Friday, July 11, 2008

Literary scenes: Part 1

You've noticed we decided against a chronological account in favor of a theme-oriented organization. Okay, the theme today is literature. Here are some of the significant spots we've visited during our trip.

This is called the "Parting Stone." It's near Grasmere, William Wordsworth's home, up over the ridge and just below a little lake called Grisedale Tarn. The significance is that William and his brother John last saw each other at this spot. John was off to military service, so William walked him to this point on his journey, where they parted at this beloved and beautiful mountain valley. Then John was lost at sea. There is a poem carved on the stone, in a curlicue script nearly obliterated by time and lichen. We intend to look this poem up when we get home.

[UPDATE] We did look it up, and here is the inscription and its source:

Here did we stop; and here looked round
While each into himself descends,
For that last thought of parting Friends
That is not to be found.
—Brother and friend, if verse of mine
Have power to make thy virtues known,
Here let a monumental Stone
Stand—sacred as a Shrine.

—William Wordsworth, 1805, from “Elegiac Verses in Memory of My Brother, John Wordsworth,” lines 21-24, 61-64


Here's Greg in front of William Shakespeare's birthplace and boyhood home in Stratford-upon-Avon.


And here's Greg at the gates of Christ's College, Cambridge, having failed to obtain permission to enter. It's a school day and tourists are not welcomed. That's okay. This is the college John Milton attended. (Paradise Lost.) When he went here he was a somewhat effeminate-looking, beardless youth with lovely waving hair. His mates nicknamed him "The Lady of Christ's." You can imagine those years were rough for him. He was a pretty good student. In the Cambridge U. Library we saw an exhibit of documents pertaining to Milton -- lots of original manuscripts, rough drafts, letters, annotated books, commentaries, illustrations for Paradise Lost, and on and on. It was a really fascinating exhibit, and free. They even gave us, free for the asking, a nice many-page color brochure with good copies of the most interesting details of the exhibit, almost completely offsetting the prohibition against taking pictures in the exhibit.


Well, here's Greg again, this time in front of the reconstructed Globe Theatre, which stands about 200 metres from the spot where the original Globe, built by Shakespeare's troupe, stood. We took a tour this day, then came back a couple days later to see A Midsummer Night's Dream. It was absolutely hilarious! Shakespeare works wonderfully in front of a live audience, performed by good actors in a good venue. Children and old folks alike roared with laughter all the way through. The occasional rain never bothered us. We were "groundlings" at this performance (look it up). Next two performances we have seats: Merry Wives of Windsor and King Lear.


Greg again, and "Hodge," Samuel Johnson's cat. This little statue stands in the courtyard just outside the house where Sam "Dictionary" Johnson compiled, with the help of 6 or 8 amanuenses, the first really great dictionary of the English language, published 1755. It set the standards for lexicography, strongly influencing the exhaustive Oxford English Dictionary a couple of hundred years later. Apparently his cat was instrumental in the success of all this. I need to look that up.

And this is Jane Austen's house in Chawton. She lived here from 1808 until maybe a year before she died. Here she penned her great stuff: Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Persuasion, and so on. Unlike Shakespeare's home, this place really relates to her writings. Shakespeare mainly wrote about people and lifestyles he knew only second-hand, but Jane wrote about people like her and her family who lived, cooked, slept, argued, and walked uin the countryside in palces just like this. Appropriately, we walked from the train depot in Alton to this place, maybe 2 or 3 miles. Horse country.