renaissance man
Yesterday I moved my travel-wearied feet to the Gladys Krieble Delmas Lecture held at the BL. It was a fairly homogenous audience: amongst the white 40, 50ish faces, I guess I was the youngest listener. I didn't know how Jonathan Bate looked like; was he the gent with the big white beard, or the bald one (quite a few actually) in grey, or the old man with a slightly large waistline? After they introduced the speaker, Bate surprisingly was non of the above--he had a slim figure, in his middle ages and carried a demeanor of sensibility. I thought the lecture was brilliant--he eloquently argued that literary history blossomed during the Elizabethan period, a time when Elizabethans engaged in writing for their nation. Certainly there were moments when my mind drifted away, but then I realised how funny it is that we readers of the early modern age attend these Renaissance seminars just to congratulate ourselves on what a glorious era we are studying. I'm sure Terry Jones has something to say about this.