Academic literature on the topic 'Return from Parnassus'

What sort of friends were Jonson and Shakespeare? Nicolas Rowe's account (1709) that Shakespeare prevailed on his acting company to perform Every Man In His Humor in 1598 when it might otherwise have been rejected leads Rowe to conclude that “After this they were professed friends, though I don't know whether the other [i.e., Jonson] ever made him equal return of gentleness and generosity.” The story is not otherwise substantiated. Many critics have seen the relationship as an uneasy one, pointing to the claim in The Return from Parnassus, Part II, that Jonson was “a pestilent fellow” to whom Shakespeare gave “a purge that made him bewray his credit.” The present essay argues to the contrary that the evidence for any personal or vindictive attacks by Jonson or Shakespeare is hypothetical at best. In their writings they vigorously defend their differing views of theatre but also learn from each other, refusing to capitulate on principles that matter to them but also implicitly acknowledging that honest intentions can be discerned on both sides. The theatre offers them both more than one way to write a successful play.

I must have been one of Barry’s first research students in Oxford when he took over supervision of my doctoral thesis in 1973. Central Gaul and its coinage in the late Iron Age were still frontier areas for research for a British student and I had come to them from Classics and Roman history, with a special interest in coinage but with no experience whatever of archaeology. I am eternally grateful to Barry for his kindly and enthusiastic guidance as I completed my thesis on time and for his encouragement to continue afterwards with research into Iron Age economy and society. He invited me to give my first public paper at the landmark Oppida conference at Rewley House in 1975 (Nash 1976) and we jointly supervised a number of research students while I was at the Ashmolean Museum as Assistant Keeper first of Roman, then of Greek coins in the Heberden Coin Room, which I left in 1986 to pursue another career as a Child Psychotherapist. I doubt I would have had the energy or self-discipline to return to part-time, freelance study of Iron Age Italy in its wider European setting a few years ago had Barry not greeted a draft of something I had written on French prehistory with, ‘Don’t stop now!’ and sponsored my application for an Honorary Research Associateship at the Institute of Archaeology at Oxford. With this chapter based on work in progress I would like to thank him for all his support over the years, and celebrate a long association. Re-reading some of Barry’s recent books with this paper in mind I found I kept wanting to engage him in conversation in the many places where, with an enviable narrative freedom that it is difficult to imagine in the academic archaeology of thirty years ago, he evokes the reality of people’s lives in the past, whether it be Pytheas’ journey to the frozen north (Cunliffe 2002) or the Celtic raiding mentality (Cunliffe 1997: 88–9) or wondering whether old fighters living in the Fayum oasis in the mid-third century BC told ‘their incredulous children stories of the fertile Danube plain or the pine-clad slopes of Mount Parnassos remembered from the time when they had camped in its shadow waiting to pillage Delphi’ (Cunliffe 1997: 182).