Michael Neill

Michael Neill , emeritus professor of English at the University of Auckland, is about to turn eighty.

Letter

Bloody Pommy

10 February 2022

Thomas Nagel quotes Philippa Foot on being asked how to detect a ‘lower-class accent’: ‘My dear, any British accent is lower class’ (LRB, 10 February). There is a striking consonance with the construction of ‘colour’ explored by Musab Younis in his piece in the same issue. To speak in something like BBC English or Received Pronunciation was to be accent-less, just as to have ‘white’...
Letter

Consider the Hare

2 July 2020

Katherine Rundell discusses the ancient reputation of hares as witches or fairy-folk (LRB, 2 July). The notion of hares as witches has a particularly tenacious history in Ireland. Medieval commentators such as Caxton recorded the belief that Irish ‘beldams’ could ‘transform themselves into the likenesses of hares, in order to milk their neighbours’ cattle and steal their milk’. As recently...

In the Shady Wood: Staging the Forest

Michael Neill, 22 March 2018

Anne Barton​ delivered the lectures on ‘The Shakespearean Forest’ that form the basis for this, her much anticipated last book, in Cambridge in 2003. The Clark Lectures were themselves the product of an extended reflection on the significance of Shakespeare’s imaginary woodlands, developing and expanding material from earlier lectures and essays. As Peter Holland’s...

Letter

The Liveliness of the Dead

16 August 2017

Marina Warner’s beautiful review of Thomas Laqueur’s Work of the Dead had me thinking about the insistent presence of the dead in my own childhood – and, I suppose, the childhoods of all those whom Doris Lessing called the Children of Violence (LRB, 17 August). It wasn’t just the absent presence of my mother’s father and brother, killed in the first and second wars (as they were then called,...

Out of the Ossuary: Shakespeare and Emotion

Michael Neill, 14 July 2016

‘Memory,’​ my mother remarked, distress masked by her usual self-mocking humour, ‘is a thing of the past.’ She was 85 and sliding into the dementia that would ultimately erase all remembrance. Increasingly haunted by the fear that she had, literally, nothing to say, nervous of gaps in conversation, she would make things up, their frequently bizarre character a...

Pieces about Michael Neill in the LRB

On the Way in which Tragedy ‘Openeth up the Greatest Wounds and Showeth forth the Ulcers that are Covered with Tissue’

Terence Hawkes, 11 December 1997

Hamlet calls death the ‘undiscovered country’, but perhaps the deftness of that description masks a fatal insouciance. True, it isn’t really possible for us to...

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