For this week we explored the world of Elizabeth 1st, Edmund Spenser’s The Fairie Queene, and Christopher Marlowe’s Faustus together with Thomas More’s incendiary damnation of Richard III (from which Shakespeare borrowed furiously in order to keep in good with his reigning monarch!). What an amazing world this was: a time of hysterical misogyny where women were…
Category: Shakespeare Plus
Richard III: Bell Shakespeare- Sydney Opera House
What an amazing performance of Richard III with Kate Mulvany in the lead role. The extraordinary relevance of her presence as Richard was amplified by her physical condition, mirroring Richard’s own adolescent idiopathic scoliosis or curvature of the spine. This is the condition that Kate felt helped to shape Richard’s response to the world in which…
Shakespeare Plus 2017
Hello All, we now begin our Shakespeare Blogs for 2017. We have had a wonderful launch into a Shakespearean autumn with Bell Shakespeare’s Richard III awaiting us on Wednesday 15th March. As a preamble to that we have explored the context of the European Renaissance and 16th Century England. What a time that was with…
MidWinter Spring!
Little Gidding I Midwinter spring is its own season Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown, Suspended in time, between pole and tropic. When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire, The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches, In windless cold that is the heart’s heat, Reflecting in a watery mirror A…
Top 19th Century Lit ePortfolios ACU 2016
There were some truly outstanding ePortfolios in this group of ACU students celebrating their experience and insight into the work of Romantic poets and the fiction of Charles Dickens, George Eliot and Tolstoy among others. The focus questions underpinning these ePortfolios were Writers and artists in the 19th Century were preoccupied with trying to solve the…
Best Blogs from OZ LIT 2016
Hi All, I have a fabulous bag full of wonderful OZ LIT ePortfolios for you to enjoy. These are the very best of the bunch; all earned a High Distinction for their efforts. There is some wonderful material here reflecting on the literature and art of Australia from ancient times right up to the present. Students…
Shakespeare Performances 2016
What a wonderful collection of performances from the Shakespeare group today: scenes from Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, King Lear and The Tempest. What a treat! So well done, with little time for rehearsal and yet so much learned about what it needs to bring Shakespeare to life on the stage. I am sure that you all see…
David Malouf- Fly Away Peter
This is such a wonderful novel to teach because it deals with such simple matters so deeply and movingly. The scene at the end of the novel where Imogen Harcourt is grieving over Jim Saddler would have to be one of the most amazing moments in Australian literature: It was that intense focus of his…
Best ePortfolios from last semester
Please take a look here at the following sample if you want some inspiration: https://michaelgriffith1.com/2015/11/27/best-eportfolioblogs-spring-2015/
The Tempest Part 2
Shakespeare’s The Tempest is a play about many things; in one way it is as the large as The Globe itself! However, at its heart it is concerned with the power of art, of drama, of poetry, of music as transformative agents in a crazy, greedy world full of conflict and opposition. If Shakespeare’s message could…
The Tempest Part 1
Shakespeare’s The Tempest is his crowning masterpiece. This play contains so much about the nature and purpose of creation itself; it is a work that embodies so much of what he as an artist hoped to achieve and simultaneously crowns that achievement with a wonderfully humble stepping off the dramatic stage: Now my charms are all…
King Lear and Sonnet 146
King Lear is a play that exposes the ways in which human beings are deeply alienated from themselves when they are totally identified with the demands of their egos. King Lear himself is such a character. It is only through the intense suffering imposed on him by rejection, amplified by his exposure to the elements…
King Lear & Cordelia
