Nicola Royan
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What is Robin Hood?
October 28, 2013
I’d never really thought of Robin Hood as jousting. A mean sword fighter, yes; good with the quarter staff, if not as good as Little John; and of course superlative with a long bow. Just not the lance. So it took me a few moments to re-orientate myself at the Robin Hood Pageant at Nottingham …
Comparing technologies of publication
July 25, 2013
About five and a half centuries ago, printing with moveable type became possible, a result of Johannes Gutenberg’s inventiveness, but also because the necessary materials, including the right kinds of metal to make type, became available. Over the subsequent fifty years or so, this technology spread and became commercially viable: more printed books circulated, especially …
The drama of good government
June 3, 2013
Next Friday (June 7), I will be attending an extraordinary performance next Friday: an uncut production of Sir David Lyndsay’s Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis at Linlithgow Peel. Ane Satyre is the first surviving play text in Older Scots: it is a personification play, most akin to Mankind , Everyman or even Magnificence. The …
An earlier Iron Lady?
April 10, 2013
Baroness Thatcher is not the only Margaret to have had a significant impact on the history of Scotland. There is Margaret of Denmark, wife of James III, who seems to have kept the peace between her husband and her eldest son, James IV; there is also her daughter-in-law, Margaret Tudor, who provided her great-grandson (through …
Rehabilitating Macbeth
March 21, 2013
Apparently inspired by the exhumation and identification of Richard III, there has been a call from a Member of the Scottish Parliament to re-examine and revise the Shakespearian view of Macbeth. This has provoked all kinds of comment, some of which you can see here http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-21421001, here http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-21483159 and here http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/15/rehabilitate-macbeth-scotland-shakespeare?INTCMP=SRCH. That the Shakespearian image …
Robin Hood and Arthur
August 11, 2012
Arthur and Robin are salient figures in our imagined medieval world; they are international; and they appear both to be symbolic of significant values; but somehow they are different. Arguments rage as to the ‘reality’ of both Robin and Arthur. With Robin, however, these arguments are more acute, because the legends associate him with a …
Older Scots
I’ve just returned from the launch of Older Scots: A Linguistic Reader, edited by Jeremy Smith, at the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh. This work has loomed large in my life over the last few years because it is published by the Scottish Text Society, of which I am now president. In all honesty, however, …