Peter Cochran

Small-Screen Shakespeare is a guide to all the Shakespeare productions available for viewing on computer or TV. From Beerbohm Tree’s silent scene from King John, to Helen Mirren as Prospera and Simon Russell Beale as Falstaff, Peter Cochran gives an expert opinion on the best and the worst, basing his judgements on a lifetime of viewing, teaching, acting and directing. The book covers films, television productions, plays on YouTube, and DVDs of videoed stage productions, as well as cinematic Shakespearean spin-offs such as Throne of Blood and Joe Macbeth. The book is composed of five sections: one on film directors who have specialised in Shakespeare; one on screen versions of individual plays; one on films remaking Shakespeare’s plots in a different idiom; one on films which contain creative references to Shakespeare; and a final review of two famous stage productions.

Small-Screen Shakespeare

The Columbian Grammar; Or, a Concise View of the English Language

Byron’s Religions is the most comprehensive study yet of the poet’s deep, diverse and eclectic attitude to religion. The articles, by several well-known and distinguished scholars, cover many of his poems and plays, taking in Anglicanism, Catholicism, Blasphemy, Calvinism, Gnosticism, Islam, and Zoroastrianism. The tentative conclusion is that Byron was never the atheist which the cliché has him to be, but a man whose profound need for a faith clashed always with an equally profound scepticism.

Byron’s Religions

George Gordon Byron Byron, Baron

George Gordon Noël Byron

Lord Byron remains, as he was to many of his contemporaries, the defining personality of his age and time, the quintessential late-Romantic: one whose life matched the freedom of imagination and possibility of his poetry, charismatic, irresistible and shocking. The full range of his work, however, reveals a less straightforward and less stereotypical writer than this: a thinker as well as a feeler, a poet rather than merely a sensationalist, someone who justifies his towering literary reputation as much as his scandalous one. This edition of the Works contains Byron's entire poetical output, including dramas and material omitted or censored from early editions. It also presents around half of the known letters, the journals and other prose writings. The contents of the volumes are: Volume 1 (386 pp.): Introduction to the poetical works by Dr. Peter Cochran; Fugitive Pieces; Poems on Various Occasions; Hours of Idleness; Poems Original and Translated; other early poems; English Bards, and Scotch Reviewers; Hints from Horace; The Curse of Minerva; The Waltz. Volume 2 (295 pp.): Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, including stanzas excluded from the early editions and all Byron's and Hobhouse's notes and appendices. Volume 3 (426 pp.): Poems 1809-1813; The Giaour; The Bride of Abydos; The Corsair; Lara; Hebrew Melodies; Poems 1814-1816; The Siege of Corinth; Parisina; Poems of the Separation. Volume 4 (509 pp.): The Prisoner of Chillon; Poems of July-September, 1816; Manfred; The Lament of Tasso; Beppo; Ode on Venice; Mazeppa; The Prophecy of Dante; The Morgante Maggiore; Francesca of Rimini; Marino Faliero; The Vision of Judgment; Poems 1816-1823; The Blues. Volume 5 (685 pp.): Sardanapalus; The Two Foscari; Cain; Heaven and Earth; Werner; The Deformed Transformed; The Age of Bronze; The Island. Volume 6 (689 pp.): Don Juan. Volume 7 (87 pp.): minor poems and jeux d'esprit. Volume 8 (204 pp.): Introduction to the prose works by Dr. Peter Cochran; letters, to August 1811. Volume 9 (352 pp.): letters, August 1811 to December 1813; journal, November 1813 to April 1814; articles from the Monthly Review; Parliamentary speeches. Volume 10 (266 pp.): letters, January 1814 to November 1816; journal for Augusta, September 1816; a fragment of a novel. Volume 11 (355 pp.): letters, November 1816 to March 1820; translations from Armenian; unfinished skit on Sotheby's Tour; letter to the editor of My Grandmother's Review; reply to Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. Volume 12 (358 pp.): letters, April 1820 to December 1821; extracts from journal, January to February 1821; My Dictionary; Detached Thoughts; the two letters on Bowles and Pope; draft of an address to the Neapolitan insurgents; notes on Bacon's apophthegms and Voltaire. Volume 13 (261 pp.): letters, January 1822 on; two late prose fragments; additional letters; undated letters to Lady Melbourne. All of the Works have been newly typeset for this edition. The basis of the texts is Ernest Hartley Coleridge's edition of the poetry and Rowland E. Prothero's edition of the prose (as published uniformly, London: John Murray, 1898). Further letters have been added from the texts in John Murray, ed., Lord Byron's Correspondence (London: John Murray, 1922, 2 vols.), Ralph, Earl of Lovelace, Astarte (London: Scribner's, 1921), and material supplied by Peter Cochran drawing on the B.L. Loan 70 collection and other sources, and incorporated silently into the chronological sequence and numbering of the series. Additional poems and portions of Childe Harold initially suppressed have been supplied from the online edition by Peter Cochran (www.internationalbyronsociety.org) and incorporated into the sequence.

