Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
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It just is, in its way, a brilliant book, because it’s both scholarly and readable, comprehensive and perceptive. He’s interested in the intellectual background of the period. It’s quite critical – that’s a good thing – and lively, and he goes through it chronologically. It’s also very useful and illuminating: when he comes to an author there’s a footnote with a potted biography. He really gets one interested in the writers who interest him or who he values, and makes you want to read them.
Your first book, C S Lewis’s Elizabethan Literature Excluding Drama.
People think of C S Lewis as a novelist really now, of course; he was an English don at Magdalen. I chose it really because it’s a work which I’ve found incredibly useful. It just is, in its way, a brilliant book, because it’s both scholarly and readable, comprehensive and perceptive. He’s interested in the intellectual background of the period. It covers all Elizabethan and early Jacobean literature, excluding drama of course, which is a big exclusion, but that would have needed another book. It’s quite critical – that’s a good thing – and lively, and he goes through it chronologically. It’s also very useful and illuminating: when he comes to an author there’s a footnote with a potted biography. He really gets one interested in the writers who interest him or who he values, and makes you want to read them – or not read them. I found that for instance, reading about Spenser, who I had found quite hard going.
What was it that spurred his passion for the age?
Really the intellectual moral background of the Elizabethan era, and the intricacy of it. I think he’s got a very strong moral sense, which comes across in his novels too. He’s quite interested in the moral backgrounds of writers of the period, and is good on Fox and the religious writers of the time, as well as the poets and writers of romances and so on.
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Mark Girouard is an architectural writer, a leading architectural historian, and biographer of James Stirling, as well as an authority on the country house. He was previously architectural editor of Country Life magazine, and was Slade Professor of Fine Art from 1975 to 1976. He was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London in 1987. His book Elizabethan Architecture was published in 2009. Elizabethan theatre, he says, wasn’t at all a provincial thing but was tied into the classical world and Europe. There were ideas of geometry and proportion in the theatres, and there was this idea that the theatre was a miniature of the world. ‘Elizabethan theatre was a conscious re-creation of Roman theatres,’ he says.
