billybookblog

*contains spoilers* By the time The School for Scandal hit the stage at the Drury Lane Theatre in May 1777, Richard Brinsley Sheridan had already been dealt his own life’s portion of scandal. In one particularly influential instance, Sheridan escorted his beloved Elizabeth Linley to a French convent to escape the advances of a certain Captain Thomas Mathews, only to return to England to find that Mathews had posted a defamatory article in the local newspaper with the intention of damaging his reputation. Honour demanded action, as the leisured classes of Bath indulged in relishing gossip over the situation, and so Sheridan challenged Mathews to a duel. This very incident is hinted at in the text: one of the piece’s villains, the heartless and ambitious Joseph Surface, is confronted by the husband of his lover, and the results of the confrontation are greatly exaggerated by the titular School for Scandal; “Then, madam, they began to fight with swords“. This is an apt attack of the natur...

*contains spoilers* One thing that must be noted when first approaching Homer’s The Iliad is that it is an archaic text – the word “archaic” itself derives from the Greek “arkhaikos”, meaning beginning – and a good deal of research and familiarisation with Greek mythology would not go amiss. Also, as I found out having switched editions just over halfway through (there was a brand spanking new addition in a charity shop that I simply could not resist buying), different translations are available and this could affect your reading experience. I began with a 1987 Penguin Classic edition, translated by Martin Hammond, before skipping over to a 2011 Phoenix edition translated by the (I’m sure) delectable Stephen Mitchell. Thus, The Iliad, for me, transformed from a rather elaborate and fluid prose in the 1987 edition to a more strategically lined (but also rather fluid) translation in the 2011 edition. Mitchell presents the text in a five-beat metre, split into stanzas, which is visually a...