Oscar Wilde
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s, he is best remembered for his epigrams and plays, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, the circumstances of his criminal conviction for homosexuality and early death at age 46. Wilde's parents were successful Anglo-Irish intellectuals in Dublin, their son became fluent in German early in life. At university, Wilde read Greats, he became known for his involvement in the rising philosophy of aestheticism, led by two of his tutors, Walter Pater and John Ruskin. After university, Wilde moved to London into fashionable social circles; as a spokesman for aestheticism, he tried his hand at various literary activities: he published a book of poems, lectured in the United States and Canada on the new "English Renaissance in Art" and interior decoration, returned to London where he worked prolifically as a journalist.
Known for his biting wit, flamboyant dress and glittering conversational skill, Wilde became one of the best-known personalities of his day. At the turn of the 1890s, he refined his ideas about the supremacy of art in a series of dialogues and essays, incorporated themes of decadence and beauty into what would be his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray; the opportunity to construct aesthetic details and combine them with larger social themes, drew Wilde to write drama. He wrote Salome in French while in Paris but it was refused a licence for England due to an absolute prohibition on the portrayal of Biblical subjects on the English stage. Unperturbed, Wilde produced four society comedies in the early 1890s, which made him one of the most successful playwrights of late-Victorian London. At the height of his fame and success, while The Importance of Being Earnest was still being performed in London, Wilde had the Marquess of Queensberry prosecuted for criminal libel; the Marquess was the father of Lord Alfred Douglas.
The libel trial unearthed evidence that caused Wilde to drop his charges and led to his own arrest and trial for gross indecency with men. After two more trials he was convicted and sentenced to two years' hard labour, the maximum penalty, was jailed from 1895 to 1897. During his last year in prison, he wrote De Profundis, a long letter which discusses his spiritual journey through his trials, forming a dark counterpoint to his earlier philosophy of pleasure. On his release, he left for France, never to return to Ireland or Britain. There he wrote his last work, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, a long poem commemorating the harsh rhythms of prison life, he died destitute in Paris at the age of 46. Oscar Wilde was born at 21 Westland Row, the second of three children born to Sir William Wilde and Jane Wilde, two years behind William. Wilde's mother had distant Italian ancestry, under the pseudonym "Speranza", wrote poetry for the revolutionary Young Irelanders in 1848, she read the Young Irelanders' poetry to Oscar and Willie, inculcating a love of these poets in her sons.
Lady Wilde's interest in the neo-classical revival showed in the paintings and busts of ancient Greece and Rome in her home. William Wilde was Ireland's leading oto-ophthalmologic surgeon and was knighted in 1864 for his services as medical adviser and assistant commissioner to the censuses of Ireland, he wrote books about Irish archaeology and peasant folklore. A renowned philanthropist, his dispensary for the care of the city's poor at the rear of Trinity College, was the forerunner of the Dublin Eye and Ear Hospital, now located at Adelaide Road. On his father's side Wilde was descended from a Dutchman, Colonel de Wilde, who went to Ireland with King William of Orange's invading army in 1690. On his mother's side Wilde's ancestors included a bricklayer from County Durham who emigrated to Ireland sometime in the 1770s. Wilde was baptised as an infant in St. Mark's Church, the local Church of Ireland church; when the church was closed, the records were moved to Dawson Street. Davis Coakley mentions a second baptism by a Catholic priest, Father Prideaux Fox, who befriended Oscar's mother circa 1859.
According to Fox's own testimony in Donahoe's Magazine in 1905, Jane Wilde would visit his chapel in Glencree, County Wicklow, for Mass and would take her sons with her. She asked Father Fox to baptise her sons. Fox described it in this way: "I am not sure if she became a Catholic herself but it was not long before she asked me to instruct two of her children, one of them being the future erratic genius, Oscar Wilde. After a few weeks I baptized these two children, Lady Wilde herself being present on the occasion." In addition to his children with his wife, Sir William Wilde was the father of three children born out of wedlock before his marriage: Henry Wilson, born in 1838, Emily and Mary Wilde, born in 1847 and 1849 of different maternity to Henry. Sir William acknowledged paternity of his illegitimate children and provided for their education, but they were reared by his relatives rather than by his wife or with his legitimate children. In 1855, the family moved to No. 1 Merrion Square, where Wilde's sister, was born in 1857.
