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Play Summary

The play begins in the flat of wealthy Algernon Moncrieff (Algy) in London's fashionable West End. Algernon's aunt (Lady Bracknell) and her daughter (Gwendolen Fairfax) are coming for a visit, but Mr. Jack Worthing (a friend of Algy's) arrives first. Algernon finds it curious that Jack has announced himself as "Ernest." When Jack explains that he plans to propose marriage to Gwendolen, Algy demands to know why Jack has a cigarette case with the inscription, "From little Cecily with her fondest love." Jack explains that his real name is Jack Worthing, squire, in the country, but he assumes the name "Ernest" when he ventures to the city for fun. Cecily is his ward. While devouring all the cucumber sandwiches, Algernon confesses that he, too, employs deception when it's convenient. He visits an imaginary invalid friend named Bunbury when he needs an excuse to leave the city.

Lady Bracknell and Gwendolen arrive. Algernon explains that he cannot attend Lady Bracknell's reception because he must visit his invalid friend, Bunbury, but he offers to arrange the music for her party. While Algernon distracts Lady Bracknell in another room, Jack proposes to Gwendolen. Unfortunately, she explains that she really wants to marry someone named Ernest because it sounds so solidly aristocratic. However, she accepts his proposal, and he makes a mental note to be rechristened Ernest. Lady Bracknell returns and refutes the engagement. She interrogates Jack and finds him lacking in social status. On her way out, Lady Bracknell tells Jack that he must find some acceptable parents. Gwendolen returns for Jack's address in the country. Algernon overhears and writes the address on his shirt cuff. He is curious about Cecily and decides to go "bunburying" in the country.

In the second act, the scene shifts to Jack Worthing's country estate where Miss Prism, Cecily Cardew's governess, is teaching Cecily in the garden. Miss Prism sings Jack's praises as a sensible and responsible man, unlike his brother Ernest, who is wicked and has a weak character. She teaches Cecily that good people end happily, and bad people end unhappily, according to the romantic novel Miss Prism wrote when she was young. The local vicar, Canon Chasuble, arrives and, sensing an opportunity for romance, takes Miss Prism for a walk in the garden. While they are gone, Algy shows up pretending to be Jack's wicked brother Ernest. He is overcome by Cecily's beauty. Determined to learn more about Cecily while Jack is absent, Algernon plans to stay for the weekend, then make a fast getaway before Jack arrives on Monday. However, Jack returns early in mourning clothes claiming that his brother Ernest has died in Paris. He is shocked to find Algy there posing as Ernest. He orders a dogcart - a small horse-drawn carriage - to send Algy back to London, but it is too late. Algernon is in love with Cecily and plans to stay there. When Jack goes out, Algernon proposes to Cecily, who gets out a diary and letters that she has already written, explaining that she had already imagined their engagement. She has always wanted to marry someone named Ernest, so Algy, like Jack, needs to arrange a rechristening.

Just when it seems that Jack and Algernon couldn't get into worse trouble, Gwendolen arrives, pursuing Jack, and discovers that his ward, Cecily, is unpleasantly beautiful. In conversation, they discover that they are both engaged to Ernest Worthing. A battle follows, cleverly carried out during the British tea ceremony. The situation is tense. Jack and Algernon arrive, and, in attempting to straighten out the Ernest problem, they alienate both women. The two men follow, explaining that they are going to be rechristened Ernest, and the women relent and agree to stay engaged.

Lady Bracknell shows up demanding an explanation for the couples' plans. When she discovers the extent of Cecily's fortune, she gives her consent to her engagement to Algernon; however, Jack's parentage is still a stumbling block to her blessings. Jack tells Lady Bracknell that he will not agree to Cecily's engagement until she is of age (35) unless he can marry Gwendolen. Dr. Chasuble arrives and announces that all is ready for the christenings. Jack explains that the christenings will no longer be necessary. Noting that Jack's present concerns are secular, the minister states that he will return to the church where Miss Prism is waiting to see him. Shocked at hearing the name "Prism," Lady Bracknell immediately calls for Prism and reveals her as the governess who lost Lady Bracknell's nephew 28 years earlier on a walk with the baby carriage. She demands to know where the baby is. Miss Prism explains that in a moment of distraction she placed the baby in her handbag and left him in Victoria Station, confusing him with her three-volume novel, which was placed in the baby carriage. After Jack asks for details, he quickly runs to his room and retrieves the handbag. Miss Prism identifies it, and Lady Bracknell reveals that Jack is Algernon's older brother, son of Ernest John Moncrieff, who died years ago in India. Jack now truly is Ernest, and Algernon/Cecily, Jack/Gwendolen, and Chasuble/Prism fall into each others' arms as Jack realizes the importance of being earnest.

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The play begins in the flat of wealthy Algernon Moncrieff (Algy) in London's fashionable West End. Algernon's aunt (Lady Bracknell) and her daughter (Gwendolen

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Comedy is a genre of dramatic performance having a light or humorous tone that depicts amusing incidents and in which the characters ultimately triumph over adversity. For ancient Greeks and Romans, a comedy was a stage-play with a happy ending. In the Middle Ages, the term expanded to include narrative poems with happy endings and a lighter tone. In this sense Dante used the term in the title of his poem, the Divine Comedy ( Italian: Divina Commedia).

The phenomena connected with laughter and that which provokes it have been carefully investigated by psychologists. The predominating characteristics are incongruity or contrast in the object, and shock or emotional seizure on the part of the subject. It has also been held that the feeling of superiority is an essential factor: thus Thomas Hobbes speaks of laughter as a "sudden glory." Modern investigators have paid much attention to the origin both of laughter and of smiling, as well as the development of the "play instinct" and its emotional expression.

Much comedy contains variations on the elements of surprise, incongruity, conflict, repetitiveness, and the effect of opposite expectations, but there are many recognized genres of comedy. Satire and political satire use ironic comedy used to portray persons or social institutions as ridiculous or corrupt, thus alienating their audience from the object of humor.[citation needed ]

Parody borrows the form of some popular genre, artwork, or text but uses certain ironic changes to critique that form from within (though not necessarily in a condemning way). Screwball comedy derives its humor largely from bizarre, surprising (and improbable) situations or characters. Black comedy is defined by dark humor that makes light of so-called dark or evil elements in human nature. Similarly scatological humor, sexual humor, and race humor create comedy by violating social conventions or taboos in comedic ways.

