A Study of Shakespeare

by Rolf Mcewen (Compiler)

Overview

Excerpt from the opening pages:
"The greatest poet of our age has drawn a parallel of elaborate eloquence between Shakespeare and the sea; and the likeness holds good in many points of less significance than those which have been set down by the master-hand. For two hundred years at least have students of every kind put forth in every sort of boat on a longer or a shorter voyage of research across the waters of that unsounded sea. From the paltriest fishing-craft to such majestic galleys as were steered by Coleridge and by Goethe, each division of the fleet has done or has essayed its turn of work; some busied in dredging alongshore, some taking surveys of this or that gulf or headland, some putting forth through shine and shadow into the darkness of the great deep."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781668597569
Publisher:	Barnes & Noble Press
Publication date:	11/21/2021
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.41(d)

About the Author

Swinburne was born at 7 Chester Street, Grosvenor Place, London, on 5 April 1837. He was the eldest of six children born to Captain (later Admiral) Charles Henry Swinburne (1797–1877) and Lady Jane Henrietta, daughter of the 3rd Earl of Ashburnham, a wealthy Northumbrian family. He grew up at East Dene in Bonchurch on the Isle of Wight.[2] The Swinburnes also had a London home at Whitehall Gardens, Westminster.[3]

As a child, Swinburne was "nervous" and "frail," but "was also fired with nervous energy and fearlessness to the point of being reckless."[4]

Swinburne attended Eton College (1849–53), where he started writing poetry. At Eton, he won first prizes in French and Italian.[4] He attended Balliol College, Oxford (1856–60) with a brief hiatus when he was rusticated[5] from the university in 1859 for having publicly supported the attempted assassination of Napoleon III by Felice Orsini.[6] He returned in May 1860, though he never received a degree.

Swinburne spent summer holidays at Capheaton Hall in Northumberland, the house of his grandfather, Sir John Swinburne, 6th Baronet (1762–1860), who had a famous library and was president of the Literary and Philosophical Society in Newcastle upon Tyne. Swinburne considered Northumberland to be his native county, an emotion reflected in poems like the intensely patriotic "Northumberland", "Grace Darling" and others. He enjoyed riding his pony across the moors, he was a daring horseman, "through honeyed leagues of the northland border", as he called the Scottish border in his Recollections.[7]

Swinburne caricatured by Carlo Pellegrini In Vanity Fair in 1874
In the period 1857–60, Swinburne became a member of Lady Trevelyan's intellectual circle at Wallington Hall.