The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
The Tudor mansion of Compton Wynyates is full of secrets and puzzles, some macabre, some downright peculiar.
Compton Wynyates is a country house in Warwickshire, begun in the 1480s by Edmund Compton. The house bears the marks of the Reformation, with priest-holes for persecuted Roman clergy, and of the Civil War, with hiding places for the family and Royalist soldiers. Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, James I and Charles I all stayed there.
David, fresh from another close encounter with Saul’s men, shares his advice for living a charmed life.
Psalm 34 is said to have been written as a thanksgiving by David, when he was on the run from the madness of King Saul. He took refuge with Achish (Achimelech or Abimelech) the King of Gath, and to ensure that news of him did not get about, passed himself off as a harmless lunatic. This extract comes from the elegant translation made in 1535 by Yorkshireman Myles Coverdale.
Hamlet cannot understand what his mother could possibly see in his uncle Claudius.
Hamlet, young Prince of Denmark, has returned home from studying in Wittenberg to find that his father is dead, apparently of a snake-bite, and his mother has married his father’s brother Claudius, who is now styling himself King. Utterly disgusted, and far from convinced by the supposed cause of death, he tells his mother exactly what he thinks of the bargain she has made.
John Galsworthy shared his unease at the rise of two competing forms of national speech.
In his Presidential Address for 1924, entitled ‘Expression’, John Galsworthy reminded the English Association that London’s inner-city English was washing away all rivals, and becoming our national speech. Was this desirable? And would the talk of ‘cultured’ people be any better? It was a rather serious point, he said, though we must hope his solution was not meant seriously.
The dazzling throne of the Mughal Emperors has vanished from history, but not before Abdul Hamid Lahori had seen it.
The Peacock Throne in the Hall of Private Audiences in the Red Fort of Delhi was the high throne of Mughal Emperors, built for Shah Jahan, who ascended it for the first time on March 22nd, 1635. The throne was looted and taken to Persia in May 1739 by Nader Shah, but we do have this eyewitness description from Abdul Hamid Lahori, Shah Jahan’s court historian.
John Galsworthy urges the English to love their language as they love their country.
Novelist John Galsworthy was elected President of the English Association for 1924. He ended his address to the members with a call not to give up on the English language, but to keep on expecting to meet round every corner something new: not a mere novelty, but something worthy to follow the noble beauty of the best that has gone before.