On 27 October 1954 the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh visited the University of Sheffield in order to inaugurate its Jubilee Session. No other reigning sovereign had visited the principal university buildings since King Edward VII opened them in 1905. Six months before the Queen's visit, the Vice-Chancellor, Professor J.M. Whittaker, put to his recently-appointed Professor of English Literature a 'general idea' - to celebrate the Queen's visit by reviving the masques with which Elizabeth I was greeted at Cambridge in 1564 and at Oxford in 1566 and 1592. Would Empson assist in the creation of a new masque by 'writing such parts of it as would be spoken or sung'? The vocal part should be in English and not Latin, Whittaker suggested; it should have 'literary value' and be in modern idiom rather than a pastiche of Elizabethan poetry. 'At any rate,' he gentled Empson, 'I hope you will turn the matter over in your mind.'

LRB 26 November 1987 | PDF Download