Aubrey in Popular Culture
In 1967, English director Patrick Garland created a one-man show, "Brief Lives", based on Dick's edition of Aubrey's work. Starring Roy Dotrice, it became the most successful one-man production ever seen, with Dotrice giving over 1800 performances across forty years on both sides of the Atlantic. For many, the play became an essential means of understanding a "vanished time" and one version of it. Aubrey scholars, however, have sometimes seen the production as over-emphasising its subject's eccentricities and lack of organisation, to the detriment of a wider appreciation of his contributions to scholarship.
In 2008, Aubrey's Brief Lives was a five part drama serial on Radio 4. Writer Nick Warburton intertwined some of Aubrey's biographical sketches with the story of the turbulent friendship between Aubrey and Anthony Wood. Abigail le Fleming produced and directed.
Read more about this topic: John Aubrey
Famous quotes containing the words aubrey, popular and/or culture:
“In ancient times—’twas no great loss—
They hung the thief upon the cross:
But now, alas!—I say’t with grief—
They hang the cross upon the thief.”
—Anonymous. “On a Nomination to the Legion of Honour,” from Aubrey Stewart’s English Epigrams and Epitaphs (1897)
“We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“In society, in the best institutions of men, it is easy to detect a certain precocity. When we should still be growing children, we are already little men. Give me a culture which imports much muck from the meadows, and deepens the soil,—not that which trusts to heating manures, and improved implements, and modes of culture only!”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)