How can we understand Cordelia’s confrontation with her father King Lear? In the Edwin Sherin directed version with James Earl Jones as Lear, staged in Central Park New York, King Lear’s violence seems to provoke a response in Cordelia which is a mirror of her father. Like father like daughter? Is there any grace in this Cordelia,…
Education of the inner self: Dickens, Mill, Arnold, Newman
The Nineteenth Century was as “distracted from distraction by distraction“as we all are in the early years of the Twenty First Century. The messages sent to us by the “poets” of the inner-self in Victorian England (Dickens, Arnold, Newman … and others) are as relevant to us now as they were then. Matthew Arnold had…
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
We had a remarkable conversation about this sonnet (no 30) today in which we discovered that the “sessions of sweet silent thought” were those rare meditative moments of complete freedom from automatic, associative thinking that give space to the soul to BREATHE. But what Shakespeare describes in this sonnet is what happens when we give…
Shakespeare/ Victorianism & Charles Dickens – Week 6
Thomas Carlyle the great Victorian historian, close friend of Charles Dickens wrote these wonderful words which have been carved in stone in the foyer to the Mitchell ( State Library) in Sydney. This is where many of us visited the Shakespeare Room this week. But for those of studying Charles Dickens and Victorianism, these words…
NSW Art Gallery Visits 2016
This week is the week all my literature units visit the Art Gallery of NSW. What a wonderful storehouse it is of aesthetic wonders and inspirational ideas. A visit to the gallery provides a total wrap-around, hands-on experience of what was going on in a particular literary period. For all prospective teachers I cannot recommend…
Romeo & Juliet- Bell Shakespeare
This would have to be one of the liveliest, most powerful productions of Romeo and Juliet! Congratulations to the director, Peter Evans and the whole cast who brought the inner significance of this play so vividly, so entertainingly alive. In his pre-performance interview Peter Evans had spoken about the vitality of Juliet as a character. And Kelly…
End of Week 3: Shakespeare’s Madness
Is Shakespeare really as pessimistic as he seems to be when describing the nature of “love”? When Lysander says (1.1.142) about true love -if and when it is eventually found- that “War, death, or sickness did lay seige to it/ Making it momentary as a sound”, I really did have some students clawing up…
Week Two Summer/Autumn: A Muse of Fire
At the start of our tutorials this week we looked long and hard at that amazing speech written as the Prologue or Chorus to Henry V. This speech is like the key that unlocks so much of Shakespeare’s purpose and magic and puts his audience (and us as readers) in the hot-seat: in order to follow him…
Great Start to Semester One
Hi All, I am not sure whether to call this autumn or summer semester! We are having the best summer for a long time and we are well into Autumn! Global warming??? At all events we have had a fabulous start to the semester in all literature units. The one blog topic for this week…
How to Create a New Category in WordPress
Hi All, those of you doing Nineteenth Century Literature or Shakespeare this semester who already have a WordPress site set up from last year have been asking me: “How do I set up a new category so that all my 19thC Lit OR Shakespeare Blogs appear under these new categories”. Easy Peasy!!! Please follow these…
Best WordPress ePortfolios for Autumn 2015: Shakespeare and the Nineteenth Century
These students have been blogging as they have been studying Nineteenth Century Literature and The Age of Shakespeare. Some of these students have been doing both courses. They each had to showcase their best blogs and also write a Summative Comment explaining what they have learned from the course and how the content still has…
Bush Walking, Literature: An Introduction, Nineteenth, Shakespeare Plus, Visionary Blake, x Blogging
Grounding the Sacred: Don’t Miss This Event- Musicians, Artists, Novelists, Poets Engaging With the Sacred
Please Click to Register for this Amazing Conference Learn more at Grounding the Sacred through Literature and the Arts Conference.
