Byron and Latin Culture consists of twenty-three papers, most of which were given at the 37th International Byron Conference at Valladolid, Spain, in July 2011. An introduction by the editor describes in detail the huge influence which the major Latin poets had on Byron: his borrowings, imitations, parodies, and echoes have never been catalogued in such detail, and it becomes clear that many ideas central to Don Juan, in particular, derive from Ovid, Virgil, Petronius, Martial and the other great classical writers. There are substantial sections on the ways Byron was influenced by, and in...

Byron's dubious status as a sex object, and his even more dubious status as a political icon, serves to disguise the fact that he is one of the greatest of all English poets, with a European reputation second only to Shakespeare. The fact that writers such as Goethe and Pushkin held him in the highest regard ensures that the English continue to despise him, and ignore his verse as much as possible. This book ignores his sexuality, his politics, and his iconography, and concentrates on his poems. Written by leading authorities such as Bernard Beatty, Germaine Greer and Michael O'Neill, it...

Byron and Italy tackles a subject to which no book has been devoted exclusively since the early 1940s. Peter Cochran writes not just about Byron's relationships with Italian literature, not just about his relationships with Italian women, and not just about his relationship with Italian politics. He writes about Byron's relationship with Italy as a whole, seeing the poet's sojourn in Italy as a vain attempt to forge a new identity for himself. Drawing on a wide range of up-to-date research, including his own as editor of Teresa Guiccioli's Lord Byron's Life in Italy and the diary of John Cam...

Small-Screen Shakespeare is a guide to all the Shakespeare productions available for viewing on computer or TV. From Beerbohm Tree's silent scene from King John, to Helen Mirren as Prospera and Simon Russell Beale as Falstaff, Peter Cochran gives an expert opinion on the best and the worst, basing his judgements on a lifetime of viewing, teaching, acting and directing. The book covers films, television productions, plays on YouTube, and DVDs of videoed stage productions, as well as cinematic Shakespearean spin-offs such as Throne of Blood and Joe Macbeth. The book is composed of five...

Aspects of Byron's Don Juan is, in part, a proceedings volume from the 2012 conference held by the Newstead Byron Society at Nottingham Trent University. Speakers represented in the book include Malcolm Kelsall, Peter Cochran, Diego Saglia and Itsuyo Higashinaka. Topics range from the politics of "Don Juan," and its treatment of women, to its comic rhymes. One section is devoted to the poem's importance in the literatures of Spain and Russia, another to the vast catalogue of Byron's prose sources (from cannibalism to cookery books), and a final section to the important role played by Mary...

Robert Bloomfield's The Farmer's Boy was the most successful poem of the Romantic period, selling 100,000 copies between 1800 and 1830. However, what was marketed was not the poem which the working-class Bloomfield had written, but a highly polished, politely spelled and punctuated re-write, prepared by the local squire, who deliberately covered up the fact that Bloomfield had written originally for a Suffolk voice, with Suffolk vowel-sounds and Suffolk idioms.This edition prints Bloomfield's first manuscript, and then has a parallel text of the polished first edition, opposite Bloomfield's...

The play Manfred is one of Byron's most famous and influential works. It established him throughout Europe as a bold, blasphemous genius. It inspired music by Tchaikovsky and Schumann, and was admired by, and influenced, Richard Wagner, whose uncle made one of its eighteen German translations. Going back to the primary manuscripts, Peter Cochran has created a new text of Manfred, so that it can at last be read as it left Byron's pen, untouched by professional polishers, too anxious to impose a formal syntax on his fluent and spontaneous style. Cochran has - through a careful study of the...