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  Cyrano de Bergerac

  Edmund Rostand

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  Anthony Burgess' energetically witty translation of this well-loved nineteenth-century French classic about the swordsman-poet with the nose too large to be taken seriously.
  This translation was first acclaimed in the 1985 Royal Shakespeare Company production with Derek Jacobi as Cyrano. Six years later Burgess provided the sub-titles for the hit film version with Gerard Depardieu, and the sub-titles won as much praise as did the film itself!
  Edmond Rostand (1868-1918) wrote several plays which were mightily successful in their time, providing starring roles for the likes of Sarah Bernhardt and Coquelin. But only Cyrano de Bergerac still survives.
  Anthony Burgess was the author of over fifty books, among them the novel, The Clockwork Orange, as well as stage plays, screenplays and translations.

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  Shakespeare's Sonnets (version 2)

  William Shakespeare

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  Shakespeare's Sonnets, or simply The Sonnets, comprise a collection of 154 poems in sonnet form written by William Shakespeare that deal with such themes as love, beauty, politics, and mortality. The poems were probably written over a period of several years. (Summary from wikipedia)

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  The Poetry of Lewis Carroll -...

  Lewis Carroll

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  Lewis Carroll was born Charles Lutwidge Dodgson on the 27th January 1832 at Daresbury, Cheshire, the eldest boy and the third child.  Another eight followed.   
   
  When Dodgson was 11, his cleric father moved his family to Croft-on-Tees in the North Riding of Yorkshire.  Although his father was active and highly conservative his son was ambivalent with those values and with the Church as a whole. 
   
  In his early years Dodgson was educated at home and by age 7 he was reading the likes of ‘The Pilgrim's Progress’.  He also spoke with a stammer which he called his ‘hesitation’. 
   
  At 12 he was dispatched to Richmond Grammar School in North Yorkshire and then on to Rugby.  He sailed through the curriculum.  He was accepted at Christ Church, Oxford but two days after arriving he was summoned home: his mother had died of ‘inflammation of the brain’ at only 47. 
   
  Dodgson was exceptionally gifted and, when not distracted, achievement came easily to him.  He remained at Christ Church studying and teaching in various capacities until his death. 
   
  In March 1856, he published the romantic poem ‘Solitude’ as by ‘Lewis Carroll’.  
   
  That same year he took up the new art of photography.  He soon excelled and became a well-known gentleman-photographer, and even toyed with the idea of making a living out of it.  When he ceased photography in 1880, he had his own studio and had created around 3,000 images. 
   
  He enjoyed moderate success with his early poems and short stories but had an array of other interests in the pre-Raphaelite circle, Psychical Research and even ordained in the Church of England in 1861.  
   
  In July 1862 he told a young Alice Liddell the story that would become his first and greatest success.  Alice begged him to write it down, and eventually he did and later presented her with a handwritten and illustrated ‘Alice's Adventures Under Ground’.  The publisher Macmillan agreed to publish it as ‘Alice's Adventures in Wonderland’ by Lewis Carroll.  
   
  It was a huge and sensational life-changing success.  Royalties quickly accumulated as did fan mail.  
   
  In 1871, the darker themed sequel ‘Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There’ was published.  A half decade later came ‘The Hunting of the Snark’, a fantastical nonsense poem, as nine tradesmen and a beaver set off to find the snark.  It was another enormous success. 
   
  He also loved to invent such delights as a writing tablet ‘the nyctograph’ that allowed note-taking in the dark as well as many word games, such as the precursor to ‘Scrabble’, and alternative systems of parliamentary voting.  Within the discipline of mathematics, he worked in geometry, linear and matrix algebra, mathematical logic, recreational mathematics and wrote nearly a dozen books on the subject.   
   
  Lewis Carroll died of pneumonia following influenza on 14th January 1898 in Guildford, Surrey.  He was 65.  
   
  1 - The Poetry of Lewis Carroll - An Introduction 
  2 - The Walrus & the Carpenter by Lewis Carroll 
  3 - A Lobster Quadrille by Lewis Carroll 
  4 - Turtle Soup by Lewis Carroll 
  5 - How Doth the Little Crocodile by Lewis Carroll 
  6 - Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll 
  7 - A Valentine by Lewis Carroll 
  8 - The Mad Gardener's Song by Lewis Carroll 
  9 - The Knight's Song by Lewis Carroll 
  10 - The Deserted Parks by Lewis Carroll 
  11 - Humpty Dumpty's Recitation by Lewis Carroll 
  12 - A Boat Beneath a Sunny Sky (Life Is But a Dream) by Lewis Carroll 
  13 - You Are Old Father William (from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland) by Lewis Carroll 
  14 - Lays of Sorrow by Lewis Carroll 
  15 - A Sea Dirge by Lewis Carroll 
  16 - Melancholetta by Lewis Carroll 
  17 - Phantasmagoria.