The Wildes' new home was larger and, with both his parents' sociality and success, it soon became a "unique medical and cultural milieu". G
Frank Kermode
Sir John Frank Kermode, FBA was a British literary critic best known for his work The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, published in 1967, for his extensive book-reviewing and editing. He was the Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College London and the King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at Cambridge University. Kermode was known for many works of criticism, as editor of the popular Fontana Modern Masters series of introductions to modern thinkers, he was a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. Kermode was born on the Isle of Man, was educated at Douglas High School for Boys and the University of Liverpool, he served in the Royal Navy during the Second World War, for six years in total, much of it in Iceland. He began his academic career as a lecturer at Durham University in 1947, he taught at the University of Reading the University of Bristol. He was named Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College London from 1967 to 1974.
Under Kermode, the UCL English Department chaired a series of graduate seminars which broke new ground by introducing for the first time contemporary French critical theory to Britain. Kermode was a contributor for several years to the literary and political magazine, Encounter and in 1965 became co-editor, he resigned within two years, once it became clear that the magazine was funded by the CIA. In 1974, Kermode took the position of King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at Cambridge University, he resigned the post in 1982, at least in part because of the acrimonious tenure debate surrounding Colin MacCabe. He moved to Columbia University, where he was Julian Clarence Levi Professor Emeritus in the Humanities. In 1975–76 he held the Norton Lectureship at Harvard University, he was knighted in 1991. A few months before Kermode's death the scholar James Shapiro described him as "the best living reader of Shakespeare anywhere, hands down". Kermode died in Cambridge on 17 August 2010. Kermode was married twice.
He was married to Maureen Eccles, from 1947 to 1970. The couple had a twin son and daughter, his second marriage was to the American scholar Anita Van Vactor. The couple co-edited The Oxford Book of Letters. Lecturer, University of Durham Lecturer, University of Reading John Edward Taylor Professor of English Literature, University of Manchester Winterstoke Professor of English, University of Bristol Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature, University College London Honorary Fellow, University College London King Edward VII Professor of English Literature, University of Cambridge Fellow, King's College, Cambridge Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University Julian Clarence Levi Professor in the Humanities, Columbia University Honorary Fellow, King's College, Cambridge Mr Frank Kermode Prof. Frank Kermode Prof. Frank Kermode FBA Prof. Sir Frank Kermode FBA English Pastoral Poetry from the Beginnings to Marvell, Life and Thought Library, Harrap, ISBN 0-393-00612-3, OCLC 230064261 The Arden Edition of the Works of William Shakespeare: The Tempest London: Methuen, OCLC 479707500 Seventeenth Century Songs, now first printed from a Bodleian manuscript, ed. with John P. Cutts.
Reading University School of Art, OCLC 185784945 John Donne, London: Longmans, Green & Co. ISBN 0-582-01086-1, OCLC 459757847 Romantic Image, Routledge & Kegan Paul, ISBN 0-00-632801-6, OCLC 459757853 The Living Milton: essays by various hands and edited by Frank Kermode, Routledge & Kegan Paul, OCLC 460313451 Wallace Stevens, Evergreen pilot books, EP4, New York: Grove Press, ISBN 0-14-118154-0, OCLC 302326 Puzzles and Epiphanies: essays and reviews 1958–1961, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, OCLC 6516698 Discussions of John Donne. Edited with an introduction by Frank Kermode, Boston: D. C. Heath & Co. OCLC 561198453 Spenser and the Allegorists, London: Oxford University Press, OCLC 6126122 William Shakespeare: the final plays, London: Longmans, Green & Co. OCLC 59684048 The Patience of Shakespeare, New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, OCLC 10454934 The Integrity of Yeats, with Donoghue, Jeffares, Henn, T. R. and Davie, Cork: Mercier Press, ISBN 0-88305-482-5, OCLC 1449245 Spenser: selections from the minor poems and The Faerie Queene, London: Oxford University Press, OCLC 671410 On Shakespeare's Learning, Manchester: Manchester University Press, OCLC 222028401 Four Centuries of Shakespearian Criticism Rouben Mamoulian Collection, Avon library, OS2, New York: Avon Books, ISBN 0-380-00058-X, OCLC 854327 The Humanities and the Understanding of Reality, with Beardsley, Monroe C.
