Norbrook, David (G. E.) 1950-

views updated

NORBROOK, David (G. E.) 1950-

PERSONAL: Born 1950. Education: University of Aberdeen, M.A.; Oxford University, D.Phil.

ADDRESSES: Offıce—Merton College, Oxford University, Merton St., Oxford OX1 4JD, England.

CAREER: Magdalen College, Oxford, Oxford, England, fellow and tutor in English, 1978-98; University of Maryland, College Park, professor of English, 1999-2002; Merton College, Oxford, Merton Professor of English literature, 2002—.

WRITINGS:

Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance, Routledge & Kegan Paul (Boston, MA), 1984, revised edition, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2002.

(Editor, with H. R. Woudhuysen, and author of introduction) The Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse, Penguin (New York, NY), 1993.

Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric andPolitics, 1627-1660, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1999.

(Editor) Lucy Hutchinson, Order and Disorder, Blackwell (Malden, MA), 2001.

Contributor of articles on Renaissance poetry and drama to numerous scholarly journals.

SIDELIGHTS: David Norbrook, whose academic interests include Renaissance literature, literary theory, and Scottish poetry, is a professor at Oxford University's Magdalen College who has produced a significant body of work focusing on seventeenth-century British literary and cultural history. Norbrook's self-described technique of being "greedily inclusive" while selecting poems to add to The Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse has produced an "anthology [that is] something special," according to Lucasta Miller in New Statesman & Society. Miller went on to note that Norbrook "writes with masterful facility, and succeeds in making his subject accessible to an audience of non-specialists without patronising their intelligence." She further asserted that Norbrook "completely avoids the leaden prose which so many academics affect as a misguided means of demonstrating their high-minded seriousness."

Reviewing the same work, a "Virginia Quarterly Review" contributor praised Norbrook and his coeditor, H. R. Woudhuysen, for broadening the canon to include more writings by women poets. Furthermore, according to the same reviewer, the editors of The Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse also organize the poems thematically in groups such as power, language, and sexuality, and provide background details that place the poems within a social and historical context. Though stating that all the poems do not "pass muster," the reviewer did find that the collected verses "unfailingly enlarge our sense of poetic background."

In his 1999 title, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627-1660, Norbrook "sets out to redress the erasure of republican culture from a royalized English history," as Laura Lunger Knoppers noted in a Renaissance Quarterly review. Similarly, David Quint, writing in Modern Philology, explained that Norbrook "seeks to reconstruct . . . a republican literary tradition that emerged in the seventeenth century before and during the years that England did without a monarch." In so doing, Norbrook uses a chronological organization to introduce and interconnect both major writers, such as John Milton and Andrew Marvell, as well as less-well-known figures such as George Wither and Thomas May, and even more obscure writers of pamphlets and single poems. Quint praised Norbrook's "deeply researched literary history" as "informed by critical imagination and political commitment," and concluded that the book "will orient future studies of both literary scholars and historians." Knoppers also had praise for Writing the English Republic, calling it "magisterial, wide-ranging, and often brilliant," and further asserting that it "boldly rewrites the history of seventeenth-century English culture."

Norbrook has also edited an edition of Lucy Hutchinson's Order and Disorder, the first published epic poem known to have been written by an Englishwoman. The initial five cantos of this poem—which has much in common with Milton's Paradise Lost—were printed anonymously in 1679. There were, however, fifteen more cantos in manuscript that were never published because of their politically sensitive content. Norbrook positively identified the entire twenty cantos as the work of republican Hutchinson, and gathers much editorial detail in his book that is "exemplary," according to Danielle Clarke writing in Notes and Queries. Clarke further called the edition of Hutchinson's epic "finely judged, meticulous, and alert to textual resonance."