In Our Time: Culture

• Thomas Middleton

  Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the most energetic, varied and innovative playwrights of his time. Thomas Middleton (1580-1627) worked across the London stages both alone and with others from Dekker and Rowley to Shakespeare and more. Middleton’s range included raucous city comedies such as A Chaste Maid in Cheapside and chilling revenge tragedies like The Changeling and The Revenger’s Tragedy, some with the main adult companies and some with child actors playing the scheming adults. Middleton seemed to be everywhere on the Jacobean stage, mixing warmth and cruelty amid laughter and horror, and even Macbeth’s witches may be substantially his work.WithEmma Smith Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Hertford College, University of OxfordLucy Munro Professor of Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature at Kings College LondonAnd Michelle O’Callaghan Professor of Early Modern Literature at the University of ReadingProducer: Simon TillotsonReading list:Swapan Chakravorty, Society and Politics in the Plays of Thomas Middleton (Clarendon Press, 1996)Suzanne Gossett (ed.), Thomas Middleton in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2011)R.V. Holdsworth (ed.), Three Jacobean Revenge Tragedies: A Selection of Critical Essays (Macmillan, 1990), especially ‘Calvinist Psychology in Middleton’s Tragedies’ by John StachniewskiMark Hutchings and A. A. Bromham, Middleton and His Collaborators (Northcote House, 2007)Gordon McMullan and Kelly Stage (eds.), The Changeling: The State of Play (The Arden Shakespeare, 2022)Lucy Munro, Shakespeare in the Theatre: The King's Men (The Arden Shakespeare, 2020)David Nicol, Middleton & Rowley: Forms of Collaboration in the Jacobean Playhouse (University of Toronto Press, 2012)Michelle O’Callaghan, Thomas Middleton: Renaissance Dramatist (Edinburgh University Press, 2009)Gary Taylor and Trish Thomas Henley (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Thomas Middleton (Oxford University Press, 2012)In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio Production

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• Oliver Goldsmith

  Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the renowned and versatile Irish writer Oliver Goldsmith (1728 - 1774). There is a memorial to him in Westminster Abbey’s Poet’s Corner written by Dr Johnson, celebrating Goldsmith's life as a poet, natural philosopher and historian. To this could be added ‘playwright’ and ‘novelist’ and ‘science writer’ and ‘pamphleteer’ and much besides, as Goldsmith explored so many different outlets for his talents. While he began on Grub Street in London, the centre for jobbing writers scrambling for paid work, he became a great populariser and compiler of new ideas and knowledge and achieved notable successes with poems such as The Deserted Village, his play She Stoops to Conquer and his short novel The Vicar of Wakefield. WithDavid O’Shaughnessy Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies at the University of GalwayJudith Hawley Professor of Eighteenth-Century Literature at Royal Holloway, University of LondonAnd Michael Griffin Professor of English at the University of LimerickProducer: Simon TillotsonReading list:Norma Clarke, Brothers of the Quill: Oliver Goldsmith in Grub Street (Harvard University Press, 2016)Leo Damrosch, The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age (Yale University Press, 2019)Oliver Goldsmith (ed. Aileen Douglas and Ian Campbell Ross), The Vicar of Wakefield: A Tale, Supposed to Be Written by Himself (first published 1766; Cambridge University Press, 2024)Oliver Goldsmith (ed. Arthur Friedman), The Vicar of Wakefield (first published 1766; Oxford University Press, 2008)Oliver Goldsmith (ed. Arthur Friedman), The Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith, 5 vols (Clarendon Press, 1966) Oliver Goldsmith (ed. Robert L. Mack), Oliver Goldsmith: Everyman’s Poetry, No. 30 (Phoenix, 1997)Oliver Goldsmith (ed. James Ogden), She Stoops to Conquer (first performed 1773; Methuen Drama, 2003)Oliver Goldsmith (ed. James Watt), The Citizen of the World (first published 1762; Cambridge University Press, 2024)Oliver Goldsmith (ed. Nigel Wood), She Stoops to Conquer and Other Comedies (first performed 1773; Oxford University Press, 2007)Michael Griffin and David O’Shaughnessy (eds.), Oliver Goldsmith in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2024)Michael Griffin and David O’Shaughnessy (eds.), The Letters of Oliver Goldsmith (Cambridge University Press, 2018)Roger Lonsdale (ed.), The Poems of Gray, Collins and Goldsmith (Longmans, 1969)In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio production