Frye, Bingham, Barry. Stroup, ed. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, OCLC 429358239 The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, New York: Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-513612-8, OCLC 42072263 Marvell: selected poetry, New York: New American Library, ISBN 0-416-40230-5, OCLC 716175 Continuities, New York: Random House, ISBN 0-7100-6176-5, OCLC 166560 The Poems of John Donne, Cambridge: University Printing House, OCLC 601720173 Shakespeare: King Lear: a casebook, Casebook series, London: Macmillan, ISBN 978-0-333-06003-2 The Metaphysical poets, Fawcett Pub. Co, OCLC 613406485 On Poetry and Poets by T. S. Eliot editor Modern Essays, London: Collins, ISBN 0-00
Anne Barton
Anne Barton was a renowned American-English scholar and Shakespearean critic. Born in Scarsdale, New York, the only child of Oscar and Blanche Roesen, Barton attended Bryn Mawr College, studying Renaissance literature with A. C. Sprague. In 1953, her senior essay on Love's Labor's Lost was published in the Shakespeare Quarterly, she attended Girton College, completing her doctoral thesis in 1960 under M. C. Bradbrook. Barton's doctoral work was published in the Idea of the Play. Married in 1957 to William Righter, she returned to the U. S. and taught at Ithaca College. Divorced in 1960, Barton returned to the U. K. and became Lady Carlisle Research Fellow at Girton. In 1969, she married theatre director John Barton, the co-founder with Sir Peter Hall of the Royal Shakespeare Company. Barton held a series of major academic appointments: From 1972 to 1974, she was Hildred Carlile Professor in English at Bedford College, London; the first female Fellow at New College, she returned to Cambridge in 1984 as Grace 2 Professor of English, becoming a Fellow of Trinity College in 1986.
Anne Barton died on 11 November 2013, aged 80, in Cambridge, United Kingdom. She was survived by her husband of theatre director John Barton. Roesen, Bobbyann. “Love’s Labour’s Lost.” Shakespeare Quarterly 4: 411–26. Righter, Anne. Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play. Chatto and Windus, 1962. Barton, Anne. Introduction to The Tempest. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968. ———. “Shakespeare and the Limits of Language.” Shakespeare Survey 24, no. 1971: 19–30. ———. “Shakespeare: His Tragedies.” English Drama To 1710: 197–233. ———. “As You Like It and Twelfth Night: Shakespeare’s Sense of an Ending.” Shakespearean Comedy, 1972, 160–80. Barton, G. Blakemore Evans; the Riverside Shakespeare. Houghton Mifflin Boston, 1972. ———. “The King Disguised: Shakespeare’s Henry V and the Comical History.” The Triple Bond: Plays, Mainly Shakespearean, in Performance, 1975, 92–117. ———. “‘A Light to Lesson Ages’: Byron's Political Plays.” In Byron, 138–162. Springer, 1975. ———. Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play. Praeger Pub Text, 1977. ———.
