Approaching the Twelfth Night

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The Living Law by Jesse Keith Butler has received an excellent review in The European Conservative.


A Talk for Twelfth Night by Arthur Machen

THE WEEKLY MACHEN

A Strand Meditation: To me it appears that August Strindberg was far more a man of science than an artist; his anxiety was not to discover the eternal truth which is the same thing as beauty, but to register observations and discoveries in psychology, sociology, sensations, schoolrooms, hospitals, and backyards.

4 thoughts on “Approaching the Twelfth Night

  1. Thanks for this, written nearly a year after Strindberg’s death – and very interesting to juxtapose with Machen’s “Twelfth Night” article!

    I’m not sure I’ve seen or read any Strindberg, and this lucid estimation does not make me more eager to try… (Though, wildly enough, I once tried out for an Oxford student production of a two-man play of his – I’m not sure which anymore! – and got turned down at once because I have an American accent – which seemed odd to me, since it was obviously a Swedish play in translation… I toyed for a moment with turning on my Captain Fluellen Welsh accent, but thought, why bother… Would success have made me keen on Strindberg? – maybe I was lucky to be turned down…)

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  2. Catching up with the 1923 Shining Pyramid volume thanks to Ben Tucker’s LibriVox audiobook, I just enjoyed “Realism and Symbol” – of which the 1973 Goldstone Bibliography says it “originally appeared in The Academy Vol. LXXV, August 1, 1908, pp. 109-110″ – and I find it very apt for juxtaposition with this Strindberg article.

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      1. Excellent – many thanks! What a lot of Machen catching-up I have to do! Enjoyable prospect!

        With the help of Goldstone -following on this comment of yours – I have started trying to catch up with the essays in The Shining Pyramid which appeared in The Academy in chronological order, and see that they would/will clearly reward re-listening/rereading in that way, repeatedly.

        Ruskin seems to me implicitly in the background, so far – and what, I wonder, of Ruskin’s friend (and first of the Wade Center ‘Seven’ authors) George MacDonald? The second of that ‘Seven’, Chesterton, is clearly in evidence, and what a fascinating sort of background and context all these essays I’ve enjoyed so far seem to form for Charles Williams (by analogy if not by Williams knowing any of them)! And where, perhaps does Machen’s friend and Williams’s then soon-to-be – what should one say? ‘partial inspirer’? – A. E. Waite fit in, implicitly?

        Distinctly interesting in the immediate context of this later Strindberg essay are Machen’s remarks in “Mandatum Novissimum” (7 September 1907) about Ibsen and Strindberg among “heresiarchs” in G.B. Shaw’s background.

        I also wonder if the ‘episodes’ in The Shining Pyramid which Starrett indicates as Secret Glory-related have any distinct connections with the essays among which they appear in The Academy

        My ‘New Machen Year’ is off to a lively start – thanks again!

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