Druids

‘Come, You Giants!’: Review of Jez Butterworth’s ‘Jerusalem’, by Rod Tweedy

Posted on by Golgonooza

Albion’s Enslavement: Green and Pleasant Lands vs Chartered Streets 

Screenshot 2022-04-30 at 12.58.00

Screen Shot 2021-05-10 at 10.39.26

In April 2022, Jez Butterworth’s terrific, William Blake-inspired drama Jerusalem returns to London for a special, limited 16-week run. I was lucky enough to see it last night at the press review – red carpet, flashing cameras, which was also kind of fun to see, and a sign of the eagerness with which the revival of this play – often said to be the “greatest British play of the 21st century” – has been greeted.

Read More

The End of Nature:  Blake and Pantheism, by Rod Tweedy

Posted on by Golgonooza

Babylon, Nature-worship, and the Sleep of Albion 

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

‘Awake! awake O sleeper of the land of shadows, wake! expand!’

As Kathleen Raine has noted, “the sleep of Albion is in a word the materialist mentality of the modern West.” However, this “materialist mentality”, for Blake, denotes not only the belief in the Newtonian universe of orthodox Science, which many are now questioning, but also the belief in “Nature” itself. For Blake, the “Creation” – the emergence of an apparently objective, natural, and material world – and Albion’s fall into “Sleep” were one and the same event.

Read More