“London Comedy and the Ethos of the City.” The London Journal 4, no. 2: 158–180. ———. “The New Inn and the Problem of Jonson’s Late Style.” English Literary Renaissance 9, no. 3: 395–418. ———. Introduction to Hamlet, Ed. Tjb Spencer, New Penguin Shakespeare. London: Penguin, 1980. ———. “Harking Back to Elizabeth: Ben Jonson and Caroline Nostalgia.” ELH 48, no. 4: 706–731. ———. “Julius Caesar and Coriolanus: Shakespeare’s Roman World of Words.” Shakespeare’s Craft: Eight Lectures, 1982, 24–47. ———. “Shakespeare and Jonson.” Shakespeare, Man of the Theater, 1983, 160. ———. Ben Jonson: Dramatist. Cambridge University Press, 1984. ———. “Falstaff and the Comic Community.” Shakespeare’s “Rough Magic”: Renaissance Essays in Honor of CL Barber, 1985, 131–148. ———. “Livy and Shakespeare’s Coriolanus.” Shakespeare Survey, no. 38: 115–129. ———. “‘Enter Mariners Wet’: Realism in Shakespeare's Last Plays.” Essays, Mainly Shakespearean, 1986, 182–203. ———. “Shakespeare’s Sense of an Ending in Twelfth Night.’.” Twelfth Night: Critical Essays, 1986, 303–10.
———. The Synthesizing Impulse of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. William Shakespeare’s a Midsummer Night’s Dream. Harold Bloom-Editor. Chelsea House, New York, 1987. ———. “The King Disguised: The Two Bodies of Henry V.” Modern Critical Interpretations: William Shakespeare’s Henry V, New York: Chelsea House, 1988. ———. “Don Juan Transformed.” In Byron: Augustan and Romantic, 199–220. Springer, 1990. ———. The Names of Comedy. University of Toronto Press, 1990. ———. Shakespeare in the Sun, 1993. ———. Byron and Shakespeare. 2004. Anne Barton portrait by James Lloyd, commissioned by New College, Oxford
Virginia Woolf
Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English writer, considered one of the most important modernist 20th-century authors and a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device. Woolf was born into an affluent household in South Kensington, the seventh child in a blended family of eight, her mother, Julia Prinsep Jackson, celebrated as a Pre-Raphaelite artist's model, had three children from her first marriage, while Woolf's father, Leslie Stephen, a notable man of letters, had one previous daughter. The Stephens produced another four children, including the modernist painter Vanessa Bell. While the boys in the family received college educations, the girls were home-schooled in English classics and Victorian literature. An important influence in Virginia Woolf's early life was the summer home the family used in St Ives, where she first saw the Godrevy Lighthouse, to become iconic in her novel To the Lighthouse. Woolf's childhood came to an abrupt end in 1895 with the death of her mother and her first mental breakdown, followed two years by the death of her stepsister and surrogate mother, Stella Duckworth.
From 1897 to 1901, she attended the Ladies' Department of King's College London, where she studied classics and history and came into contact with early reformers of women's higher education and the women's rights movement. Other important influences were her Cambridge-educated brothers and unfettered access to her father's vast library. Encouraged by her father, Woolf began writing professionally in 1900, her father's death in 1905 caused another mental breakdown for Woolf. Following his death, the Stephen family moved from Kensington to the more bohemian Bloomsbury, where they adopted a free-spirited lifestyle, it was in Bloomsbury where, in conjunction with the brothers' intellectual friends, the Stephens formed the artistic and literary Bloomsbury Group. Following her 1912 marriage to Leonard Woolf, the couple founded the Hogarth Press in 1917, which published much of her work; the couple rented a home in Sussex and moved there permanently in 1940. Throughout her life, Woolf was troubled by bouts of mental illness.
