Matthew Steggle

A quote from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy The Encyclopedia Galactica defines a robot as a mechanical apparatus designed to do the work of a man. The marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics C...

Then light dawned - they are basically Douglas Adams’s Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.

www.goodreads.com/quotes/98555...

www.goodreads.com/quotes/98555...

Like others my mind kept turning not just to the uses, but to the companies that are creating these far-from-neutral black box thingies. So cheery, so profit-driven, so sinister.

Congratulations to the presenters, to @lisahopkins.bsky.social and Deborah Cartmell, and to @bsashakespeare.bsky.social on the “AI and Shakespeare” conference. Much to chew on. (1/3)

A shelf of books including Lee Jackson’s Dirty Old London

Hello @victorianlondon.bsky.social - look what I bumped into on the reference shelves of the National Archives!

Speeding up Shakespeare; studies of the bygone theatre and drama : Lawrence, William John, 1862-1940 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive 220 p. 20 cm

On the former - yes, certainly some evidence for stage dummies - a very old essay in here: archive.org/details/spee...

Henry Wotton, “On the sudden restraint of the Earl of Somerset”:
Dazzled thus with height of place,
Whilst our hopes our wits beguile,
No man marks the narrow space
'Twixt a prison and a smile.

In Our Time - Henry IV Part 1 - BBC Sounds Shakespeare's powerful exploration of power and succession with Hotspur, Hal and Falstaff.

Really enjoyed this, in which @oldfortunatus.bsky.social, @lucycmunro.bsky.social, and my esteemed colleague Laurence Publicover, all wearing lightly their massive learning, talk about how much fun the Henry IV plays are.
www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...

Mayne’s The City Match, satirizing puritans: “Yesterday I went / To see a lady that has a parrot. My woman / While I was in discourse converted the fowl, / And now it can speak nought but Knox’s works. / So there’s a parrot lost.”
Not specified that it comes on - but you couldn't not, could you?

Next week: “At half-time, the home crowd were delighted when the second XI performed some scenes from that perennial favourite The Island Princess”.

How ‘Hamnet’ sidelines Anne Hathaway Historical records suggest that Shakespeare’s wife was central to his career and life. So why does this film reduce her to a woman of the woods?

Prospect magazine have suspended their paywall for this weekend - so if you want to read their review of Hamnet, or indeed anything else, it’s free till Feb 2.

www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/culture/the-...

Front page of today’s Sunday Times, with a panel for an article inside, “how accurate is Hamnet?”

Very pleased that the Mrs Shakspaire letter is mentioned in the Sunday Times today!

Yes, absolutely! It would have made Imtiaz Habib very happy to see it.

Old St Paul's, the cathedral which was destroyed in the Great Fire of London.

And there's some great detail. Was that the Moorish Ambassador watching Hamlet in 1600? Not categorically impossible. And the night scene by the Thames, where as the camera moves Old St Paul's looms up where you would expect. For someone immersed in the stuff, the effect is uncanny. (3/3)

From a Shakespearean's POV - much more Hamlet than was in the novel, and that worked thrillingly well. Inevitably scope to argue about historical fidelity, but Shakespeare, glass houses, stones. (2/3)

I loved Hamnet, which was beautiful throughout, and very joyful (by the standards of films about the plague). (1/3)

Have emailed you!

That piece by you and Heather likewise! I had no idea Adams was a card-carrying white supremacist, which as you say gives a pretty chilling twist to the whole affair.

But it’s Berkhout’s show, and his essay is really marvellous. (5/5)

furtling around some typhoid-ridden backstreets around 1840, looking for an address that Shakespeare obviously never lived at, you might enjoy it. Meanwhile, Paster, Lesser, and Wolfe start on the more serious concerns. (4/5)

Berkhout’s essay is vast, and I only get to one small part, basically trying to reinforce and expand on his footnotes 89-102. If you like old maps, old newspapers, and (3/5)

Berkhout’s subject is the copy of Lambarde’s Archaionomia (1568) now at the Folger which contains what’s often called the “seventh signature” of Shakespeare.  No spoilers here, but it’s quite a wild ride. (2/5)

Volume 76 Issue 4 | Shakespeare Quarterly | Oxford Academic Shakespeare Quarterly (SQ) is a leading journal in Shakespeare studies, publishing highly original, rigorously researched essays, notes, and book reviews.

he new issue of SQ is devoted to an epic bit of detective work by the late Carl T. Berkhout: wide-ranging, technically brilliant, and really alarming. Brief contributions from Gail Kern Paster, Zachary Lesser, Heather Wolfe, and me, start picking up the pieces. (1/5)

academic.oup.com/sq/issue/76/4

Likewise! Just don’t let on and hopefully no-one will ever know.

I second that OHHHHHHH!

That’s an amazing object!

A sample page of red and black printed music on four-line red staves, woodcut initial, and type; on the right, an image of the blind tooled pigskin binding

Last BPL new acquisition of the year is a copy of the very rare gradual printed by Johann Emerich for Lucantonio Giunta in Venice in 1499. This is the largest book (by dimensions) printed during the 15th century and it required a custom-manufactured paper stock to print. 1/8

Had not seen that! Thank you!

John Carey was a brilliant scholar and public intellectual, but he was also a model professional academic, and personally kind. In the 90s he ended up supervising my D Phil when no one else much fancied it, and for that I am eternally grateful.

I mean, it’s there in black and white on the internet, but I still have some doubts…

YouTube video by David Stoker In the Company of Mrs Shakespeare

Thanks to Aberystwyth Bibliographical Group for hosting me for a zoom talk the other week on Mrs Shakespeare and binding waste! They also recorded the talk, which was kind: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9PK...