Ian Donaldson

Shakespeare was commonly regarded by his Romantic admirers as a solitary figure, whose prodigious talents were linked in some mysterious fashion to his isolation from society and from his fellow writers. ‘Shakespeare,’ wrote Coleridge in 1834, ‘is of no age – nor, I might add, of any religion, or party, or profession. The body and substance of his works came out of the unfathomable substance of his own oceanic mind.’ Carlyle thought likewise; Shakespeare, he believed, dwelt ‘apart, in a kind of royal solitude; none equal, none second’ to his creative powers.

Shakespeare’s great contemporary Ben Jonson dressed an actor in armour to open his play Poetaster. The Prologue explained:

If any muse why I salute the stage,
An armèd Prologue, know, ’tis a
dangerous age,
Wherein who writes had need present
his scenes
Forty-fold proof against the conjuring
means
Of base detractors and illiterate apes,
That fill up rooms in fair and formal
shapes.

Disdaining the opening moves traditionally associated with literary biography – the expected orderly progress through ancestry, parentage, birth, schooling, juvenilia – John Drury’s masterly new account of the life and poetry of George Herbert begins instead with the poem that Drury sees as Herbert’s finest work, written in mid-career, ‘Love (III)’. Herbert designed this poem as the culminating piece in the collection upon which his poetic reputation would come ultimately to rest, The Temple (1633).

It was not until the middle years of the nineteenth century, so far as we can tell, that anyone seriously doubted that the man from Stratford-upon-Avon called William Shakespeare had written the plays that for the past two and a half centuries had passed without question under his name. In the early 1850s, however, a private scholar from Connecticut named Delia Bacon began to develop an alternative view. She believed that the plays had been composed not by Shakespeare but by a syndicate of writers headed probably by Francis Bacon, whom she later came to think of as her distant ancestor.

The humanities are currently experiencing what’s been called a ‘material turn’ that is in some ways comparable to the linguistic turn that animated the academy half a century ago. Then it was language that commanded attention, and appeared to constitute a primary ‘reality’; now the focus is on physical objects, and what they can tell us about the world in which we live. Within certain humane disciplines – art history, archaeology, museum studies – objects have always loomed large, and it is therefore not surprising that a leading figure in the present field should be the distinguished director of the British Museum, Neil MacGregor, whose brilliant study, A History of the World in 100 Objects (2011), has deservedly won both popular and scholarly acclaim.

This is a highly intelligent collection of essays by some of the nation’s finest minds about the ebb and flow of intellectual endeavour in the humanities since the institution of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1969. In the thirty-one essays – built around keynotes, panels, and responses – there are too many gems among them for me to be willing to pick out individual contributions for particular attention. If you care for the life of the mind and for our culture, download the e-book and peruse it, according to your interests. These are mainly stories of success, in transforming disciplines and the like. Less flatteringly, they are also a reminder that the humanities were more central in Australian universities back in 1969 than now.

Two photographs from the present book, caught by the British press in 2009, vividly testify both to the fun and to the difficulty of maintaining ancient ritual in the modern world. In the first, a widely grinning Prince Harry, one leg extended in parody of traditional marching style ...

Ambitious, arrogant, talented, brave, learned, truculent, and convivial: Ben Jonson was too outstanding, too odd, and too contrary to be taken as a creature of his time. Yet he had so wide-ranging a life that to write his biography is to capture, in little, a great part of his remarkable age.

Sir Maurice Bowra, renowned as the most lively and learned don in Britain, if not in all Europe, reigned supreme as Warden of Wadham College Oxford for more than three decades until his retirement in 1970. This long-expected biography, diligently researched for many years by the late Michael Davie, London-based author, journalist, and former editor of the Melbourne Age, has now been expertly completed by Oxford historian Leslie Mitchell, who writes with the ease and authority of a biographer thoroughly acquainted with his subject and the College over which he long presided: though not, perhaps, with the sharply quizzical eye that Davie, working outside that golden circle, might have trained on both.

Shakespeare the Thinking is the final and posthumously published book of the Oxford critic A.D. Nuttall, who died unexpectedly in January 2007. Pitched at a wider readership than most of his earlier writings, the book is the culmination of Nuttall’s lifetime thinking about Shakespeare, and the work by which his remarkable originality as a critic will no doubt be most widely recognised.