She was institutionalized attempted suicide at least twice. Her illness is considered to have been bipolar disorder, for which there was no effective intervention during her lifetime. At age 59, Woolf committed suicide in 1941 by putting rocks in her coat pockets and drowning herself in the River Ouse. During the interwar period, Woolf was an important part of London's artistic society. In 1915 she published her first novel, The Voyage Out, through her half-brother's publishing house, Gerald Duckworth and Company, her best-known works include the novels Mrs Dalloway, To the Orlando. She is known for her essays, including A Room of One's Own, in which she wrote the much-quoted dictum, "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction." Woolf became one of the central subjects of the 1970s movement of feminist criticism and her works have since garnered much attention and widespread commentary for "inspiring feminism." Her works have been translated into more than 50 languages.
A large body of literature is dedicated to her life and work, she has been the subject of plays and films. Woolf is commemorated today by statues, societies dedicated to her work and a building at the University of London. Virginia Woolf was born Adeline Virginia Stephen on 25 January 1882 at 22 Hyde Park Gate in South Kensington, London to Julia and Leslie Stephen, historian, essayist and mountaineer. Julia Jackson was born in 1846 in Calcutta, British India to Dr. John Jackson and Maria "Mia" Theodosia Pattle, from two Anglo-Indian families. John Jackson FRCS was the third son of George Jackson and Mary Howard of Bengal, a physician who spent 25 years with the Bengal Medical Service and East India Company and a professor at the fledgling Calcutta Medical College. While John Jackson was an invisible presence, the Pattle family were famous beauties, moved in the upper circles of Bengali society; the seven Pattle sisters married into important families. Julia Margaret Cameron was a celebrated photographer, while Virginia married Earl Somers, their daughter, Julia Jackson's cousin, was Lady Henry Somerset, the temperance leader.
Julia moved to England with her mother at the age of two and spent much of her early life with another of her mother's sister, Sarah Monckton Pattle. Sarah and her husband Henry Thoby Prinsep, conducted an artistic and literary salon at Little Holland House where she came into contact with a number of Pre-Raphaelite painters such as Edward Burne-Jones, for whom she modelled. Julia was the youngest of three sisters and Adeline Virginia Stephen was named after her mother's eldest sister Adeline Maria Jackson and her mother's aunt Virginia Pattle; because of the tragedy of her aunt Adeline's death the previous year, the family never used Virginia's first name. The Jacksons were a well educated and artistic proconsular middle-class family. In 1867, Julia Jackson married Herbert Duckworth, a barrister, but within three years was left a widow with three infant children, she was devastated and entered a prolonged period of mourning, abandoning her faith and turning to nursing and philanthropy. Julia and Herbert Duckworth had three children.
Classic book
A classic is a book accepted as being exemplary or noteworthy, for example through an imprimatur such as being listed in a list of great books, or through a reader's personal opinion. Although the term is associated with the Western canon, it can be applied to works of literature from all traditions, such as the Chinese classics or the Indian Vedas. What makes a book "classic" is a concern that has occurred to various authors ranging from Italo Calvino to Mark Twain and the related questions of "Why Read the Classics?" and "What Is a Classic?" have been essayed by authors from different genres and eras. The ability of a classic book to be reinterpreted, to be renewed in the interests of generations of readers succeeding its creation, is a theme, seen in the writings of literary critics including Michael Dirda, Ezra Pound, Sainte-Beuve; the terms "classic book" and "Western canon" are related concepts, but they are not synonymous. A "canon" refers to a list of books considered to be "essential" and is presented in a variety of ways.
It can be published as a collection, presented as a list with an academic’s imprimatur or be the official reading list of an institution of higher learning (such as "The Reading List" at St. John's College or Rutgers University. In the 1980s, Italo Calvino said in his essay "Why Read the Classics?" that "a classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say" and comes to the crux of personal choice in this matter when he says: "Your classic author is the one you cannot feel indifferent to, who helps you define yourself in relation to him in dispute with him." Consideration of what makes a literary work a classic is for Calvino a personal choice, constructing a universal definition of what constitutes a Classic Book seems to him to be an impossibility, since, as Calvino says "There is nothing for it but for all of us to invent our own ideal libraries of classics."What makes a work of literature a "classic book" is not just a consideration of extensively published authors. In 1920, Fannie M. Clark, a teacher at the Rozelle School in East Cleveland, predates Calvino's similar conclusions by 60 years when she essayed the question of what makes a book a "classic" in her article "Teaching Children to Choose" in The English Journal.