Budjwa Bay: Muoagamarra Nature Reserve Near Cowan, NSW- Early Sunday Morning Walk
The image at the top of this site is Budjwa Bay as it manifested itself on this cold, wet winter morning. But the stillness, the freshness was deafening, except for the multi-coloured calls of the Lyre Birds from across the water. Here is a place to sit and absorb the quiet round about and hear the quiet inside. What…
Winter is upon us! But the Bush is still a fabulous place to enter…
Made it to the top of the ridge above Galston, early on Saturday morning. The air was fresh and there were beautifully icy mists swirling up from the Gorge to the valley tops (click on all images to get stunning resolutions): On the ridge tops there was an amazing array of winter flowering plant life:…
Literature: An Introduction, Nineteenth, NSW Art Gallery, Performances, Shakespeare Plus, x Blogging
Final Night Clemente/ Catalyst Students at Mission Australia Surry Hills: Shakespeare
Arthur Enfield (Stained Glass) The Seven Ages of Man (Shakespeare As You Like It), State Library of NSW. What a fabulous outcome! All our doubts, uncertainties, wrestling with difficult words, produced an amazing and satisfying presentation of sections of As You Like It. This was the culmination of our course Introduction to Literature which ran for 12 weeks: 4…
An Event Not to be Missed: Grounding the Sacred in Literature and the Arts at ACU July 23-26th
In July this year (23-26) we are co-ordinating an international conference on the links between Literature, the Arts and the Sacred. We have an amazing line-up of participants including David Malouf, Genevieve Lacey, Kevin Hart, Vivien Johnson, Kathleen Deignan, David Jasper, Imam Afroz Ali, Maeve Heaney, Carmel Bird, Michael McGirr, Joelene Griffith and many more.…
Shakespeare the Magician, Transforming A World of Enmity into a Holy Place- The Tempest
In The Tempest Shakespeare takes on all the hostility in the world and uses the extraordinary magic of his art to transform hostility into love- then and now! This is in fact the signature of all his comedies and romances and maybe even the implied cathartic outcome of that series of desperate tragedies (Othello, King Lear,…
All the World’s a Stage – and are we really nothing but players?? Rehearsals! Clemente/Catalyst students
In 3 weeks time the Clemente/ Catalyst students have to present extracts from As You Like It to a public audience at the MAC (Mission Australia Centre) Surry Hills. We are going to begin with a dramatised reading of Jacques’s speech (perhaps the most famous speech in all of Shakespeare): “All the world’s a stage, And all…
Falstaff and Prince Hal
Falstaff is one of those amazing characters who, although from many points of view, is just a “bad” man, from other points of view he is the life of the party! Intelligent, witty, full of good humour, full of appreciation of the good things in life and scathing about those things that drive ambition: “honour”,…
Clemente/Catalyst Students Go the NSW Art Gallery: The Links between Literature and Art!
One of the most exciting things I do several times each year is conduct literature students to the NSW Art Gallery to explore the ways in which paintings and sculptures can hugely expand our understanding of the way literature communicates meaning. One of my students (thank you Joey!) right at the start of our tour…
Clemente/ Catalyst students visit NSW State Library and Shakespeare Room
What a great introduction to our imminent study of/ participation in a production of scenes from Shakespeare’s As You Like It! Thank you Julie for your wonderful tour of the resources in the Mitchell Library, the Dixon Library and the Shakespeare Room itself! We were taken through the Mitchell (fabulous space for letting the creative spirit soar!)…
Leo Tolstoy and the Search for Truth
Tolstoy was passionate about uncovering those aspects of a human being in society that prevented him or her making contact with something true or real. He saw people in the law courts, in families acting out a kind of public drama which put each person centre-stage, totally ignorant of the other. It was like a…
Shakespeare’s Falstaff and Henry IV
Today we had some fabulous tutorials exploring the kind of language Shakespeare uses in the opening scenes of Henry IV. Here is the king trying to bind together his empire with a proposal that all the civil warmongering British unite in one force and go on a crusade to rescue Jerusalem from the “infidels”. This is such…
Top Blogs- First Cull Autumn 2015
My students are performing miracles with their blogs. They are grasping and extending the content of the literature they are studying in the most creative ways. Poems and prose creations -giving expression to their own experience- are being grounded on traditional models from Shakespeare through to Charles Dickens & Matthew Arnold. Along with this they are…
Thomas Carlyle’s Wonderful Words Celebrating the Continuing Importance of the Printed Word
At the State Library Today, we also genuflected in front of these amazing words from that extraordinary 19th Century wordsmith, the historian Charles (to whom Dickens dedicated his Hard Times). To anyone who still reads and benefits from the written word, these words carved in Sydney sandstone inside the vestibule to the Mitchell Library will have a…
Art in the Age of Shakespeare: A Distant Mirror over 450 Years Ago!
