Author Archives: Steve Pratley

The Faerie Land: Exploring Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion ()

The Christmas Friends of TOM lecture at The Oxfordshire Museum, Woodstock, Oxfordshire

Anne Louise Avery and Steve Pratley in conversation, discussing Michael Drayton, Poly-Olbion and 17th century landscape poetry and their groundbreaking work with marginalised children.

Lecture starts at 19:30,  but please arrive for 19:00 to allow time to be seated and a prompt start

The lecture will be held in the Coach House to the rear of the Oxfordshire Museum Gardens.

Friends go free and visitors are £2.

 

Faerie Land Family Session ()

Drop-in Jacobean crafts and stories for the under-fives every Tuesday morning at 10.30 am throughout the Faerie Land exhibition run.

Free and no booking required, but donations welcome.

Suitable for children up to 10 years old.

Dates: Tuesday 15th, Tuesday 22nd, Tuesday 29th September 2015

Faerie Land Family Session ()

Drop-in Jacobean crafts and stories for the under-fives every Tuesday morning at 10.30 am throughout the Faerie Land exhibition run.

Free and no booking required, but donations welcome.

Suitable for children up to 10 years old.

Dates: Tuesday 15th, Tuesday 22nd, Tuesday 29th September 2015

As in a Glasse, this Isle Survay: Nature and Landscape Writing in Britain ()

A weekend literary festival featuring major British writers and academics exploring the themes of The Faerie Land exhibition: the interplay between poetry, art, memory and the British landscape.

Confirmed speakers include: Paul Farley (poet; broadcaster; winner of Whitbread Poetry Prize; co-author of Edgelands); Jerry Brotton (A History of the World in Twelve Maps; BBC4’s Maps: Power, Plunder and Possession); Charlotte Scott (Shakespeare’s Nature; The New Oxford Shakespeare); Stephen Walter (groundbreaking artist-cartographer; The Island: London Mapped); Tim Dee (BBC radio producer; author of The Running Sky), Michael Symmons Roberts  (poet; winner of the Forward Prize, the Costa Book Award and the Whitbread Prize for Poetry).

 Dates: Saturday 19th September and Sunday 20th September

Tickets will cost £8/£6 for individual talks and can be booked through www.eventbrite.co.uk or at childrenspoly-olbion.exeter.ac.uk. There will also be a limited number of tickets available on the door. The full schedule will available online.

GOG/MAGOG ()

A gallery talk by acclaimed Arthurian author John Matthews

The Faerie Land Exhibition
Royal Geographical Society
1 Kensington Gore
London SW7 2AR

As part of our continuing celebration of the poet Michael Drayton (1563-1631) and his epic poem of British myth and landscape, Poly-Olbion, John Matthews, acclaimed author and expert in myth and Arthurian literature, will be give a talk on Gog and Magog, the mysterious giants who once protected these isles and who still lead the Lord Mayor’s Procession though London every year. Their history goes back into a distant mythic past, but they can be traced through the centuries as archetypes whose power can still move us today.
Drayton’s Poly-Olbion includes several passages about the giant, notably in Song I, where Gogmagog fights the Trojan general, Corineus. The exhibition also features several works inspired by their folklore, including Charles Newington’s sketches for new chalk figures of the giants at Plymouth Hoe.

Faerie Land Family Session ()

Drop-in Jacobean crafts and stories for the under-fives every Tuesday morning at 10.30 am throughout the Faerie Land exhibition run.

Free and no booking required, but donations welcome.

Suitable for children up to 10 years old.

Dates: Tuesday 15th, Tuesday 22nd, Tuesday 29th September 2015

 


 

With Musick of My Verse: The Music of Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion ()

Londy SmallerArs Eloquentiae, a versatile and very talented ensemble specialising in period performance will be performing a special concert at the exhibition, “The Faerie Land: Michael Drayton’s Vision of Britain”,  in the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) on September 11 at 1pm.

The concert will consist of selection of early music inspired by Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion (published in 1612 & 1622).