Over the course of her essay, Clark considers the question of what makes a piece of literature a classic and why the idea of "the classics" is important to society as a whole. Clark says that "teachers of English have been so long trained in the'classics' that these'classics' have become to them much like the Bible, for the safety of which the rise of modern science causes such unnecessary fears." She goes on to say that among the sources she consulted was a group of eighth-graders when she asked them the question: "What do you understand by the classics in literature?" Two of the answers Clark received were "Classics are books your fathers give you and you keep them to give to your children" and "Classics are those great pieces of literature considered worthy to be studied in English classes of high school or college". Calvino agrees with the Ohio educator when he states "Schools and universities ought to help us understand that no book that talks about a book says more than the book in question, but instead they do their level best to make us think the opposite."
Clark and Calvino come to a similar conclusion that when a literary work is analyzed for what makes it'classic', that in just the act of analysis or as Clark says "the anatomical dissection", the reader can end up destroying the unique pleasure that mere enjoyment a work of literature can hold. While blogging on the website guardian.co.uk in 2009, Chris Cox echoes Twain's "classic" sentiments of 1900 and Bennett's witticism about classic books when he opined on the Guardian. Co "Books Blog" that there are two kinds of "classic novels": The first are those we know we should have read, but have not; these are the books that make us burn with shame when they come up in conversation... The second kind, are those books that we've read five times, can quote from on any occasion, annoyingly push on to other people with the words: "You have to read this. It's a classic." In 1850, Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve stated his answer to the question "What is a Classic?": The idea of a classic implies something that has continuance and consistence, which produces unity and tradition and transmits itself, endures….
A true classic, as I should like to hear it defined, is an author who has enriched the human mind, increased its treasure, caused it to advance a step. In this same essay, Sainte-Beuve quoted Goethe: "Ancient works are classical not because they are old, but because they are powerful and healthy."The concept of'the classic' was a theme of T. S. Eliot's literary criticism as well. In The Sacred Wood he thought that one of the reasons "Dante is a classic, Blake only a poet of genius was "because of "the concentration resultin
Oxford University Press
Oxford University Press is the largest university press in the world, the second oldest after Cambridge University Press. It is a department of the University of Oxford and is governed by a group of 15 academics appointed by the vice-chancellor known as the delegates of the press, they are headed by the secretary to the delegates, who serves as OUP's chief executive and as its major representative on other university bodies. Oxford University has used a similar system to oversee OUP since the 17th century; the Press is located on opposite Somerville College, in the suburb Jericho. The Oxford University Press Museum is located on Oxford. Visits are led by a member of the archive staff. Displays include a 19th-century printing press, the OUP buildings, the printing and history of the Oxford Almanack, Alice in Wonderland and the Oxford English Dictionary; the university became involved in the print trade around 1480, grew into a major printer of Bibles, prayer books, scholarly works. OUP took on the project that became the Oxford English Dictionary in the late 19th century, expanded to meet the ever-rising costs of the work.
As a result, the last hundred years has seen Oxford publish children's books, school text books, journals, the World's Classics series, a range of English language teaching texts. Moves into international markets led to OUP opening its own offices outside the United Kingdom, beginning with New York City in 1896. With the advent of computer technology and harsh trading conditions, the Press's printing house at Oxford was closed in 1989, its former paper mill at Wolvercote was demolished in 2004. By contracting out its printing and binding operations, the modern OUP publishes some 6,000 new titles around the world each year; the first printer associated with Oxford University was Theoderic Rood. A business associate of William Caxton, Rood seems to have brought his own wooden printing press to Oxford from Cologne as a speculative venture, to have worked in the city between around 1480 and 1483; the first book printed in Oxford, in 1478, an edition of Rufinus's Expositio in symbolum apostolorum, was printed by another, printer.
