PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
James Simpson is the Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English at Harvard University. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Stephen Greenblatt (Ph.D. Yale) is Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. Also General Editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, he is the author of eleven books, including The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (winner of the 2011 National Book Award and the 2012 Pulitzer Prize); Shakespeare's Freedom; Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare; Hamlet in Purgatory; Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World; Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture; and Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. He has edited seven collections of criticism, including Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto, and is a founding coeditor of the journal Representations. His honors include the MLA's James Russell Lowell Prize, for both Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England and The Swerve, the Sapegno Prize, the Distinguished Humanist Award from the Mellon Foundation, the Wilbur Cross Medal from the Yale University Graduate School, the William Shakespeare Award for Classical Theatre, the Erasmus Institute Prize, two Guggenheim Fellowships, and the Distinguished Teaching Award from the University of California, Berkeley. He was president of the Modern Language Association of America and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
[Reynard the Fox] is clearly a satire, one that exposes the greed, corruption, and lying that poison institutions and social relations, above all at court It helps, of course, that this is an animal fable, so what might otherwise seem like pages taken from King Lear or Othello come across as episodes from a Road Runner cartoon or an episode of The Itchy & Scratchy Show. Still more, the literary artistry of Reynard the Fox its pace, its deft twists of plot, its zany characters, and its savage humor persuades us that to survive in this world it is more important to pretend to be good than actually to be good. To this extent at least, Reynard is the secret twin of his great contemporary Niccolo Machiavelli. --Stephen Greenblatt from the foreword