The Complete Works in 13 Volumes

Lord Byron

The works of Lord Byron and his friend Sir Walter Scott had an influence on European literature which was immediate and profound. Peter Cochran s book charts that influence on France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Poland and Russia, with individual chapters on Goethe, Pushkin, and Baudelaire and one special chapter on Ibsen, who called Peer Gynt his Manfred. Cochran shows that, although Byron s best work is his satirical writing, which is aimed in part at his earlier romantic material and its readership, his self-correction was not taken on board by many European writers (Pushkin being the exception), and it was the gloomy Byronic Heroes who held sway. These were often read as revolutionaries, but were in fact dead-end. It was a mythical, not a literary Byron whom people thought they had read. The book ends with chapters on three British writers who seem at last to have read Byron, in their different ways, accurately Eliot, Joyce, and Yeats."

Byron's European Impact

The play Manfred is one of Byron’s most famous and influential works. It established him throughout Europe as a bold, blasphemous genius. It inspired music by Tchaikovsky and Schumann, and was admired by, and influenced, Richard Wagner, whose uncle made one of its eighteen German translations. Going back to the primary manuscripts, Peter Cochran has created a new text of Manfred, so that it can at last be read as it left Byron’s pen, untouched by professional polishers, too anxious to impose a formal syntax on his fluent and spontaneous style. Cochran has – through a careful study of the original texts – decoded one hitherto-illegible note which throws light on Byron’s strange and elaborate demonology. Several essays cover the myriad sources of the play, and there are sections on its production history. Cochran ends with an amusing essay on how to, and how not to, bring Byron’s Manfred to the stage.

An Edition of Byron’s Manuscripts and a Collection of Essays

Manfred

The Gothic Byron examines in detail the Gothic element in Byron’s work, arguing that it has traditionally been undervalued. It looks closely at his reading in the novels of Ann Radcliffe, Monk Lewis, and Charlotte Dacre, and then discusses the Gothic elements in his Turkish Tales, plays, and satirical poetry, ending with two essays on Don Juan. Further essays explore the indebtedness of several European and English writers, including Charlotte and Emily Brontë, to the Gothic element in Byron’s poetry.

The Gothic Byron

Byron’s dubious status as a sex object, and his even more dubious status as a political icon, serves to disguise the fact that he is one of the greatest of all English poets, with a European reputation second only to Shakespeare. The fact that writers such as Goethe and Pushkin held him in the highest regard ensures that the English continue to despise him, and ignore his verse as much as possible. This book ignores his sexuality, his politics, and his iconography, and concentrates on his poems. Written by leading authorities such as Bernard Beatty, Germaine Greer and Michael O’Neill, it contains essays on his verse-forms and his comic rhymes, as well as thematic analyses on such recurrent Byronic themes as the Sea, Will-o’-the-Wisps, and Love versus Knowledge. In the face of many modern books which translate his verse into prose and try without success to analyse the result, Byron’s Poetry puts his real achievement – as a creative writer – back into the focus of discussion.

