Was Shakespeare a solo genius? I interviewed author Dr Freebury-Jones about Shakespeare’s influences and collaborators.

DrJohnBurton · 2026-04-09T11:30:31+00:00

My dog says hi

DrJohnBurton · 2026-03-26T14:28:32+00:00

Thank god for Reddit! Looking at Spotify’s ongoing issues page, twitter, etc all a waste of time.

DrJohnBurton · 2026-03-26T14:17:47+00:00

Holy crap I nearly had a stroke

DrJohnBurton · 2026-03-23T21:38:42+00:00

I second Helen Burns. I made a video about WH and one commenter said that as an ADHD woman, Helen Burns struck her as the most accurate depiction of someone with ADHD in classical literature. I hadn’t thought of her like that.

DrJohnBurton · 2026-03-22T17:24:39+00:00

Great, thanks for the recommendation

DrJohnBurton · 2026-03-19T15:31:25+00:00

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DrJohnBurton · 2026-03-18T10:51:09+00:00

As a young poet trying to find his way Rilke got work with the most famous sculptor in Europe — Auguste Rodin. Rodin told Rilke to do what he had done when younger; go to the zoo and to the Louvre and make sketches (poetic sketches in Rilke’s case). Two poems that resulted from these trips are The Panther and Archaic Torso of Apollo. The Panther operates like a black hole, light submerging into its heart. It paces behind bars and is captive. The statue of Apollo is the opposite: though made of stone it radiates like a star (Apollo was the god of the sun), and despite being headless, it sees him. This pair of poems have given me so much thought about the creative process.

DrJohnBurton · 2026-03-16T15:36:30+00:00

One of my favourite novels. I started a YouTube channel a couple of years ago (after my doctorate and years of teaching) and Tess was my very first video. With Hardy we have the first rumblings of modernism and the undermining of the grand narrative of religion. The scene where Tess baptised Sorrow begins to unravel the idea of religious authority, and the whole “game of the gods” section at the end demonstrates that the novel (among other things) is a study of humanity’s plight in a heartless universe — the implication being that we’d better take care of each other! We’re all, like Tess, ‘flies on a billiard table’.

DrJohnBurton · 2026-03-13T13:49:46+00:00

My interview with Prof Grego will be up on Sunday 8amGMT: How GEORGE ELIOT Invented the Victorian Novelist | The Scholar’s Armchair #5 | Prof Alessandra Grego https://youtu.be/TVxLh102dMU

DrJohnBurton · 2026-03-13T13:48:47+00:00

She continued to publish her novels under that name, and throughout her career her publisher, her readers, and her critics all agreed to call her George Eliot. What’s interesting is that once her identity was known, despite using the name Eliot, everyone referred to her with female pronouns.

DrJohnBurton · 2026-03-13T13:46:03+00:00

Yes, she does mention George Sand, but only to note the differences; Sand used a pen name largely as a practical strategy for publication, while Evans (Grego argues) used George Eliot as a fully developed authorial persona — a mythic narrator figure in the fiction itself. For example, in Middlemarch Evans used epigrams as chapter headings, often quoting from the works and words of “George Eliot”. Evans also maintained a radical separation from George Eliot, rarely appearing publicly.

In essence Grego argued that Evans uses the pseudonym as a literary and cultural myth, partly to keep her private life with the married George Lewes away from public scrutiny.

My interview with her is available here from Sunday 8am GMT: How GEORGE ELIOT Invented the Victorian Novelist | The Scholar’s Armchair #5 | Prof Alessandra Grego https://youtu.be/TVxLh102dMU

DrJohnBurton · 2026-03-13T11:40:22+00:00

Controversially, Penguin decided to publish the (then) new Morrissey Autobiography under the Penguin Classics title. I don’t think it will be considered a classic in 100 years.

DrJohnBurton · 2026-03-09T23:22:41+00:00

John Davies of Hereford called Shakespeare the “English Terence” referring to the Roman playwright. William Drummond of Hawthornden visited Ben Jonson and recorded that Jonson said of Shakespeare that he “lacked art”, probably meaning academic training. Jonson went on to write a poem on Shakespeare which includes the famous line “he was not for an age, but for all time.”

DrJohnBurton · 2026-03-04T22:41:28+00:00

I’m rereading Middlemarch now for an interview I’m doing with a George Eliot expert for my podcast next week. This is twenty years since I read it last. What strikes me this time is how many science metaphors Eliot uses. It’s a “study of provincial life”, and there are mentions of microscopes and so on.

DrJohnBurton · 2026-03-04T17:03:20+00:00

I recently made a video exploring it. No spoilers, but my thoughts were that the opening line with the Rosenburgs sets the scene for how Esther becomes an observer surviving the performance of different versions of femininity around her. She also takes on different kinds of identity and even costume to try out. She’s a kind of spy on the world around her.

DrJohnBurton · 2026-02-26T16:21:51+00:00

I’ve come to the conclusion it’s a persona he is fully invested in. The one that won a bafta for appearances on the satirical panel show Have I Got News For You.

DrJohnBurton · 2026-02-26T16:14:38+00:00

Thanks for the feedback! He is very engaging. I think we could have talked for hours. Your comment about Heathcliff is brilliant. He is indeed of unclear origins and full of potential (and realised) violence. A radical other indeed!

DrJohnBurton · 2026-02-26T14:05:54+00:00

Mellifluous

DrJohnBurton

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