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• Sir John Soane

  Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the architect Sir John Soane (1753 -1837), the son of a bricklayer. He rose up the ranks of his profession as an architect to see many of his designs realised to great acclaim, particularly the Bank of England and the Law Courts at Westminster Hall, although his work on both of those has been largely destroyed. He is now best known for his house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields in London, which he remodelled and crammed with antiquities and artworks: he wanted visitors to experience the house as a dramatic grand tour of Europe in microcosm. He became professor of architecture at the Royal Academy, and in a series of influential lectures he set out his belief in the power of buildings to enlighten people about “the poetry of architecture”. Visitors to the museum and his other works can see his trademark architectural features such as his shallow dome, which went on to inspire Britain's red telephone boxes.With: Frances Sands, the Curator of Drawings and Books at Sir John Soane’s MuseumFrank Salmon, Associate Professor of the History of Art at the University of Cambridge and Director of the Ax:son Johnson Centre for the Study of Classical ArchitectureAnd Gillian Darley, historian and author of Soane's biography.Producer: Eliane Glaser In Our time is a BBC Studios Audio production.Reading list:Barry Bergdoll, European Architecture 1750-1890 (Oxford University Press, 2000)Bruce Boucher, John Soane's Cabinet of Curiosities: Reflections on an Architect and His Collection (Yale University Press, 2024)Oliver Bradbury, Sir John Soane’s Influence on Architecture from 1791: An Enduring Legacy (Routledge, 2015)Gillian Darley, John Soane: An Accidental Romantic (Yale University Press, 1999)Ptolemy Dean, Sir John Soane and the Country Estate (Ashgate, 1999)Ptolemy Dean, Sir John Soane and London (Lund Humphries, 2006)Helen Dorey, John Soane and J.M.W. Turner: Illuminating a Friendship (Sir John Soane’s Museum, 2007)Tim Knox, Sir John Soane’s Museum (Merrell, 2015)Brian Lukacher, Joseph Gandy: An Architectural Visionary in Georgian England (Thames and Hudson, 2006)Susan Palmer, At Home with the Soanes: Upstairs, Downstairs in 19th Century London (Pimpernel Press, 2015)Frances Sands, Architectural Drawings: Hidden Masterpieces at Sir John Soane’s Museum (Batsford, 2021)Sir John Soane’s Museum, A Complete Description (Sir John Soane’s Museum, 2018)Mary Ann Stevens and Margaret Richardson (eds.), John Soane Architect: Master of Space and Light (Royal Academy Publications, 1999)John Summerson, Architecture in Britain 1530-1830 (9th edition, Yale University Press, 1993)A.A. Tait, Robert Adam: Drawings and Imagination (Cambridge University Press, 1993) John H. Taylor, Sir John Soane’s Greatest Treasure: The Sarcophagus of Seti I (Pimpernel Press, 2017)David Watkin, Sir John Soane: Enlightenment Thought and the Royal Academy Lectures (Cambridge University Press, 1996)David Watkin, Sir John Soane: The Royal Academy Lectures (Cambridge University Press, 2000)John Wilton-Ely, Piranesi, Paestum & Soane (Prestel, 2013)

