5 November 1966

A good bit of the program is honestly remarkable. The good points plentiful. Yesterday, for instance, we heard an M.P. full of elegance and practical political wisdom, and this coming Thursday we are meeting him in London for another talk and a guided tour of Parliament. Just a little while ago we had a brilliant lecture by Inga Stina Ewbank, a Swedish scholar from the University of Liverpool, who cast her prepared notes aside and fashioned a marvelous impromptu analysis of Tourneur's Revenger's Tragedy, just a week before all of us were to see it at Stratford. (The production is the first major one in about 300 years, and it is reportedly really fine. Ted Ross had run up from his London sabbatical digs to see it, and he and I and Rhoda and Patty literally bumped into each other in the lobby.)
     We've been to castles, universities, schools, village meetings, shrines, cathedrals, and landmarks of all sorts and have been visited by some of Britain's best scholars and lecturers. (One of them even came from Edinburgh to meet our classes.) We've heard, in addition, directors, actors, musicians, architects, political organizers, mayors, solicitors, museum keepers, and amateur and professional archaeologists. One of our lectures we heard in the 14th-century schoolroom where Shakespeare studied as a boy and four more in the Institute where a team of Shakespeareans is now preparing a new edition of the plays. The first of our "Schools and Schooling" lectures was presented by an Eton master in the High Room where several prime ministers had their early lessons. Another, on British prehistory, will soon be offered in the Ashmolean Museum by the Senior Keeper.
     As a result of some letters I wrote to the Banbury Historical Society and a local industrialist, two of our students, working respectively on 17th-century puritanism and marketing techniques, are drawing upon a unique ms. of sermons by a 1600 Banbury preacher named Whately and data made available by a local coffee-making subsidiary of General Foods. Still another student, having visited Stratford seven times and read Jan Kott and Martin Esslin, is analyzing the R.S.C.'s absurdist modifications of Shakespeare's plays.
     All of this is cause for delight, and on at least three days of every week here I am convinced that I am in a kind of academic Elysium.