Culture in Kent - Arts

Arts

Kent has provided inspiration for several notable writers and artists. Canterbury's religious role gave rise to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, a key development in the English language. The father of novelist Charles Dickens worked at the Chatham Dockyard; in many of his books, the celebrated novelist featured the scenery of Chatham, Rochester, and the Cliffe marshes. The landscape painter J. M. W. Turner spent part of his childhood in the town of Margate in East Kent, and regularly returned to visit it throughout his life. The East Kent coast inspired many of his works, including some of his most famous seascapes. During the late 1930s, Nobel Prize-awarded novelist William Golding worked as a teacher at Maidstone Grammar School, where he met his future wife Ann Brookfield.

The county's largest theatre is The Marlowe Theatre, situated in the centre of Canterbury. It re-opened, after being completely rebuilt, in October 2011.

Read more about this topic:  Culture In Kent

Famous quotes containing the word arts:

    But here comes Generosity; giving—not to a decayed artist—but to the arts and sciences themselves.—See,—he builds ... whole schools and colleges for those who come after. Lord! how they will magnify his name!
    —One honest tear shed in private over the unfortunate, is worth them all.
    Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)

    Note too that a faithful study of the liberal arts humanizes character and permits it not to be cruel.
    Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso)

    If we will admit time into our thoughts at all, the mythologies, those vestiges of ancient poems, wrecks of poems, so to speak, the world’s inheritance,... these are the materials and hints for a history of the rise and progress of the race; how, from the condition of ants, it arrived at the condition of men, and arts were gradually invented. Let a thousand surmises shed some light on this story.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)