A comedy of manners typically takes as its subject a particular part of society (usually upper class society) and uses humor to parody or satirize the behavior and mannerisms of its members. Romantic comedy is a popular genre that depicts burgeoning romance in humorous terms, and focuses on the foibles of those who are falling in love.

The word "comedy" is derived from the Classical Greek κωμῳδία, which is a compound either of (revel) or κώμη (village) and ᾠδή (singing): it is possible that κῶμος itself is derived from κώμη, and originally meant a village revel. The adjective "comic" (Greek κωμικός), which strictly means that which relates to comedy is, in modern usage, generally confined to the sense of "laughter-provoking". The word came into modern usage through the Latin comoedia and Italian commedia and has, over time, passed through various shades of meaning.

Albert Edelfelt's drawing from the Finnish comedy play Heath Cobblers premiered in 1876.

In ancient Greece, comedy seems to have originated in songs or recitations apropos of fertility festivals or gatherings, or also in making fun at other people or stereotypes. In the , Aristotle states that comedy originated in phallic rituals and festivals of mirth. It is basically an imitation of "the ridiculous, which is a species of the ugly". However, Aristotle taught that comedy is a good thing. It brings forth happiness, which for Aristotle is the ideal state, the final goal in any activity. He does believe that we humans feel pleasure oftentimes by doing the wrong thing, but he does not necessarily believe that comedy and humor is the wrong thing. It is also not true for Aristotle that a comedy must involve sexual humor to qualify as a comedy. A comedy is about the fortunate arise of a sympathetic character. A happy ending is all that is required in his opinion.

In contrast, Plato taught that comedy is a destruction to the self. He believed it produces an emotion that overrides rational self-control and learning. In The Republic, Plato says that the guardians of the state should avoid laughter, "for ordinarily when one abandons himself to violent laughter, his condition provokes a violent reaction." Plato says comedy should be tightly controlled if one wants to achieve the ideal state.

Literary critic Northrop Frye described the comic genre as a drama that pits two societies against each other in an amusing agon or conflict. In The Anatomy of Criticism (1957) he depicted these two opposing sides as a "Society of Youth" and a "Society of the Old", but this dichotomy is seldom described as an entirely satisfactory explanation. A later view[further explanation needed ] characterizes the essential agon of comedy as a struggle between a powerless youth and the societal conventions that pose obstacles to its hopes; in this sense, the youth is understood to be constrained by its lack of social authority, and is left with little choice but to take recourse to ruses that engender dramatic consequences.

Bibliography

Aristotle, Poetics.

Buckham, Philip Wentworth, Theatre of the Greeks, 1827.

Marteinson, Peter (2006). On the Problem of the Comic: A Philosophical Study on the Origins of Laughter. Legas Press, Ottawa, 2006.

Pickard-Cambridge, Sir Arthur Wallace

Dithyramb, Tragedy, and Comedy , 1927.

The Theatre of Dionysus in Athens, 1946.

The Dramatic Festivals of Athens, 1953.

Raskin, Victor, The Semantic Mechanisms of Humor, 1985.

Riu, Xavier, Dionysism and Comedy, 1999. [1]

Sourvinou-Inwood, Christiane, Tragedy and Athenian Religion, Oxford University Press, 2003.

Wiles, David, The Masked Menander: Sign and Meaning in Greek and Roman Performance, 1991.

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Comedy is a genre of dramatic performance having a light or humorous tone that depicts amusing incidents and in which the characters ultimately triumph over adversity. For ancient Greeks and Romans, a comedy was a stage-play with a happy ending. In the Middle Ages, the term expanded to include narrative poems with happy endings and a lighter tone.

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Twelfth Night 2013 - Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, Globe on Screen

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Getting the plot in order

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Summary of William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night: Viola thinks her brother is dead. He thinks that she is dead. Everyone thinks that she is her brother. Everyone thinks that her brother is her. Shenanigans ensue.

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Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants

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Page not found - Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants

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In honour of its 10th Anniversary, Andrea Levy talked about her novel, SMALL ISLAND

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Four or five locals gossip their way up the hill from one of Heptonstall's two stone village shops, a tiny deli-cafe and a corner store that doubles as a post office.

They find me lost, take me into their custody and offer directions.

"Follow this path," says one, in a broad Yorkshire accent, "And you'll come to the church and its old graveyard. Drop by the New Cemetery first. You'll be wanting to see Sylvia. She's in there."

Sylvia is Sylvia Plath, the brilliant, anguished and ultimately tragic poet who took her own life in 1963, aged just 30.

If you come this way, it is best to come armed with a little reading first.

Most do, but restrict it to the books of the Bronte sisters, who lived and wrote in the parsonage, perfectly preserved still, of the village of Haworth, about 14 kilometres north-west of Heptonstall.

It is a lonely drive between Haworth and Heptonstall across the "tops" of bleak and beautiful moorland, wind tearing at mist, sheep dotted across hillsides and the wide landscape interrupted only by drystone fences.

Emily Bronte captured this country for generations of romantics in her novel Wuthering Heights.

But the West Yorkshire uplands also captured the imagination of the immensely gifted and fragile Sylvia Plath.

She was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and it seems baffling to find her grave half a world away in this obscure and ancient Yorkshire village.

Heptonstall perches on crags high up a steep and narrow road above the better-known market township of Hebden Bridge, its view the dark and wooded Upper Calder Valley. Beyond, those bare moorlands stretch.

Plath discovered wild beauty up here during the final years of her short life.

One of her poems, Two Views of Withens, concerns itself with an old farmhouse across the moors towards Haworth called Top Withens that is thought to be Emily Bronte's inspiration for Heathcliff's adoptive home in Wuthering Heights.

Above whorled, spindling gorse, Plath wrote of it in 1957, Sheepfoot-flattened grasses/Stone wall and ridgepole rise/Prow-like through blurs/Of fog in that hinterland few/Hikers get to.

In fact, so many hikers from distant parts have discovered Bronte country since then that some of the directions on hiking paths these days are posted not just in English, but Japanese.

Japanese women come in such great numbers to Bronte country, obsessed with the three literary sisters - Emily, Charlotte and Anne - that academics and social commentators have devoted scholarly works to the phenomenon. So pervasive is the annual Japanese pilgrimage to West Yorkshire that British prize-winning writer Mick Jackson devoted his 2017 novel, Yuki chan in Bronte Country, to the subject.