Famously, this was mis-dated in Roman numerals as "1468", thus pre-dating Caxton. Rood's printing included John Ankywyll's Compendium totius grammaticae, which set new standards for teaching of Latin grammar. After Rood, printing connected with the university remained sporadic for over half a century. Records or surviving work are few, Oxford did not put its printing on a firm footing until the 1580s. In response to constraints on printing outside London imposed by the Crown and the Stationers' Company, Oxford petitioned Elizabeth I of England for the formal right to operate a press at the university; the chancellor, Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester, pleaded Oxford's case. Some royal assent was obtained, since the printer Joseph Barnes began work, a decree of Star Chamber noted the legal existence of a press at "the universitie of Oxforde" in 1586. Oxford's chancellor, Archbishop William Laud, consolidated the legal status of the university's printing in the 1630s. Laud envisaged a unified press of world repute.
Oxford would establish it on university property, govern its operations, employ its staff, determine its printed work, benefit from its proceeds. To that end, he petitioned Charles I for rights that would enable Oxford to compete with the Stationers' Company and the King's Printer, obtained a succession of royal grants to aid it; these were brought together in Oxford's "Great Charter" in 1636, which gave the university the right to print "all manner of books". Laud obtained the "privilege" from the Crown of printing the King James or Authorized Version of Scripture at Oxford; this "privilege" created substantial returns in the next 250 years, although it was held in abeyance. The Stationers' Company was alarmed by the threat to its trade and lost little time in establishing a "Covenant of Forbearance" with Oxford. Under this, the Stationers paid an annual rent for the university not to exercise its full printing rights – money Oxford used to purchase new printing equipment for smaller purposes.
Laud made progress with internal organization of the Press. Besides establishing the system of Delegates, he created the wide-ranging supervisory post of "Architypographus": an academic who would have responsibility for every function of the business, from print shop management to proofreading; the post was more an ideal than a workable reality, but it survived in the loosely structured Press until the 18th century. In practice, Oxford's Warehouse-Keeper dealt with sales and the hiring and firing of print shop staff. Laud's plans, hit terrible obstacles, both personal and political. Falling foul of political intrigue, he was executed in 1645, by which time the English Civil War had broken out. Oxford became a Royalist stronghold during the conflict, many printers in the city concentrated on producing political pamphlets or sermons; some outstanding mathematical and Orientalist works emerged at this time—notably, texts edited by Edward Pococke, the Regius Professor of Hebrew—but no university press on Laud's model was possible before the Restoration of the Monarchy in 1660.
It was established by the vice-chancellor, John Fell, Dean of Christ Church, Bishop of Oxford, Secretary to the Delegates. Fell regarded Laud as a martyr, was determined to honour his vision of the Press. Using the provisions of the Great Charter, Fell persuaded Oxford to refuse any further payments from the Stationers and drew
Giorgio Vasari
Giorgio Vasari was an Italian painter, architect and historian, most famous today for his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters and Architects, considered the ideological foundation of art-historical writing. Vasari was born on 30 July 1511 in Tuscany. Recommended at an early age by his cousin Luca Signorelli, he became a pupil of Guglielmo da Marsiglia, a skillful painter of stained glass. Sent to Florence at the age of sixteen by Cardinal Silvio Passerini, he joined the circle of Andrea del Sarto and his pupils Rosso Fiorentino and Jacopo Pontormo, where his humanist education was encouraged, he was befriended by Michelangelo. He died on 27 June 1574 in Florence, Grand Duchy of Tuscany, aged 62. In 1529, he visited Rome where he studied the works of Raphael and other artists of the Roman High Renaissance. Vasari's own Mannerist paintings were more admired in his lifetime than afterwards. In 1547 he completed the hall of the chancery in Palazzo della Cancelleria in Rome with frescoes that received the name Sala dei Cento Giorni.