Ars Eloquentiae is fast establishing a reputation as a versatile and vibrant ensemble specialising in period performance. In 2014, they were invited by the William Hogarth Trust to spearhead celebrations for the artist’s 250th anniversary and also undertook a joint project with the University of Cambridge, researching and recording Parisian street songs from the Seventeenth Century. Formed in 2012, Ars Eloquentiae members are drawn from the highest ranks of London’s young professional musicians, who individually perform with many of the world’s most highly-renowned early-music ensembles.

The concert will be free, but donations are encouraged for the Exuberant Trust, a charity which supports young people in Oxfordshire who are developing their interest in the arts and for whom a one-off grant will make a significant difference to their career.

 

Poly-Olbion and the Writing of Britain. Academic Conference ()

Devon DetailTaking place during the opening week of the Faerie Land exhibition and hosted by the AHRC-funded ‘Poly-Olbion Project’, the Poly-Olbion and the Writing of Britain two-day conference at the Royal Geographical Society centres attention on Michael Drayton’s great poem of Jacobean national description, the prose annotations written by John Selden, and the unique county maps by William Hole.

Papers, covering all components of the text, will situate Poly-Olbion within contexts of early modern British discourses of space, place, nationhood, and regional identity.

List of Speakers:

Andrew McRae (Exeter), ‘The Poly-Olbion Project’

Sara Trevisan (Brunel), ‘National Ancestry and Cultural Geography in Poly-Olbion’

James Loxley (Edinburgh), ‘Jonson, Drayton and the Mythography of a Binational Britain’

Sukanya Dasgupta (Calcutta), ‘Imagining Britain: Reconstructing history and writing national identity in Englands Heroicall Epistles and Poly-Olbion’

Sandra Logan (Michigan State), ‘Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion: Maritime England and the Free Seas Debate’

Shannon Garner-Balandrin (Northeastern), ‘Curls to Curled Waves: the Poly-Olbion and Michael Drayton’s Female Rivers’

Bernhard Klein (Kent), ‘Poly-Olbion and “those Rough Gods of the Sea”’

Liz Oakley-Brown (Lancaster), ‘Of merry Robin Hood, and of his merrier men’: Anti-Curial Chorography and Michael Drayton’s ‘Robin Hood’s Story’

Todd Andrew Borlik (Huddersfield), ‘Poly-Olbion, Bio-Regionalism, and the Beating of the Bounds’

Steph Mastoris (National Waterfront Museum), ‘Choices in chorography: Inclusion and omission in Drayton’s account of Nottinghamshire’

Daniel Cattell, ‘Michael Drayton and Britain’s Religious Past’

Robert Smith, ‘Poly-Olbion and the Writing of Britain in John Trussell’s Touchstone of Tradition’

Esther M. J. van Raamsdonk, ‘British Consciousness, Poly-Olbion and the Travelogue’

Rab MacGibbon (National Portrait Gallery), ‘William Hole:  Drayton’s engraver in the context of Prince Henry’s court’

William Porter (Harvard), ‘“By his spatious Maps”: The Cartographic Poly-Olbion’

Sjoerd Levelt (Bilkent), ‘John Selden’s Medieval Chronicles’

Philip Schwyzer (Exeter), ‘Drayton and Selden in Dialogue’

Angus Vine (Stirling), ‘Drayton’s copious chorography’

Andrew Hadfield (Sussex), ‘The Problems of Reading The Landscape’

Location:

The Royal Geographical Society

1 Kensington Gore,
London,
SW7 2AR.

Further Details and Booking

Michael Drayton Memorial Service at Westminster Abbey ()

To celebrate the poet-laureate Michael Drayton’s (1563-1631) life and works and to launch the Children’s Poly-Olbion exhibition, the Children’s Poly-Olbion held a memorial service, with a wreath-laying, in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey.

This was the first service commemorating Drayton since his death in 1631.

Download the Order of Service here:

Westminster Abbey Order of Service