Wuthering Heights has been translated into Japanese more than 20 times and has been adapted in Japan for numerous stage productions, films and TV series. Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre also has a wide following in Japan.

A common theme to the speculating about all this is that the passion expressed within the Bronte sisters' writing - the longing for freedom alongside a repressed violence, yet nestled within the comfort of patriarchal society, not to mention all of it set in the barren beauty of Wuthering Heights country - finds some deep resonance within Japanese hearts.

It also found empathy within the brittle soul of Sylvia Plath.

Plath visited this area of Yorkshire soon after famously marrying the Yorkshire-born poet Ted Hughes in 1956.

Theirs was a turbulent relationship, and in 1962, Hughes - who would become Poet Laureate in 1984 and remained so until his death in 1998 - left Plath for another woman.

You need only creep into the New Cemetery of the 13th century stone village of Heptonstall to understand that Plath's devoted admirers still blame Hughes for his wife's lonely end, her head in her kitchen oven, the gas turned on.

Hughes saw to it that Plath's body was conveyed across the moors of West Yorkshire to Heptonstall, near where his parents lived, where he had played as a child, and where he gained inspiration for his brooding poem-sequence Remains of Elmet, published in 1979.

In a poem from that sequence, Hughes describes the West Yorkshire moors thus: Moors/Are a stage for the performance of heaven./Any audience is incidental.

Despite the literary greatness she won in death, Plath's grave is nothing but bare earth bordered by rocks and a headstone bearing the enigmatic quotation: "Even among fierce flames the golden lotus can be planted."

Here is yet another link between Yorkshire and the Far East. Chosen by Hughes, the quotation is from the allegorical Chinese folk novel, Monkey, written in the 16th century by Wu Ch'Eng.

But it is Plath's name etched into the headstone that is most intriguing.

Sylvia Plath Hughes, it reads, or is supposed to do so.

Pilgrims to the grave, however, keep blacking out the word Hughes, having never forgiven. The cemetery keepers appear to have given up, and on the day I visit, the word Hughes is no more than a smudge.

A few steps away is the "old" churchyard. Its history extends back to 1260, when the village's first church, dedicated to St Thomas A'Beckett, was built.

There are supposedly 100,000 bodies lying beneath the ground here, and perhaps there are. But the ancient, original church is a spooky ruin, and the churchyard is dominated by a newer church, this one dedicated to St Thomas the Apostle.

I wander around the village, encountering no one. It feels empty. Dark and brooding and ancient.

A sign on a wall declares that Heptonstall was once an important centre of the woollen cloth trade, and the town's market hall, the oldest town cloth hall in Yorkshire, was built by the Lords of the Manor circa 1545-1558. "Here came the yeoman clothiers to sell and the merchants to buy the cloth."

Hughes, in his Remains of Elmet, lamented what was lost from places like this.

"Throughout my lifetime, since 1930, I have watched the mills of the region and their attendant chapels die," he wrote in the preface to the 1979 edition of his work. "Within the last 15 years the end has come. They are now virtually dead ..."

And yet, he - like Emily Bronte - wrote of the enduring power of the landscape, declaring it held a "spectacular desolation", a "grim sort of beauty".

Plath, who endures here forever now, clearly recognised it, too, and understood in some elemental way that her final destiny lay there.

In her poem Wuthering Heights (1961), she wrote of the moorland: "I can feel it trying/To funnel my heat away/If I pay the roots of the heather/Too close attention, they will invite me/To whiten my bones among them."

And so, I reflect as I stand before her modest grave, it came to be.

I return across the empty road atop the moor to tiny, pretty Haworth where I have found a perfect hotel called The Fleece Inn.

Locals bring their dogs in to the lounge and drink pints, the room buzzing with timeworn, easy country friendship.

I fill myself with good sausage and mash, imagining the Bronte family up the hill in their parsonage, dreaming the dreams that still fill bookshelves across the world.

And I find myself haunted a bit by the knowledge of a grave of a lost poet away across the rolling, lonely high country, who once walked there and wrote "The sky leans on me, me, the one upright/ Among all horizontals."

No more.

TRIP NOTES

MORE

BritRail passes (purchase before you fly, see britrail.net) can save money and hassle if travelling around Britain by train for several days. Trains from London Kings Cross to York are frequent and take about two hours.Rental cars are available right next to the York Railway Station, see europcar.co.uk or enterprise.co.uk

STAY

The Fleece Inn, Haworth, Yorkshire has twin rooms from about $160, see fleeceinnhaworth.co.uk
Tony Wright travelled at his own expense.

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Heptonstall, UK: Sylvia Plath's final resting place

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Four or five locals gossip their way up the hill from one of Heptonstall's two stone village shops, a tiny deli-cafe and a corner store that doubles as a post office. They find me lost, take me into their custody and offer directions.

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Seamus Heaney is widely recognized as one of the major poets of the 20th century. A native of Northern Ireland, Heaney was raised in County Derry, and later lived for many years in Dublin. He was the author of over 20 volumes of poetry and criticism, and edited several widely used anthologies. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995 "for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past." Heaney taught at Harvard University (1985-2006) and served as the Oxford Professor of Poetry (1989-1994). He died in 2013.

Heaney has attracted a readership on several continents and has won prestigious literary awards and honors, including the Nobel Prize. As Blake Morrison noted in his work Seamus Heaney, the author is "that rare thing, a poet rated highly by critics and academics yet popular with 'the common reader.'" Part of Heaney's popularity stems from his subject matter-modern Northern Ireland, its farms and cities beset with civil strife, its natural culture and language overrun by English rule. The New York Review of Books essayist Richard Murphy described Heaney as "the poet who has shown the finest art in presenting a coherent vision of Ireland, past and present." Heaney's poetry is known for its aural beauty and finely-wrought textures. Often described as a regional poet, he is also a traditionalist who deliberately gestures back towards the "pre-modern" worlds of William Wordsworth and John Clare.