Byron’s Poetry

The Burning of Byron’s Memoirs is a collection of new and uncollected essays, and papers given at many conferences over a two-decade period. They cover many aspects of Byron’s life and work, including his relationship with his parents, his library, his attitude to Shakespeare, his borrowings from other writers, and his feelings about women and men. Two essays centre on his close friends Hobhouse and Kinnaird. All are informed by first-hand acquaintance with primary texts. The title essay has been hailed as the best-ever documentation of the disgraceful way in which Byron’s Memoirs were destroyed within days of his death being announced. For anyone interested in Byron either as a man, a poet, or as a cultural phenomenon, The Burning of Byron’s Memoirs is essential reading.

New and Unpublished Essays and Papers

The Burning of Byron’s Memoirs

Byron at the Theatre is a collection of essays by a wide spectrum of European scholars, dealing with Byron’s dramas in a variety of ways. It starts with a long and detailed introduction on Byron and Drury Lane, incorporating much recent research done on the riotous and squalid conditions of the theatre in Regency London – conditions which go far towards explaining Byron’s distaste for the idea of theatrical success. There follows a chapter about the influence on Byron of Vittorio Alfieri, a vital subject which has not been written about thoroughly for over a century, and which goes far to explain what motivated Byron’s experiments in classical drama. The main body of the essays discuss Byron’s plays from thematic perspectives, and examine Byron himself as a figure in the dramas of Goethe and Stoppard. There is a chapter on Rudolph Nureyev’s little-known Manfred ballet, and another on Byron himself as a dramatic performer. Byron at the Theatre is a vital book for anyone interested in this much-discussed but little-understood aspect of Byron’s life and work.

Byron at the Theatre

Robert Bloomfield’s The Farmer’s Boy was the most successful poem of the “Romantic” period, selling 100,000 copies between 1800 and 1830. However, what was marketed was not the poem which the working-class Bloomfield had written, but a highly polished, politely spelled and punctuated re-write, prepared by the local squire, who deliberately covered up the fact that Bloomfield had written originally for a Suffolk voice, with Suffolk vowel-sounds and Suffolk idioms. This edition prints Bloomfield’s first manuscript, and then has a parallel text of the “polished” first edition, opposite Bloomfield’s second manuscript, made for his own use and for that of his family, in which he changes the poem back to the form in which he wrote, heard, and read it. Thus Bloomfield’s intentions appear for the first time, edited in detail from the original manuscripts at Harvard. Also included are the two eighteenth-century poems The Thresher’s Labour by Stephen Duck, and The Woman’s Labour by Mary Collier.

A Parallel Text Edition

The Farmer’s Boy by Robert Bloomfield

Juliusz Słowacki is one of Poland’s most important writers, but his poetry and plays are little known in the West. This book provides a long-overdo, much-needed introduction to him. It contains his popular play Balladina, his meditative poem Agamemnon’s Tomb, and his hilarious mock-epic Beniowski, in the style of Byron’s Don Juan.

Two Poems and a Play by Juliusz Słowacki

Poland’s Angry Romantic

Aspects of Byron’s Don Juan is, in part, a proceedings volume from the 2012 conference held by the Newstead Byron Society at Nottingham Trent University. Speakers represented in the book include Malcolm Kelsall, Peter Cochran, Diego Saglia and Itsuyo Higashinaka. Topics range from the politics of Don Juan, and its treatment of women, to its comic rhymes. One section is devoted to the poem’s importance in the literatures of Spain and Russia, another to the vast catalogue of Byron’s prose sources (from cannibalism to cookery books), and a final section to the important role played by Mary Shelley in copying most of the poem for the printer. The editor’s introduction describes the enormous literary tradition of which Don Juan forms a vital continuation, from Pulci’s Morgante Maggiore, via Rabelais, Cervantes, and Montaigne, to the novelists Sterne, Smollett and Fielding, all of whom Byron adored. Another chapter concerns the differing ways in which Don Juan has been treated by other artists, from Tirso de Molina, via E. T. A. Hoffman, to Johnny Depp.

Peter Cochran

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