T.S. Eliot as a Dramatist: A View of the 1960s

My subject tonight is the difficult birth of a dramatist; and I think I can already hear someone in the audience murmur to himself or to his neighbour: "The best he can do is to compose a delicate obituary." Indeed it may well be that the moment of obituary has come, and that after the tired cadences of The Elder Statesman the aged eagle will stretch its wings no longer. But obituaries tend to be either summary in their judgments or facile in their praise; only the best of them have the virtue of a revaluation. And there is evidently a feeling abroad, notably in the United States where they take nothing for granted except themselves, that the reputation of T. S. Eliot is ripe for overhauling. If the esoteric pundits of the Higher Literary Criticism had watched the people of Adelaide queuing up all night for the chance of getting a ticket for Murder in the Cathedral, they would have averted their steel-rimmed spectacles from the sight of so sinister a popularity, and mustered all their powers of analysis into a single, overwhelming question: "What, in the name of Heaven, has happened to J. Alfred Prufrock?

Re-Gendering the Libertine; or, The Taming of the Rake: Lucy Vestris as Don Giovanni on the Early Nineteenth-Century London Stage

When Luigi Bassi entered the stage of the Prague National Theatre in 1787 to create the title role of Mozart and Da Ponte's Don Giovanni, he could have drawn inspiration from a rich tradition of theatrical, pantomimic and marionette representations of the legendary Don Juan, to which this new opera was the latest contribution. Previous incarnations had been shaped by the likes of Tirso de Molina, Molière, Shadwell, Purcell and Gluck; yet it is Mozart and Da Ponte's version that has for us become the definitive: the Don as paradox; an uncomfortable blend of the despicable and the admirable, hero and anti-hero. Lecher, rapist, liar, cheat, murderer, he is the brutal epitome of macho striving for power and domination, yet clothed with a seductive panache, conviction and bravado — the reckless-heroic libertine phallocrat who would rather face the fires of eternal damnation than curb his appetites

‘“For Without Vanity I’m Better Known”: Restoration Actors and Metatheatre on the London Stage.’

Published version of article deposited in accordance with SHERPA Romeo guidelines. © Cambridge University Press, 2011

From Romantic Gothic to Victorian Medievalism: 1817 and 1877

"The Cambridge History of the Gothic was conceived in 2015, when Linda Bree, then Editorial Director at Cambridge University Press, first suggested the idea to us

El ángel en la niebla

Tít. orix. : The angel in the mistAnte