Wit S Treasury

All Of Us Have Had The Experience Of Trying Desperately To Reach Back Into The Recesses Of Our Memory For Some Story Or Anecdote To Illustrate A Given Point And Too Often That Memory Has Failed Us. It Contains Hundreds Of Anecdotes, Jokes And Stories That Can Be Used Over And Over Again To Help You Scintillate Your Daily Conversation. They Comprise Some Of The Best Of Thousands Of Items Collected By The Author During The Course Of Fifty Years Of Reading, Clipping And Filing.

Quotations arranged alphabetically by subject matter.

As England entered the Renaissance and as humanism, with its focus on classical literature and philosophy, informed the educational system, English intellectuals engaged in a concerted effort to remake the culture, language, manners—indeed, the whole national style—through adapting the classics. But how could English literature, art, and culture, become "classical," not only in imitating the ancients, but in the sense subsequently applied to music: "classical" as opposed to popular, as formal, serious, and therefore as good? For several decades in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Stephen Orgel writes, the return to the classics held out the promise of refinement and civility. Poetry was to be modeled on Greek and Roman examples rather than on the great English medieval works, which though admirable, lacked "correctness." More than poetry was at stake, however, and the transition would not be easy. Classical rules seemed the wave of the future, rescuing England from what was seen as the crudeness and the sheer popularity of its native traditions, but advocacy was tempered with a good deal of ambivalence: classical manners and morals were often at variance with Christian principles, and the classicism of the age would need to be deeply revisionist. "Christian humanism" was never untroubled, Orgel writes, always an unstable or even paradoxical amalgam. In Wit's Treasury, one of our foremost interpreters of Renaissance literature and culture charts how this ambivalence yielded the rich creative tension out of which emerged an unprecedented flowering of drama, lyric, and the arts. Orgel has here written a book that will appeal to anyone interested in English Renaissance art and literature, and particularly in the cultural ferment that produced Shakespeare, Marlowe, Spenser, Jonson, and Milton.

Commonplace book typical of Elizabethan times; important for its contemporary view of Shakespeare as a poet & dramatist.

Presents an anthology of quotations and extracts from a selection of writers and thinkers on the subject of books and reading, covering various aspects of bookishness, including hoarding, buying, borrowing, arranging, stealing, choosing, losing, reviewing, and displaying.