The Man Born to be King

By -
The Man Born to be King, by Dorothy Sayers

I've had this for a few years, so I put it on my TBR pile for this year.  I love Sayers, but drama makes me nervous, and this is a collection of 12 short plays written as a cycle.  They were actually written to be performed on the radio (and were, on the BBC).  They make up a life of Christ, written in a modern vernacular so as to be more immediate and less like stained-glass pictures (that is, all fancy and remote).  Jesus and his followers were not really fancy or remote people, after all. 

Sayers was very careful with her project; she was a serious scholar and theologian, so while she's translating into a vernacular she is being extremely cautious about it, making sure to get the right feeling and not to let it turn into the utter disaster it could so easily be. So the introductions to each play describe the social station of each character and what the players should aim for, which is great information to have.

I wasn't sure what to expect, but I loved these plays so much.  They are so easy to get immersed in, and just really good.  The characters jump right off the page.  It's fantastic stuff.  I've found what look to be online streaming recordings of performances, so I'll be listening!

Comments

  1. CleoAugust 11, 2014 at 5:28 PM

    I can imagine that the enjoyment of these plays was a surprise. On one hand, she can be viewed as a writer of mysteries from her Peter Wimsey series, but she also translated The Divine Comedy, so perhaps her proficiency shouldn't be underestimated. Thanks for the introduction and review. I probably wouldn't have read these plays without it!

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousAugust 11, 2014 at 5:54 PM

    I'd love to find recordings of these so I could actually listen to them! I think I've got a copy of this on my bookshelves somewhere -- I need to hunt it down. I love Dorothy Sayers.

    ReplyDelete
  3. JeanAugust 11, 2014 at 7:53 PM

    Here's the link I found, but I make no claims as to reliability, legality, or lurking malware. I haven't listened to anything yet. http://grooveshark.com/#!/album/The+Man+Born+To+Be+King/6153293

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of...
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the s...
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he ...
Read more