Monday Literary Club - Dr Pamela Tudor-Craig

Tonight's guest speaker at Pelham House is Dr Pamela Tudor-Craig (aka Lady Wedgewood) who will be flagging up the links between Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream and Boticelli's Primavera. Tudor-Craig, an art historian, is best known as the presenter of the 1980's TV series, ‘The Secret Lives of Paintings'. I speak to her on the phone and ask her where her ideas came from. "I first started thinking about Botticelli's Primavera when I was working on the TV series", she says. "And when you climb one hill, you invariably see another one from the top." With a life-long passion for Shakespeare's ‘Dream’ it was just a matter of time before these interests came together. "I became aware that they were coming from the same Neo-Platonic background. This is not to suggest that Shakespeare had seen the painting - he hadn't. But they were coming from the same font of knowledge".

Central to Dr Tudor-Craig's presentation are the popular illustrations of Midsummer Night’s Dream by Arthur Rackham. "He was a great illustrator", she says, "But not everyone knows his work, so I will be including lots of his pieces in the slide show. It should be very visually exciting." Alongside the talk and the slides, the evening will be punctuated with extracts from the play, read by Stephen Medcalf. (It is a format which Dr Tudor Craig will be repeating in a series of six lectures for Lent at St Ann's Church later this year). "Above all it will be about love," she finishes. "Everyone likes that. Don't they?" ER