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  53:25
• Vase-mania

  Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss eighteenth century 'vase-mania'. In the second half of the century, inspired by archaeological discoveries, the Grand Tour and the founding of the British Museum, parts of the British public developed a huge enthusiasm for vases modelled on the ancient versions recently dug up in Greece. This enthusiasm amounted to a kind of ‘vase-mania’. Initially acquired by the aristocracy, Josiah Wedgwood made these vases commercially available to an emerging aspiring middle class eager to display a piece of the Classical past in their drawing rooms. In the midst of a rapidly changing Britain, these vases came to symbolise the birth of European Civilisation, the epitome of good taste and the timelessness that would later be celebrated by John Keats in his Ode on a Grecian Urn.WithJenny Uglow Writer and Biographer Rosemary Sweet Professor of Urban History at the University of LeicesterAndCaroline McCaffrey-Howarth Lecturer in the History of Art at the University of EdinburghProducer: Eliane GlaserReading list:Viccy Coltman, Fabricating the Antique: Neoclassicism in Britain 1760–1800 (University of Chicago Press, 2006)David Constantine, Fields of Fire: A Life of Sir William Hamilton (Phoenix, 2002)Tristram Hunt, The Radical Potter: Josiah Wedgwood and the Transformation of Britain (Allen Lane, 2021)Ian Jenkins and Kim Sloan (eds), Vases and Volcanoes: Sir William Hamilton and his Collection (British Museum Press, 1996)Berg Maxine, Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford University Press, 2005)Iris Moon, Melancholy Wedgwood (MIT Press, 2024)Rosemary Sweet, Grand Tour: The British in Italy, c.1690–1820 (Cambridge University Press, 2012)Jenny Uglow, The Lunar Men: The Friends who Made the Future (Faber and Faber, 2003)In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio production

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  56:27
• Plutarch's Parallel Lives

  Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Greek biographer Plutarch (c46 AD-c120 AD) and especially his work 'Parallel Lives' which has shaped the way successive generations see the Classical world. Plutarch was clear that he was writing lives, not histories, and he wrote these very focussed accounts in pairs to contrast and compare the characters of famous Greeks and Romans, side by side, along with their virtues and vices. This focus on the inner lives of great men was to fascinate Shakespeare, who drew on Plutarch considerably when writing his Julius Caesar, Coriolanus, Timon of Athens and Antony and Cleopatra. While few followed his approach of setting lives in pairs, Plutarch's work was to influence countless biographers especially from the Enlightenment onwards.WithJudith Mossman Professor Emerita of Classics at Coventry UniversityAndrew Erskine Professor of Ancient History at the University of EdinburghAnd Paul Cartledge AG Leventis Senior Research Fellow of Clare College, University of CambridgeProducer: Simon TillotsonReading list:Mark Beck (ed.), A Companion to Plutarch (Wiley-Blackwell, 2014)Colin Burrow, Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity (Oxford University Press, 2013), especially chapter 6Raphaëla Dubreuil, Theater and Politics in Plutarch’s Parallel Lives (Brill, 2023)Tim Duff, Plutarch’s Lives: Exploring Virtue and Vice (Oxford University Press, 1999)Noreen Humble (ed.), Plutarch’s Lives: Parallelism and Purpose (Classical Press of Wales, 2010)Robert Lamberton, Plutarch (Yale University Press, 2002)Hugh Liebert, Plutarch's Politics: Between City and Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2016)Christopher Pelling, Plutarch and History (Classical Press of Wales, 2002)Plutarch (trans. Robin Waterfield), Greek Lives (Oxford University Press, 2008) Plutarch (trans. Robin Waterfield), Roman Lives (Oxford University Press, 2008) Plutarch (trans. Robin Waterfield), Hellenistic Lives (Oxford University Press, 2016)Plutarch (trans. Ian Scott-Kilvert), The Rise and Fall of Athens: Nine Greek Lives (Penguin, 2023) Plutarch (trans. Ian Scott-Kilvert), The Age of Alexander: Nine Greek Lives (Penguin, 2011) Plutarch (trans. Richard Talbert), On Sparta (Penguin, 2005)Plutarch (trans. Christopher Pelling), The Rise of Rome (Penguin, 2013) Plutarch (trans. Christopher Pelling), Rome in Crisis: Nine Lives (Penguin, 2010)Plutarch (trans. Rex Warner), The Fall of the Roman Republic: Six Lives (Penguin, 2006)Plutarch (trans. Thomas North, ed. Judith Mossman), The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (Wordsworth, 1998)Geert Roskam, Plutarch (Cambridge University Press, 2021)D. A. Russell, Plutarch (2nd ed., Bristol Classical Press, 2001)Philip A. Stadter, Plutarch and his Roman Readers (Oxford University Press, 2014)Frances B. Titchener and Alexei V. Zadorojnyi (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Plutarch (Cambridge University Press, 2023)In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio Production

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