Heaney was born and raised in Castledawson, County Derry, Northern Ireland. The impact of his surroundings and the details of his upbringing on his work are immense. As a Catholic in Protestant Northern Ireland, Heaney once described himself in the New York Times Book Review as someone who "emerged from a hidden, a buried life and entered the realm of education." Eventually studying English at Queen's University, Heaney was especially moved by artists who created poetry out of their local and native backgrounds-authors such as Ted Hughes, Patrick Kavanagh, and Robert Frost. Recalling his time in Belfast, Heaney once noted: "I learned that my local County Derry [childhood] experience, which I had considered archaic and irrelevant to 'the modern world' was to be trusted. They taught me that trust and helped me to articulate it." Heaney's work has always been most concerned with the past, even his earliest poems of the 1960s. According to Morrison, a "general spirit of reverence toward the past helped Heaney resolve some of his awkwardness about being a writer: he could serve his own community by preserving in literature its customs and crafts, yet simultaneously gain access to a larger community of letters." Indeed, Heaney's earliest poetry collections- Death of a Naturalist (1966) and Door into the Dark (1969)-evoke "a hard, mainly rural life with rare exactness," according to critic and Parnassus contributor Michael Wood. Using descriptions of rural laborers and their tasks and contemplations of natural phenomena-filtered through childhood and adulthood-Heaney "makes you see, hear, smell, taste this life, which in his words is not provincial, but parochial; provincialism hints at the minor or the mediocre, but all parishes, rural or urban, are equal as communities of the human spirit," noted Newsweek correspondent Jack Kroll.

As a poet from Northern Ireland, Heaney used his work to reflect upon the "Troubles," the often-violent political struggles that plagued the country during Heaney's young adulthood. The poet sought to weave the ongoing Irish troubles into a broader historical frame embracing the general human situation in the books Wintering Out (1973) and North (1975). While some reviewers criticized Heaney for being an apologist and mythologizer, Morrison suggested that Heaney would never reduce political situations to false simple clarity, and never thought his role should be as a political spokesman. The author "has written poems directly about the Troubles as well as elegies for friends and acquaintances who have died in them; he has tried to discover a historical framework in which to interpret the current unrest; and he has taken on the mantle of public spokesman, someone looked to for comment and guidance," noted Morrison. "Yet he has also shown signs of deeply resenting this role, defending the right of poets to be private and apolitical, and questioning the extent to which poetry, however 'committed,' can influence the course of history." In the New Boston Review, Shaun O'Connell contended that even Heaney's most overtly political poems contain depths that subtly alter their meanings. "Those who see Seamus Heaney as a symbol of hope in a troubled land are not, of course, wrong to do so," O'Connell stated, "though they may be missing much of the undercutting complexities of his poetry, the backwash of ironies which make him as bleak as he is bright." As poet and critic Stephen Burt wrote, Heaney was "resistant to dogma yet drawn to the numinous." Helen Vendler described him as "a poet of the in-between."

Heaney's first foray into the world of translation began with the Irish lyric poem Buile Suibhne. The work concerns an ancient king who, cursed by the church, is transformed into a mad bird-man and forced to wander in the harsh and inhospitable countryside. Heaney's translation of the epic was published as Sweeney Astray: A Version from the Irish (1984). New York Times Book Review contributor Brendan Kennelly deemed the poem "a balanced statement about a tragically unbalanced mind. One feels that this balance, urbanely sustained, is the product of a long, imaginative bond between Mr. Heaney and Sweeney." This bond is extended into Heaney's 1984 volume Station Island, where a series of poems titled "Sweeney Redivivus" take up Sweeney's voice once more. The poems reflect one of the book's larger themes, the connections between personal choices, dramas and losses and larger, more universal forces such as history and language. In The Haw Lantern (1987)Heaney extends many of these preoccupations. W.S. DiPiero described Heaney's focus: "Whatever the occasion-childhood, farm life, politics and culture in Northern Ireland, other poets past and present-Heaney strikes time and again at the taproot of language, examining its genetic structures, trying to discover how it has served, in all its changes, as a culture bearer, a world to contain imaginations, at once a rhetorical weapon and nutriment of spirit. He writes of these matters with rare discrimination and resourcefulness, and a winning impatience with received wisdom."

With the publication of Selected Poems, 1966-1987 (1990) Heaney marked the beginning of a new direction in his career. Poetry contributor William Logan commented of this new direction, "The younger Heaney wrote like a man possessed by demons, even when those demons were very literary demons; the older Heaney seems to wonder, bemusedly, what sort of demon he has become himself." In Seeing Things (1991) Heaney demonstrates even more clearly this shift in perspective. Jefferson Hunter, reviewing the book for the Virginia Quarterly Review, maintained that collection takes a more spiritual, less concrete approach. "Words like 'spirit' and 'pure'... have never figured largely in Heaney's poetry," Hunter explained. However, in Seeing Things Heaney uses such words to "create a new distanced perspective and indeed a new mood" in which "'things beyond measure' or 'things in the offing' or 'the longed-for' can sometimes be sensed, if never directly seen." The Spirit Level (1996) continues to explore humanism, politics and nature.

Always respectfully received, Heaney's later work, including his second collected poems, Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996 (1998), has been lavishly praised. Reviewing Opened Ground for the New York Times Book Review, Edward Mendelson commented that the volume "eloquently confirms [Heaney's] status as the most skillful and profound poet writing in English today." With Electric Light (2001), Heaney broadened his range of allusion and reference to Homer and Virgil, while continuing to make significant use of memory, elegy and the pastoral tradition. According to John Taylor in Poetry, Heaney "notably attempts, as an aging man, to re-experience childhood and early-adulthood perceptions in all their sensate fullness." Paul Mariani in America found Electric Light "a Janus-faced book, elegiac" and "heartbreaking even." Mariani noted in particular Heaney's frequent elegies to other poets and artists, and called Heaney "one of the handful writing today who has mastered that form as well."

Heaney's next volume District and Circle (2006) won the T.S. Eliot Prize, the most prestigious poetry award in the UK. Commenting on the volume for the New York Times, critic Brad Leithauser found it remarkably consistent with the rest of Heaney's oeuvre. But while Heaney's career may demonstrate an "of-a-pieceness" not common in poetry, Leithauser found that Heaney's voice still "carries the authenticity and believability of the plainspoken-even though (herein his magic) his words are anything but plainspoken. His stanzas are dense echo chambers of contending nuances and ricocheting sounds. And his is the gift of saying something extraordinary while, line by line, conveying a sense that this is something an ordinary person might actually say."