He was employed by members of the Medici family in Florence and Rome, worked in Naples and other places. Many of his pictures still exist, the most important being the wall and ceiling paintings in the Sala di Cosimo I in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, where he and his assistants were at work from 1555, the frescoes begun by him inside the vast cupola of the Duomo were completed by Federico Zuccari and with the help of Giovanni Balducci, he helped to organize the decoration of the Studiolo, now reassembled in the Palazzo Vecchio. In Rome he painted frescos in the Sala Regia. Among his other pupils or followers are included Sebastiano Flori, Bartolomeo Carducci, Domenico Benci, Tommaso del Verrocchio, Federigo di Lamberto, Niccolo Betti, Vittor Casini, Mirabello Cavalori, Jacopo Coppi, Piero di Ridolfo, Stefano Veltroni of Monte San Savino, Orazio Porta of Monte San Savino, Alessandro Fortori of Arezzo, Bastiano Flori of Arezzo, Fra Salvatore Foschi of Arezzo, Andrea Aretino. Aside from his career as a painter, Vasari was successful as an architect.
His loggia of the Palazzo degli Uffizi by the Arno opens up the vista at the far end of its long narrow courtyard. It is a unique piece of urban planning that functions as a public piazza, which, if considered as a short street, is unique as a Renaissance street with a unified architectural treatment; the view of the Loggia from the Arno reveals that, with the Vasari Corridor, it is one of few structures that line the river which are open to the river itself and appear to embrace the riverside environment. In Florence, Vasari built the long passage, now called Vasari Corridor, which connects the Uffizi with the Palazzo Pitti on the other side of the river; the enclosed corridor passes alongside the River Arno on an arcade, crosses the Ponte Vecchio and winds around the exterior of several buildings. It was once the home of the Mercado de Vecchio, he renovated the medieval churches of Santa Maria Novella and Santa Croce. At both he removed the original rood screen and loft, remodelled the retro-choirs in the Mannerist taste of his time.
In Santa Croce, he was responsible for the painting of The Adoration of the Magi, commissioned by Pope Pius V in 1566 and completed in February 1567. It was restored, before being put on exhibition in 2011 in Rome and in Naples, it is planned to return it to the church of Santa Croce in Bosco Marengo. In 1562 Vasari built the octagonal dome on the Basilica of Our Lady of Humility in Pistoia, an important example of high Renaissance architecture. In Rome, Vasari worked with Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola and Bartolomeo Ammannati at Pope Julius III's Villa Giulia. Called "the first art historian", Vasari invented the genre of the encyclopedia of artistic biographies with his Le Vite de' più eccellenti pittori, scultori, ed architettori, dedicated to Grand Duke Cosimo I de' Medici, first published in 1550, he was the first to use the term "Renaissance" in print, though an awareness of the ongoing "rebirth" in the arts had been in the air since the time of Alberti, he was responsible for our use of the term Gothic Art, though he only used the word Goth which he associated with the "barbaric" German style.
The Lives included a novel treatise on the technical methods employed in the arts. The book was rewritten and enlarged in 1568, with the addition of woodcut portraits of artists; the work has a consistent and notorious bias in favour of Florentines, tends to attribute to them all the developments in Renaissance art – for example, the invention of engraving. Venetian art in particular, is systematically ignored in the first edition. Between the first and second editions, Vasari visited Venice and while the second edition gave more attention to Venetian art, it did so without achieving a neutral point of view. There are many inaccuracies within his Lives. For example, Vasari writes that Andrea del Castagno killed Domenico Veneziano, not true, given Andrea died several years before Domenico. In another example, Vasari's biography of Giovanni Antonio Bazzi, whom he calls "Il Soddoma," published only in the Lives' second edition after Bazzi's death, condemns the artist as being immoral and vain. Vasari dismisses Bazzi's work as being lazy and offensive, despite the artist's having been named a Cavaliere di Crist
