Offered to the Gods

Frank Kermode

  • BuyCulture and Sacrifice: Ritual Death in Literature and Opera by Derek Hughes
    Cambridge, 313 pp, £45.00, October 2007, ISBN 978 0 521 86733 7

This extraordinary book examines the practice and the cultural contexts of human sacrifice, more or less from its speculative prehistoric beginnings to Margaret Atwood’s recent novel The Blind Assassin. To succeed in such an enterprise an author must be fantastically well read, expert in the disposition of large tracts of material in various languages, some of it by great artists and some by no less useful journeymen. He must also take care to guard against the possibility of his book being mistaken for another sort of study which it superficially resembles but which is less cautious in dealing with speculative prehistoric beginnings.

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[*] Kayll’s The Trades Increase (1615) complained of the ‘labours and lives . . . sacrificed to that implacable East Indian Neptune’. Dudley Digges, MP, a shareholder in the company, defended its enterprises. He was the stepson of Shakespeare’s friend Thomas Russell, to whom Shakespeare left £5 in his will. Digges’s brother Leonard wrote the encomiastic poem that appears over his name in the First Folio.