Heaney's prose constitutes an important part of his work. Heaney often used prose to address concerns taken up obliquely in his poetry. In The Redress of Poetry (1995), according to James Longenbach in the Nation, "Heaney wants to think of poetry not only as something that intervenes in the world, redressing or correcting imbalances, but also as something that must be redressed-re-established, celebrated as itself." The book contains a selection of lectures the poet delivered at Oxford University as Professor of Poetry. Heaney's Finders Keepers: Selected Prose, 1971-2001 (2002) earned the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism, the largest annual prize for literary criticism in the English language. John Carey in the London Sunday Times proposed that Heaney's "is not just another book of literary criticism...It is a record of Seamus Heaney's thirty-year struggle with the demon of doubt. The questions that afflict him are basic. What is the good of poetry? How can it contribute to society? Is it worth the dedication it demands?" Heaney himself described his essays as "testimonies to the fact that poets themselves are finders and keepers, that their vocation is to look after art and life by being discoverers and custodians of the unlooked for."

As a translator, Heaney's most famous work is the translation of the epic Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf (2000). Considered groundbreaking because of the freedom he took in using modern language, the book is largely credited with revitalizing what had become something of a tired chestnut in the literary world. Malcolm Jones in Newsweek stated: "Heaney's own poetic vernacular-muscular language so rich with the tones and smell of earth that you almost expect to find a few crumbs of dirt clinging to his lines-is the perfect match for the Beowulf poet's Anglo-Saxon...As retooled by Heaney, Beowulf should easily be good for another millennium." Though he has also translated Sophocles, Heaney remains most adept with medieval works. He translated Robert Henryson's Middle Scots classic and follow-up to Chaucer, The Testament of Cresseid and Seven Fables in 2009.

In 2009, Seamus Heaney turned 70. A true event in the poetry world, Ireland marked the occasion with a 12-hour broadcast of archived Heaney recordings. It was also announced that two-thirds of the poetry collections sold in the UK the previous year had been Heaney titles. Such popularity was almost unheard of in the world of contemporary poetry, and yet Heaney's voice is unabashedly grounded in tradition. Heaney's belief in the power of art and poetry, regardless of technological change or economic collapse, offers hope in the face of an increasingly uncertain future. Asked about the value of poetry in times of crisis, Heaney answered it is precisely at such moments that people realize they need more to live than economics: "If poetry and the arts do anything," he said, "they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness."

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Seamus Heaney is widely recognized as one of the major poets of the 20th century. A native of Northern Ireland, Heaney was raised in County Derry, and later lived for many years in Dublin. He was the author of over 20 volumes of poetry and criticism, and edited several widely used anthologies.

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Sylvia Plath was one of the most dynamic and admired poets of the 20th century. By the time she took her life at the age of 30, Plath already had a following in the literary community. In the ensuing years her work attracted the attention of a multitude of readers, who saw in her singular verse an attempt to catalogue despair, violent emotion, and obsession with death. In the New York Times Book Review, Joyce Carol Oates described Plath as "one of the most celebrated and controversial of postwar poets writing in English." Intensely autobiographical, Plath's poems explore her own mental anguish, her troubled marriage to fellow poet Ted Hughes, her unresolved conflicts with her parents, and her own vision of herself. On the World Socialist web site, Margaret Rees observed, "Whether Plath wrote about nature, or about the social restrictions on individuals, she stripped away the polite veneer. She let her writing express elemental forces and primeval fears. In doing so, she laid bare the contradictions that tore apart appearance and hinted at some of the tensions hovering just beneath the surface of the American way of life in the post war period." Oates put it more simply when she wrote that Plath's best-known poems, "many of them written during the final, turbulent weeks of her life, read as if they've been chiseled, with a fine surgical instrument, out of arctic ice." Plath has inspired countless readers and influenced many poets since her death in 1963.

In the New York Times Book Review, former US poet laureate Robert Pinsky wrote, "Thrashing, hyperactive, perpetually accelerated, the poems of Sylvia Plath catch the feeling of a profligate, hurt imagination, throwing off images and phrases with the energy of a runaway horse or a machine with its throttle stuck wide open. All the violence in her work returns to that violence of imagination, a frenzied brilliance and conviction." Denis Donoghue made a similar observation, also in the New York Times Book Review: "Plath's early poems, many of them, offered themselves for sacrifice, transmuting agony, 'heart's waste,' into gestures and styles." Donoghue added that "she showed what self-absorption makes possible in art, and the price that must be paid for it, in the art as clearly as in the death." Dictionary of Literary Biography essayist Thomas McClanahan wrote, "At her most articulate, meditating on the nature of poetic inspiration, [Plath] is a controlled voice for cynicism, plainly delineating the boundaries of hope and reality. At her brutal best-and Plath is a brutal poet-she taps a source of power that transforms her poetic voice into a raving avenger of womanhood and innocence."

Born in 1932 in Boston, Plath was the daughter of a German immigrant college professor, Otto Plath, and one of his students, Aurelia Schober. The poet's early years were spent near the seashore, but her life changed abruptly when her father died in 1940. Some of her most vivid poems, including the well-known " Daddy," concern her troubled relationship with her authoritarian father and her feelings of betrayal when he died. Financial circumstances forced the Plath family to move to Wellesley, Massachusetts, where Aurelia Plath taught advanced secretarial studies at Boston University. Sylvia Plath was a gifted student who had won numerous awards and had published stories and poetry in national magazines while still in her teens. She attended Smith College on scholarship and continued to excel, winning a Mademoiselle fiction contest one year and garnering a prestigious guest editorship of the magazine the following summer.

It was during her undergraduate years that Plath began to suffer the symptoms of severe depression that would ultimately lead to her death. In one of her journal entries, dated June 20, 1958, she wrote: "It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative-whichever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it." This is an eloquent description of bipolar disorder, also known as manic depression, a very serious illness for which no genuinely effective medications were available during Plath's lifetime. In August of 1953, at the age of 20, Plath attempted suicide by swallowing sleeping pills. She survived the attempt and was hospitalized, receiving treatment with electro-shock therapy. Her experiences of breakdown and recovery were later turned into fiction for her only published novel, The Bell Jar.

Having made a recovery, Plath returned to Smith for her degree. She earned a Fulbright grant to study at Cambridge University in England, and it was there that she met poet Ted Hughes. The two were married in 1956. Plath published two major works during her lifetime, The Bell Jar and a poetry volume titled The Colossus. Both received warm reviews. However, the end of her marriage in 1962 left Plath with two young children to care for and, after an intense burst of creativity that produced the poems in Ariel, she committed suicide by inhaling gas from a kitchen oven.