Thank you all for your keen participation in today’s visit to the Renaissance section of the NSW Art Gallery. We all got a very good taste of the range of art work from the period and the connections of all this work to Shakespeare’s imagination. Most powerfully this painting by Jacques Blanchard Mars and the Vestal…
The Shakespeare Room: State Library of NSW- into the bosom of Shakespeareana.
We visited the Shakespeare Room in the State Library today. This room is a wonderful expression of how much Shakespeare has meant to the Australian colony since the time of Captain Cook. One of the first plays ever to be produced in Sydney was in fact Henry IV with a complete convict cast! When you get to…
Shakespeare’s 451st Birthday Party is on April 23rd: Get Ready for it!
Check out the big party at the Shakespeare Folger Library! And here is Anthony Burgess’s novel about Shakespeare’s love life.
Prose versus Poetry- what are the key differences- if any?
We tackled this question in our class this week. Here is a very simple way of showing the differences. We drew attention to these differences initially with special reference to Shakespeare. We have all just been to see As You Like It with John Bell in a leading role. We were trying to identify why and…
Henry Lawson’s “Sweeney” and Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” at Mission Australia
What a fantastic session we had this week with Henry Lawson and Robert Frost. Both these poets display such a deep insight into the human condition but do it in such dramatically different ways. …
As You Like It: Will Shakespeare…. what is it that we (are) like?
What a fantastic performance by the Bell Shakespeare Company at the Opera House Drama Theatre. Around 60 students from ACU and another 20 or so from the Clemente program witnessed this great event. Thank you all for attending. Shakespeare’s As You Like It is a play that appeals above all to our sense of order, our…
Shakespeare and the Quest for a Golden Age
Shakespeare’s contemporary Pietro da Cortona The Golden Age Arthur Golding’s translation of Ovid’sMetamorphosis (1565) has this wonderful description of the four ages of man on earth: the golden age, the silver age, the brazen age and the iron age. The golden age – as here described- is a wonderful period in which humans lived in harmony with…
Literature and Life at Mission Australia Surry Hills- Week 3
Dawn over Kuring-gai Chase- North of Sydney 5 new students last night! That was fabulous and we had some really great discussions on what poetic language can do through its use of sound patterning, its use of connotations (rather than denotations) and its use of imagery (visual, tactile, kinetic etc)… And we had a wonderful…
Clemente Mission Australia Week 2 Continued
The Clemente Program being run from Australian Catholic University in close partnership with range of Welfare Organizations such as Mission Australia, was started some years ago by an American, Earl Shorris. Shorris had a vision that poverty stricken Americans needed a way in which they could reclaim their dignity, their creative spirit, their intelligence. He wrote a…
Shakespeare The Anarchist!
At every moment of his writing Shakespeare tries to shake us out of our habitual ways of thinking and being. He is in anarchist in the sense that he wants us to look critically at the way we are controlled by our prejudices. In his sonnet “My Mistress’ Eyes Are Nothing Like the Sun” (Sonnet 130) he…
Shakespeare and the Renaissance: Week 1 2015
Elizabeth the First’s poem “On Monsieur’s Departure” shows well how literature of the Renaissance was so often deeply concerned with the inner workings of the human soul. The rich texture of the language, dramatising her conflicted nature in loving the French Duke of Anjou, draws the reader in to her effort to understand by describing…
Autumn Semester 2015
Hi All, I am looking forward very much to working with you in all of the following units: Nineteenth Century Literature (ENGL200); Shakespeare & The Renaissance (ENGL210); Introduction to Literature (Clemente- Mission Australia Students, ENGL104); Learning in the Community (HUMA247)and (ARTS232). This is the space where I will be posting my weekly reflections on our…
Michael Griffith: Home Page- Literature and Life Autumn 2022 
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