts by reflecting on rhyme’s importance in the context of Hill’s ‘antiphonal’ poetics, and reviews some of the suspicions of rhyme’s ‘easy mellifluousness’, citing Stevens and Pope. The second section asks how Hill’s rhyme might be influenced by, and how it differs from, the suggestions of T. S. Eliot and the example of Allen Tate. A survey of rhyme in Hill’s poetry is offered in the third section, with a distinction drawn between the work before and after the 1985 Collected Poems. The culminating fourth and fifth sections of the chapter posit two paradoxical kinds of rhyme in Hill’s work: the impossible and the inevitable. Admitting that it is a question of emphasis rather than strict definition, the chapter studies at length two poems from Hill’s early work, ‘The Pentecost Castle’ (1978) and ‘Ovid in the Third Reich’ (1968), as examples of impossible rhyming; and several poems from Al Tempo de’ Tremuoti (2007–2012) as examples of inevitable rhyming. The chapter ends with a short suggestion of the relation between rhyme and Hill’s idea of equity.
Beginning the book’s perspectival ascent to the larger structural features of poetry, the fourth chapter, on syntaxes, examines the ends Hill seeks at the level of the sentence. It takes A Treatise of Civil Power (2007) as its point of reference for an analysis of the tension between order and disorder in Hill’s syntax. It notes the ‘[u]rge to unmake | all wrought finalities’ in the collection’s last poem, ‘Nachwort’, and regards this urge as essential to the troubled and diverse energies of Hill’s syntaxes. The metatextual rhetoric of language undressing or undoing itself in the later poems sheds light on the struggle for ‘plain speaking’ in Hill. The remaining two sections of the chapter evaluate one of the key orchestrators of Hill’s syntax: his punctuation. The second section looks at poems of ‘limited punctuation’ in Canaan (1996), arguing that these, somewhat surprisingly, provide some of the clearest examples of ‘satisfactory’, conclusive endings in Hill’s work. The third section assesses the punctuational changes made between revisions of Odi Barbare (2007–2012), reading the helpful additions of punctuation marks in the latter version as revealing a deepened ‘trust’ in syntax in Hill’s late poetry.
This chapter reveals the extent to which Shakespeare borrowed from Christopher Marlowe’s plays, and how Marlowe’s ghost appears to have haunted him throughout much of his career. It also, however, explores key differences between the dramatists’ styles, including rhetoric and phraseology. Finally, the chapter investigates claims that Marlowe and Shakespeare co-authored plays and shows that those suspected collaborations are distinctly different from Marlowe in terms of poetic style. While Shakespeare sought to emulate Marlowe in his earliest plays, he also saw opportunities to distinguish himself from his predecessor through more flexible verse, more nuanced applications of rhetorical schemes, and an overall suppler dramatic style. The chapter also argues that we have been getting the title The Taming of the Shrew wrong for all these years.
While the idea of Shakespeare guiding younger dramatists in his later co-authored plays is now generally accepted, there remains some unwillingness to accept that Shakespeare himself was guided in earlier collaborations. Scholars still prefer to imagine Shakespeare improving, or even salvaging, the work of more experienced dramatists, rather than learning from the process of co-authorship at the beginning of his career. This conclusion interrogates such reticence in tandem with older scholarship reluctant to see Shakespeare as a borrower, scholarship that instead assumes other dramatists borrowed from him. It looks at the ways in which the compilers of the First Folio helped to create the image of Shakespeare as a solitary genius. Shakespeare’s dramatic identity was shaped in large part by the people with whom he collaborated most. It is time for readers to fully recognise that in his lifetime Shakespeare was a member of a community of playwrights, his works embedded in a network of affiliation and indebtedness within the early modern writing scene. He was not, to quote Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit, ‘the only Shake-scene in a country’.