Aubrey in Popular Culture
In 1967, English director Patrick Garland created a one-man show, "Brief Lives", based on Dick's edition of Aubrey's work. Starring Roy Dotrice, it became the most successful one-man production ever seen, with Dotrice giving over 1800 performances across forty years on both sides of the Atlantic. For many, the play became an essential means of understanding a "vanished time" and one version of it. Aubrey scholars, however, have sometimes seen the production as over-emphasising its subject's eccentricities and lack of organisation, to the detriment of a wider appreciation of his contributions to scholarship.
In 2008, Aubrey's Brief Lives was a five part drama serial on Radio 4. Writer Nick Warburton intertwined some of Aubrey's biographical sketches with the story of the turbulent friendship between Aubrey and Anthony Wood. Abigail le Fleming produced and directed.
Read more about this topic: John Aubrey
Famous quotes containing the words aubrey, popular and/or culture:
“In ancient timestwas no great loss
They hung the thief upon the cross:
But now, alas!I sayt with grief
They hang the cross upon the thief.”
—Anonymous. On a Nomination to the Legion of Honour, from Aubrey Stewarts English Epigrams and Epitaphs (1897)
“An aesthetic movement with a revolutionary dynamism and no popular appeal should proceed quite otherwise than by public scandal, publicity stunt, noisy expulsion and excommunication.”
—Cyril Connolly (19031974)
“Any historian of the literature of the modern age will take virtually for granted the adversary intention, the actually subversive intention, that characterizes modern writinghe will perceive its clear purpose of detaching the reader from the habits of thought and feeling that the larger culture imposes, of giving him a ground and a vantage point from which to judge and condemn, and perhaps revise, the culture that produces him.”
—Lionel Trilling (19051975)