1666 and All That
Sir CHRISTOPHER WREN was billed as the subject of a BBC broadcast entitled English Architects. The theme was good, but the treatment unfortunate. The conversations, carried on in strange and unnatural accents, were of the self-conscious, glib, echoingly unreal kind invariably conducted between historical personages in these affairs, Thus
King Charles II, surveying the ruins of London after the Great Fire: "But I swear that from these ruins a better, cleaner and more healthy city shall arise!" The thought and the idiom are largely anachronistic and the attempt at characterisation so stilted and inept that it really is not possible to believe it exists. The author of a famous poem about Wren has another in which, after remarking that Lord Clive is no longer alive, he adds: "There is a great deal to be said For being dead." Just so, historical characters should be treated with realism and respect or left undramatised. The best feature of the programme was the vivid hint it gave of the intellectual life of the late 17th Century, an age before the specialisation of learning in which the same splendid amateur could be anatomist and architect, another physicist, and admiral, a_ third "in the course of one revolving moon War statesman, chemist, rhymer and buffoon,’ when the natural and applied sciences played happily together and "in his majesty’s reign warships were for the first time constructed on philosophical principles."
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 387, 22 November 1946, Page 10
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2381666 and All That New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 387, 22 November 1946, Page 10
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