Scribleriana

Brian McCrea (University of Florida) has retired and stepped down as our editor of scholarship on Fielding. We have been fortunate. For more than 10 years, readers have read his lucid, graceful, thoughtful prose. When we come to his contributions at our editorial meetings, our pens are still; the good news is that he will continue to write for the Scrib. For an unusually large number of his fine contributions, see 43 No, 2, Spring 2011, our last issue. His place is being taken by Scott Black (University of Utah), who has reviewed for us, and now will be a Contributing Editor.

We also welcome Anthony Lee (Arkansas Tech University) as a Contributing editor. And special thanks go to Melvyn New, Michael A. Rotenberg-Schwartz, Matthew Binney, and Shiladitya Sen (Temple University) for their generous assistance.

Chris Chambers's Gulliver's Travels

An ambitious stage version of Gulliver's Travels, written by Chris Chambers with music by Andy Rappa, was performed in England in 2008. This amateur production was Brobdingnagian in every dimension: thirty-five scenes, fifty characters, a chorus and supporting musicians, a performance time of three hours.

The structure of the play is retrospective: Pedro de Mendez rescues Gulliver from Houyhnhnmland, and Gulliver tells the story of his life. More inward-looking and tormented than Swift's original, this reimagined Gulliver generally finds himself the victim of the vices and follies of the societies he visits: "Throw me back in the sea / That's the only place for me / The pox of vile humanity / The pride, conceit and vanity / Murder, lies, insanity / Who cares for that reality!" The authors balance their protagonist's anguish with characters who temper it: they give Gulliver a female companion Gaia (killed in a rebellion against oppressive Laputans), and they play up his long-suffering wife, Mary, who provides a home to return to. Best of all, they give new prominence to Pedro de Mendez as Gulliver's friend, confidant, and comforter—"someone to recount and relive his travels with; to help him see things from a different and perhaps wiser perspective and, having sunk low, find a better way to be," as they explain in the program notes.

Mr. Kosok praises this revised Gulliver for its intelligence and skill: if the authors cannot match the complexity of Swift's satire, still they have respectfully reimagined the original (Heinz Kosok, "Another Stage in the Captain's Career," SStud, 24, 2009, 167-170).

300^th Anniversary of Essay on Criticism

In TLS, May 13, 2011, Donald W. Nichol (with the help of search engines) pays tribute to the 300^th anniversary of the publication of Essay on Criticism by chronicling the endurance of some of the poem's most memorable phrases in popular films and music. For example, "to err is human" shows up in films in 1942 (Woman of the Year) and 1958 (Some Like It Hot), in an episode of TV's Law and Order (1991), and on Mr. Nichol's Korean-made coffee cup: "To err is human. To really screw things up, you need a computer."

"Fools rush in where angels fear to tread" has had an even more august afterlife, with examples from Star Trek to a rock album entitled "Where Angels Fear to Tread" by Mentallo and the Fixer (1994), only one of several by that name, none of which is known to your editors. Scriblerian readers will probably be more familiar, however, with the Johnny Mercer-Rube Bloom song, "Fools Rush In," which Ray Eberle sang with Glenn Miller's orchestra in 1940, followed by the versions of Tony Martin, Frank Sinatra, Doris Day, and Ricky Nelson, among many others—indeed, 779 entries, Mr. Nichol reports, in "your iTunes store." He ends his tribute, appropriately, with Maynard Mack's observation: "Pope has contributed more to our common language than any other poet. It is a gift not lightly to be dismissed."

Lerman on Pope and Johnson

The following is from the journal entry of Leo Lerman (1914-1994), writer, critic, editor at Condé Nast, and New York man of letters:

"The irrational qualities of the living...