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  John Keats - The Poetry Of

  John Keats

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  John Keats – The Poetry Of.  Keats.  The name is synonymous with great romantic poetry and great romantic poets.  A short life but a legacy of works that few if any can rival.  And of course his end was to be tragically romantic.  Keats was returning one night to his home in Hampstead when he coughed.  He coughed a single drop of blue blood upon his hand and said ‘I know the colour of that blood, it is arterial blood, it is my death warrant, I must die. And so it was that tuberculosis took its slow devastating hold.  He moved to Rome hoping the warmer climate would help but died at age 25 in 1821.  These poems are read for you by Richard Mitchley and Ghizela Rowe.

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  The Last of the Haussmans

  Stephen Beresford

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  A funny, touching and at times savage portrait of a family full of longing that's losing its grip - The Last of the Haussmans is a play examining the fate of the revolutionary generation. It premiered at the National Theatre in 2012, starring Julie Walters and Rory Kinnear.
  Anarchic, feisty but growing old, high-society drop-out Judy Haussman remains in spirit with the ashrams of the 1960s, while holding court in her dilapidated art deco house on the Devon coast.
  After an operation, she's joined by her wayward offspring, her sharp-eyed granddaughter, a local doctor and a troubled teenager who makes use of the family's crumbling swimming pool. Over a few sweltering months they alternately cling to and flee a chaotic world of all-day drinking, infatuations, long-held resentments, free love and failure.
  'A knockout - entertaining, sad and outrageous. [Stephen Beresford] is going to be a major name' Observer
  'Beresford's drama is frequently a hoot... you can't not enjoy' Metro
  'Beresford's debut is thoughtful and fresh, delighting in the savagery of a dysfunctional family... deliciously comical... drips with smart lines' Evening Standard

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  The Poetry of Thomas Chatterton...

  Thomas Chatterton

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  Thomas Chatterton was born in Bristol on 20th November 1752 some 15 weeks after the death of his father. For a time he was admitted to Edward Colston's Bristol charity school, on a limited curriculum of reading, writing, arithmetic and the catechism. 
    
  Although fascinated by the church of St Mary Redcliffe where his uncle was sexton, he was liable to fits of abstraction, sitting for hours in a trance or crying for no reason. When Chatterton was 8 he was so eager for books that he would read and write all day long and by 11 he had become a contributor to Felix Farley's Bristol Journal. He lived in thought with his 15th-century heroes and heroines. 
    
  The first of his literary mysteries, the dialogue of "Elinoure and Juga," was written before he was 12, and he showed it to the usher at the boarding school Colston's Hospital where he was a pupil, pretending it was the work of a 15th-century poet. Chatterton remained a boarder at Colston's Hospital for more than six years. His little pocket-money was spent borrowing books from a circulating library and always attempting to ingratiate himself with book collectors. 
    
  His holidays were mostly spent at his mother's house, and much of that in the attic study living for the most part in an ideal world of his own, centered on his mid-15th century imaginary world. 
    
  Chatterton soon conceived the romance of Thomas Rowley, an imaginary monk of the 15th century, and adopted for himself the pseudonym Thomas Rowley for poetry and history. He imagined he would become a famous poet who by his talents would be able to rescue his mother from poverty. 
    
  Chatterton needed a patron. Many were not interested. Horace Walpole was but discovering that the poems were most probably fake and Chatterton himself only 16 scornfully sent him away. 
    
    
    
  Badly hurt by Walpole's snub, Chatterton wrote very little for a summer. Then he turned his attention to periodical literature and politics, and the London periodicals. He was frequently published but received little reward for his startling efforts. 
    
  Chatterton wrote at Easter 1770, ‘‘Last Will and Testament,’’ a satirical mix in jest and seriousness. The will was possibly prepared so that John Lambert, the attorney to whom he was apprenticed, cancelled his indentures. His friends and acquaintances, having donated money, Chatterton proceeded to London. 
    
  He continued to write and publish in various styles and was paid little for his efforts. He wrote hopefully to his mother and sister, and spent his first earnings in buying gifts for them. 
    
  In June 1770, after nine weeks in London, he moved from a shared room in Shoreditch to an attic in Brook Street, Holborn. He now enjoyed uninterrupted solitude and now could write all night. The romance of his earlier years revived, and he transcribed from an imaginary parchment of the old priest Rowley his "Excelente Balade of Charitie." This poem, disguised in archaic language, he sent to the editor of the Town and Country Magazine, where it was rejected. 
    
  A neighbouring apothecary, repeatedly invited him to come for dinner or supper; but he refused. His landlady also, suspecting his necessity, pressed him to share her dinner, but in vain. "She knew," as she afterwards said, "that he had not eaten anything for two or three days." But he assured her that he was not hungry. 
    
  In August 1770, while walking in St Pancras Churchyard, Chatterton was much absorbed in thought, and did not notice a newly dug open grave in his path, and subsequently tumbled into it. His walking companion helped Chatterton out of the grave, and told him that he was happy in assisting at the resurrection of a genius. Chatterton replied, "My dear friend, I have been at war with the grave for some time now." 
   
  On 24th August 1770, Thomas Ch

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