Timothy Materer wrote in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, "The critical reactions to both The Bell Jar and Ariel were inevitably influenced by the manner of Plath's death at 30." Hardly known outside poetry circles during her lifetime, Plath became in death more than she might have imagined. Donoghue, for one, stated, "I can't recall feeling, in 1963, that Plath's death proved her life authentic or indeed that proof was required. ... But I recall that Ariel was received as if it were a bracelet of bright hair about the bone, a relic more than a book." Feminists portrayed Plath as a woman driven to madness by a domineering father, an unfaithful husband, and the demands that motherhood made on her genius. Some critics lauded her as a confessional poet whose work "spoke the hectic, uncontrolled things our conscience needed, or thought it needed," to quote Donoghue. Largely on the strength of Ariel, Plath became one of the best-known female American poets of the 20th century.

The writer A. Alvarez, writing in The Savage God, believed that with the poems in Ariel, compiled and published by Hughes, Plath made "poetry and death inseparable. The one could not exist without the other. And this is right. In a curious way, the poems read as though they were written posthumously." Robert Penn Warren called Ariel "a unique book, it scarcely seems a book at all, rather a keen, cold gust of reality as though somebody had knocked out a window pane on a brilliant night." George Steiner wrote, "It is fair to say that no group of poems since Dylan Thomas's Deaths and Entrances has had as vivid and disturbing an impact on English critics and readers as has Ariel. ... Reference to Sylvia Plath is constant where poetry and the conditions of its present existence are discussed." Plath's growing posthumous reputation inspired younger poets to write as she did. But, as Steiner maintained, her "desperate integrity" cannot be imitated. Or, as Peter Davison put it, "No artifice alone could have conjured up such effects." According to McClanahan, the poems in Ariel "are personal testaments to the loneliness and insecurity that plagued her, and the desolate images suggest her apparent fixation with self-annihilation. ... In Ariel, the everyday incidents of living are transformed into the horrifying psychological experiences of the poet."

In Plath's final poems, wrote Charles Newman in his The Art of Sylvia Plath, "death is preeminent but strangely unoppressive. Perhaps it is because there is no longer dialogue, no sense of 'Otherness'-she is speaking from a viewpoint which is total, complete. Love and Death, all rivals, are resolved as one within the irreversibility of experience. To reverse Blake, the Heart knows as much as the Eye sees." Alvarez believed that "the very source of [Plath's] creative energy was, it turned out, her self-destructiveness. But it was, precisely, a source of living energy, of her imaginative, creative power. So, though death itself may have been a side issue, it was also an unavoidable risk in writing her kind of poem. My own impression of the circumstances surrounding her eventual death is that she gambled, not much caring whether she won or lost; and she lost."

As a very young poet Plath experimented with the villanelle and other forms. She had been "stimulated" by such writers as D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Virginia Woolf, Henry James, Theodore Roethke, Emily Dickinson, and later by Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton. She has been linked with Lowell and Sexton as a member of the so-called "confessional" school of poetry. Ted Hughes noted that she shared with them a similar geographical homeland as well as "the central experience of a shattering of the self, and the labour of fitting it together again or finding a new one."

At times, Plath was able to overcome the "tension between the perceiver and the thing-in-itself by literally becoming the thing-in-itself," wrote Newman. "In many instances, it is nature who personifies her." Similarly, Plath used history "to explain herself," writing about the Nazi concentration camps as though she had been imprisoned there. She said, "I think that personal experience shouldn't be a kind of shut box and mirror-looking narcissistic experience. I believe it should be generally relevant, to such things as Hiroshima and Dachau, and so on." Newman explained that, "in absorbing, personalizing the socio-political catastrophes of the century, [Plath] reminds us that they are ultimately metaphors of the terrifying human mind." Alvarez noted that the "anonymity of pain, which makes all dignity impossible, was Sylvia Plath's subject." Her reactions to the smallest desecrations, even in plants, were "extremely violent," wrote Hughes. "Auschwitz and the rest were merely the open wounds." In sum, Newman believed, Plath "evolved in poetic voice from the precocious girl, to the disturbed modern woman, to the vengeful magician, to Ariel-God's Lioness."

While few critics dispute the power or the substance in Plath's poetry, some have come to feel that its legacy is one of cynicism, ego-absorption, and a prurient fascination with suicide. Donoghue suggested that "the moral claims enforced by these poems now seem exorbitant," adding, "The thrill we get from such poems is something we have no good cause to admire in ourselves." McClanahan felt that Plath's legacy "is one of pain, fear, and traumatic depression, born of the need to destroy the imagistic materialization of ' Daddy.'" Nevertheless, the critic concluded, "The horrifying tone of her poetry underscores a depth of feeling that can be attributed to few other poets, and her near-suicidal attempt to communicate a frightening existential vision overshadows the shaky technique of her final poems. Plath writes of the human dread of dying. Her primitive honesty and emotionalism are her strength." Critics and scholars have continued to write about Plath, and her relationship with Hughes; a reviewer for the National Post reported that in 2000, there were 104 books in print about Plath.

Newman considered The Bell Jar a "testing ground" for Plath's poems. It is, according to the critic, "one of the few American novels to treat adolescence from a mature point of view. ... It chronicles a nervous breakdown and consequent professional therapy in non-clinical language. And finally, it gives us one of the few sympathetic portraits of what happens to one who has genuinely feminist aspirations in our society, of a girl who refuses to be an event in anyone's life. ... [Plath] remains among the few woman writers in recent memory to link the grand theme of womanhood with the destiny of modern civilization." Plath told Alvarez that she published the book under a pseudonym partly because "she didn't consider it a serious work ... and partly because she thought too many people would be hurt by it."

The Bell Jar is narrated by 19-year-old Esther Greenwood. The three-part novel explores Esther's unsatisfactory experiences as a student editor in Manhattan, her subsequent return to her family home, where she suffers a breakdown and attempts suicide, and her recovery with the aid of an enlightened female doctor. One of the novel's themes, the search for a valid personal identity, is as old as fiction itself. The other, a rebellion against conventional female roles, was slightly ahead of its time. Nancy Duvall Hargrove observed in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, "As a novel of growing up, of initiation into adulthood, [The Bell Jar] is very solidly in the tradition of the Bildungsroman. Technically, The Bell Jar is skillfully written and contains many of the haunting images and symbols that dominate Plath's poetry." Materer commented that the book "is a finely plotted novel full of vivid characters and written in the astringent but engaging style one expects from a poet as frank and observant as Plath. The atmosphere of hospitals and sickness, of incidents of bleeding and electrocution, set against images of confinement and liberation, unify the novel's imagery." Hargrove maintained that the novel is "a striking work which has contributed to [Plath's] reputation as a significant figure in contemporary American literature. ... It is more than a feminist document, for it presents the enduring human concerns of the search for identity, the pain of disillusionment, and the refusal to accept defeat."

