Critical Readings

Released on 14 June 2021:

The panel examines The Man of Law’s Tale and scholarly arguments about whether it is suited to its putative teller, and consider the tale’s depictions of crime and justice (temporal and divine), constancy, providence, misadventure, and religious strife.

Released on 7 June 2021:

Leaving behind the Knight’s noble depictions of courtly love, the panel descends through bawdy, sexual misadventures in the form of ‘quites’–narrative responses–offered by the drunken Miller and the vengeful Reeve, and the Cook’s incomplete tale.

Released on 31 May 2021:

In the second part of the Canterbury Tales series, the panel reads selections from The Knight’s Tale, with a focus on how the three shines–to Venus, to Mars, and to Diana–serve as an interpretive device, and on the connexion to Boethian philosophy.

Released on 24 May 2021:

In the first week of the Canterbury Tales series, the panel reviews the biography of Geoffrey Chaucer, introduces the Canterbury Tales in general, and then reads selections from the General Prologue, with emphasis on Chaucer’s development of character.

Released on 17 May 2021:

The panel discusses selections from the poetry of Rudyard Kipling, including his most famous poem, “If”, and three poems related to The Great War and, its mechanised social aftermath: “Gethsemane”, “The Benefactor”, and “The Secret of the Machines”.

Released on 10 Mary 2021:

The panel discusses Ben Jonson’s role as critic and author of the Elizabethan age, and reads four of his poems, including several of his Epigrams, before concluding with his rhapsodic ode written in memory of his friend, William Shakespeare.

Released on 26 April 2021:

The panel reads excerpts from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, including poems from the inscriptions, Song of Myself, Children of Adam, and Calamus, considering the formal nature of the ‘American Epic’, and Whitman’s use of individualism and universalism.

Released on 19 April 2021:

The panel examines a selection of sonnets and a song from Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, considering the formal and tonal connexions between Sidney’s poetry and the works of earlier and later poets, including Chaucer, Petrarch, and Shakespeare.

Released on 12 April 2021:

The panel discusses a selection of poems covering the entire span of Abraham Cowley’s oeuvre: beginning with his college years and the unfinished epic ‘Davideis’, through his popular collections, and concluding with his late ‘Ode to the Royal Society’.

Released on 5 April 2021:

The panel discusses a selection of John Milton’s shorter poems, the oft-paired ‘L’Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso’, and examines their use of Orpheus as a metaphor, and their different attitudes to finding communal delight and solitary pleasure in life.