h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I was having a little nose through your theatre credits and hey, I did Beggars Opera too. At The Cement Box Theatre in Brisbane, Australia. We sort of mulched it up with the Brechtian one so we could include "Mack the Knife."

I also took my BA in Lit. but combined it with Drama. Finished my Hons. three weeks ago long-distance from China and just got the result yesterday.Am already researching for my Masters in Dram. In Australia anyone who is over 24 and starts a degree is called a "Mature Student" which I personally feel to be rather an oxymoron and always gives me the giggles.

You're right, very few students are actually mature, no matter how old they may be chronologically. What are of specialism are you looking at for your masters?

The Beggar's Opera is fascinating, isn't it? We did Benjamin Britten's version, which basically means more part-singing than the original.

I'm going to (I think) anotate a play from one of 'my ladies'. My ladies being the nick-name my tutors have given to my ruling passion in life - the female writers of the seventeenth century who have been given such bad press over the intervening years. Its all part of my fiendish master-plan to overhaul the canon to include them. If everyone hasn't completely got fed up with disputing the canon and given it up in its entirety as a bad job long before I ever get to unleash my concept on the world.

And yes, re students. I rather think we have a duty to the rest of the world to remain complete knobs and give people with pseudonyms a reason to write in to newspapers. I intend to remain one until I die. Or else become an eccentric old lady in a red shawl who takes in stray dogs and has doghairs on all the furniture.

Do you have a particular lady in mind to annotate? Sounds interesting. I'm afraid I was terribly conventional for my Master and chose Henry Fielding!

AAArgh! Fielding, huh? No, I want to go further back to the lady who first introduced satire - Margaret Cavendish. Actually, I have this great yen to explore Amelia Lanyer - but I think I would like to do a "life of..." with her. In fact, a fictional presentation with no connection to my degree because a) the whole family was the stuff which good fiction could have a ball with and b) her astrologer left a journal with good, meaty, stuff in.

But 'Mad Madge' seems to have replaced Aphra Behn as flavour of the month in some circles so an annotated version of one of her plays would be timeous and, perhaps (with a wicked gleam in her eye) saleable. Also (with a modest blush) I have kind of established a Cavendish niche for myself in Australian academic circles so it would be in keeping. Please don't tell me you aren't familiar with her because I will consider it part of my life mission to rectify this state of affairs. (So if you aren't, you'd better google her quickly so you don't have to lie.)

I don't know much about her, but I know enough to think that she or her plays would be a fascinating topic to research. Eighteenth century is my area of most knowledge in both theatre and the novel, so she's a bit before the era I'm most comfortable with.

Yeah, know what you mean: - there was such a plethora of good writers about in the 18th century, wasn't there? That's actually where I was for a long time - until I discovered my ladies.

BTW, if you've popped into Lil's lately and are scratching your head about how someone who has only just finished her hons. thesis comes to be correcting undergrad. essays? That's because of my LBU (Life Before University).

I have to admit to really not liking Samuel Richardson (though Pamela is quite funny, even if he didn't mean it to be), but the rest of the eighteenth century is of great interest in both novels and theatre. I find it fascinating that Fielding is largely to blame for the theatrical censorship in London which wasn't lifted until the late 1960s.

The problem with literature is that no matter how much you've read, you'll never have read everything!

I expect then that you've read 'Shamela'? I appreciated how that picked up on, as you say, all the things Fielding didn't mean to be funny. And yeah, as regards never having read enough - I guess that's the problem with knowledge in general, isn't it? That tired old adage about the more you learn being the less you know really is true. That's why I have dedicated my life to being a perpetual student - which is kind of why I have landed up in China - a place where every day brings me a hundred reasons to go...and to stay. Sometimes my brain simply goes into overload!

Shamela and Joseph Andrews did indeed make me laugh a lot after reading Pamela. I never did make it to the end of Clarissa, though. I got to page 1000 (of about 1500) and decided enough was enough. How did these women find time to pine in between writing all those blasted letters?

The acquisition of knowledge can be a bit like a drug, I think, but wisdom is ultimately much more useful!