Letters Home, a collection of Plath's correspondence between 1950 and 1963, reveals that the source of her inner turmoil was perhaps more accurately linked to her relationship with her mother. The volume, published by Plath's mother in 1975, was intended, at least in part, to counter the angry tone of The Bell Jar as well as the unflattering portrait of Plath's mother contained in that narrative. According to Janet Malcolm in the New Yorker, "The publication of Letters Home had a different effect from the one Mrs. Plath had intended, however. Instead of showing that Sylvia wasn't 'like that,' the letters caused the reader to consider for the first time the possibility that her sick relationship with her mother was the reason she was like that." Though Hughes exercised final editorial approval, the publication of Letters Home also cast a new and unfavorable light on numerous others linked to Plath, including Hughes himself. Malcolm wrote, "Before the publication of Letters Home, the Plath legend was brief and contained, a taut, austere stage drama set in a few bleak, sparsely furnished rooms." Plath's intimate letters to her family contain unguarded personal commentary on her college years, writing, despair, friendships, marriage, and children.

After Plath's death, The It-Doesn't-Matter Suit, a book for children, was also discovered among her papers and published posthumously. The story features Max Nix, a resident of Winkelburg, who happily acquires a modest "woolly, whiskery brand-new mustard-yellow suit." Nicci Gerrard wrote in the Observer, "There's no disturbance in the world of Winkelburg: even Max's desire for a suit is as shallow and clear as the silver stream that runs like a ribbon through the valley." Despite the lasting impression of Plath's bleak art and early death, Gerrard concluded that "small pieces of happiness like this little book remind us of her life."

Plath's relationship with Hughes has long been the subject of commentary, not always flattering to Hughes. Feminist critics in particular tended to see in Plath's suicide a repudiation of the expectations placed upon women in the early 1960s. Further criticism attended Hughes's guardianship of Plath's papers, especially when Hughes admitted that he destroyed some of Plath's journals, including several written just prior to her suicide. Materer felt that Hughes's control over Plath's papers-a right he exercised only because their divorce had not become final-caused "difficulties" for both critics and biographers. Materer added, "The estate's strict control of copyright and its editing of such writings as Plath's journals and letters have caused the most serious problems for scholars."

Since Hughes's death from cancer in 1998, a new edition of Plath's journals has been published, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962.This exact transcription of the poet's journals, from her earliest days at Smith College to the days of her marriage, has been published verbatim, down to her misspellings. "Uncritical admirers of Plath will find much here that is fascinating," noted Oates. "Other readers may find much that is fascinating and repellent in equal measure." Oates concluded, "Like all unedited journals, Plath's may be best read piecemeal, and rapidly, as they were written. The reader is advised to seek out the stronger, more lyric and exhilarating passages, which exist in enough abundance through these many pages to assure that this presumed final posthumous publication of Sylvia Plath's is that rarity, a genuine literary event worthy of the poet's aggressive mythopoetic claim in ' Lady Lazarus '-Out of the ash/I rise with my red hair/And I eat men like air."

Hughes once summarized Plath's unique personality and talent: "Her poetry escapes ordinary analysis in the way clairvoyance and mediumship do: her psychic gifts, at almost any time, were strong enough to make her frequently wish to be rid of them. In her poetry, in other words, she had free and controlled access to depths formerly reserved to the primitive ecstatic priests, shamans and Holymen." The poet continued, "Surveyed as a whole ... I think the unity of her opus is clear. Once the unity shows itself, the logic and inevitability of the language, which controls and contains such conflagrations and collisions within itself, becomes more obviously what it is-direct, and even plain, speech. This language, this unique and radiant substance, is the product of an alchemy on the noblest scale. Her elements were extreme: a violent, almost demonic spirit in her, opposed a tenderness and capacity to suffer and love things infinitely, which was just as great and far more in evidence. Her stormy, luminous senses assaulted a downright practical intelligence that could probably have dealt with anything. ... She saw her world in the flame of the ultimate substance and the ultimate depth. And this is the distinction of her language, that every word is Baraka: the flame and the rose folded together. Poets have often spoken about this ideal possibility but where else, outside these poems, has it actually occurred? If we have the discrimination to answer this question, we can set her in her rightful company."

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Sylvia Plath was one of the most dynamic and admired poets of the 20th century. By the time she took her life at the age of 30, Plath already had a following in the literary community. In the ensuing years her work attracted the attention of a multitude of readers, who saw in her singular verse an...

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Revisiting the Holocaust Metaphors of Sylvia Plath - Center for Literary Publishing | Colorado State University

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By Colorado Review Editorial Assistant Leila Einhorn Like many female-identifying poets, I grew up with what can only be called a kind of worship for Sylvia Plath. Discovering Plath’s poetry among the overwhelmingly male voices of the American literary canon was like finding my way home. I was a tee…

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Where simile appears in the poem:

Lines 9-10: "frogspawn that grew like clotted water / In the shade of the banks"

Line 28: "their loose necks pulsed like sails"

Lines 29-30: "Some sat / Poised like mud grenades"

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Where simile appears in the poem: Lines 9-10: "frogspawn that grew like clotted water / In the shade of the banks" Line 28: "their loose necks pulsed like sails" Lines 29-30: "Some sat / Poised like mud grenades"

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Voyaging, from The Making of Poetry Adam Nicholson 2020

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A brilliant Greek sun beats down on Daniel Craig and his co-stars Kate Hudson, Edward Norton and Janelle Monáe in the follow-up to, the surprise whodunnit hit of 2019.

When Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery arrives later this month in UK cinemas, audiences will be introduced to a handful of prime suspects in the time-honoured manner, while Craig's gentlemanly sleuth Benoit Blanc sets out to solve an impending crime.

But the glossy Knives Out films are not the only recent releases to stretch the framework of the traditional whodunnit into blockbuster territory. Film producers are now prepared to risk huge sums on the sort of classic crime capers that were once the preserve of Sunday afternoon television specials.

"This kind of drama is a global phenomenon now," said James Prichard, chairman and chief executive of Agatha Christie Ltd and the author's great-grandson. "It all changed with Kenneth Branagh and his Murder on the Orient Express. Fox did something amazing when it put in all that money. It showed that people still want murder mysteries, and Netflix, among others, has picked up the idea quickly."

Glass Onion - its title is taken from a Beatles song and from the transparent dome structure that dominates the film's island location - comes out just months after Branagh's stellar lineup of actors sailed downriver together in the second of his Christie remakes, Death on the Nile.

And in September British cinema audiences turned out in large numbers for See How They Run. A playful twist on the classic format, this mystery revolved around Christie's long-running West End play The Mousetrap, and in the film's denouement, its detective team, in the shape of police officers Saoirse Ronan and Sam Rockwell, actually encounter Christie herself, played by Shirley Henderson.

The US director and writer of the Knives Out films, Rian Johnson, described Glass Onion optimistically as "an equal, not a sequel" at its London premiere, but this second film is no sedate drawing-room puzzle. Johnson claims that both screenplays were inspired by Christie's work, but the new outing is clearly the direct result of the commercial success of the first.

The budget is spent on spectacle and the hi-tech world it creates brings Craig closer to the whizzy gadgetry he played with as James Bond than to the analogue deductive tools of Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple.

Prichard is right, though, about the new worldwide reach of the basic whodunnit template. This weekend sees the airing of a stylish French take on one of Christie's most famous books - the one with the difficult original title, now known as And Then There Were None.

The French television series, brought to British screens by Channel 4's Walter Presents strand, is called They Were Ten and places a group of suspects on another sunny island, this time a tropical resort. The seemingly random group quickly find they are cut off from the rest of the world. This summer also saw the release of a Chinese series called Checkmate, based on the Christie Poirot narratives.

"If murder mystery is booming, then we inevitably play an important part in that. After all, my great-grandmother wrote 66 novels and 20 plays without really repeating herself or making many mistakes," said Prichard. "But I hate the phrase 'cosy crime'. Looking at the books with the writer Sarah Phelps for her recent BBC adaptations taught me a lot. They are not just crossword puzzles. The murders matter and are rarely excused. There are some very nasty people killed in her books, but it is not condoned."

The violence tends to happen off-screen, however, and none of the grim tropes of Scandi noir, such as abandoned wells and dank cellars, seem to feature. Christie, though, did like a little dash of the sordid: greed, lust and sexual jealousy were all within her literary compass.

Nevertheless, at this comfier end of the murder market, Hugh Laurie successfully brought a fresh version of the Christie mystery Why Didn't They Ask Evans? to BritBox in a three-part series earlier this year.

He adapted, directed and also appeared in the show, alongside Paul Whitehouse, Will Poulter and Lucy Boynton. Widely judged a sprightly venture, it proved that, a century on, the question in Christie's title was still worth asking. Stars Emma Thompson and Jim Broadbent were happy to join Laurie's fun because whodunnits are now such a ratings draw.

Their claustrophobic, often camp form of suspense competes ably with gritty police procedurals and the gore of true crime. After the pandemic and with economic troubles looming, viewers are seeking out the certainties of a neat, conventional mystery.

So if we gather around the fireplace, with the evidence laid out before us, what do we see? A sudden glut of screen reworkings of whodunnit formulas and new riffs on Christie classics.

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And then there are other contributing factors: the real-life West End production of The Mousetrap celebrates its 70th anniversary later this month and an acclaimed, immersive London staging of the author's Witness for the Prosecution - already five years old - announced last week that it is extending its run again until this time next year.

The verdict is clear for first-time crime writer Charlotte Vassell: murder mysteries are so popular now because they are an unbeatable way to scrutinise society. "A murder is an aberration of the social contract. So as a crime writer, you set up the part of society you want to study and then pull it all apart. We are all just nosey, really," she said.

Vassell's debut novel, The Other Half, is published next year by Faber and tells the contemporary story of the hidden wall of wealth behind a London murder. "As a reader, you look at all the characters' motivations and are often confounded by your own prejudices. It allows you to look at class and at race," she said, adding that Christie was always "meticulous" about setting up the social worlds she was about to destroy.

Vassell, 32, wrote her new mystery during lockdown "as an escape". "It was a way to get me up in the mornings," she said. And while we may not all have written our own whodunnits, Prichard suspects it is the tribulations of the last three years that have led readers and viewers back to the genre.

"One of the bizarre things is how the book sales absolutely took off in lockdown," he said. "My father said at the beginning of it all that in times of trouble, people turn to Agatha Christie and he was right. There really is something cathartic there, considering she herself wrote them after the horrors of war."

The recipe for a convincing mystery is harder to concoct than fans think, Prichard adds. But for those with children who might like to try, there is an opportunity coming up.

To celebrate the anniversary of The Mousetrap's world-beating run, with more than 28,500 performances clocked up since that first night in the West End in November 1952 starring Richard Attenborough and his wife Sheila Sim, the production has just set up a Young Mystery Writers programme, designed to inspire the next generation.

Working with the National Literacy Trust and more than 30 secondary schools across Britain, the scheme will focus and support young students from disadvantaged backgrounds as they attempt to write their own short whodunnit. It will also offer them the chance to experience a West End show. Those who take part will later have the opportunity to be published in a celebratory anthology.

"This partnership will use Agatha Christie's incredible legacy to encourage a love of writing - a key literacy skill - in 600 students from disadvantaged backgrounds," said Tim Judge, head of schools programmes at the trust.

"Christie is the bestselling novelist of all time and Young Mystery Writers will continue to serve as an inspiration."

Film director Johnson, now at the centre of the burgeoning international Knives Out movie franchise, started out just this way, he has revealed, reading Christie stories as a young person and then penning his own tentative efforts.

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And then there were more: Knives Out, Agatha Christie and nonstop murder mystery boom

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A brilliant Greek sun beats down on Daniel Craig and his co-stars Kate Hudson, Edward Norton and Janelle Monáe in the follow-up to, the surprise whodunnit hit of 2019. When Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery arrives later this month in UK cinemas, audiences will be introduced to a handful of prime suspects in the time-honoured manner, while Craig's gentlemanly sleuth Benoit Blanc sets out to solve an impending crime.