Cambridge English Students and Applicants

Heya - Was just wondering how many Cambridge English applicants there are out there? What college you have applied for, any feedback etc etc!

Had an acknowledgement from Girton - so just need to sit back and wait now!

Just rediscovered this thread. I am applying to Peterhouse. My favourite Shakespeare is 'The Tempest' as you may figure out from my sig and I think Marlowe is a total don. Right now I am very very slowly returning to Philip Sidney's 'The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia', though I have claimed to be reading this book for quite a while now...

I'm applying to Peterhouse too - only they only just offered me an interview. Seriously, why would you send out the invitations in thirds? It's like they wanted to torture me.

also... probably a stupid question but how does it link to the Tempest?

Oh no, competition. I guess you're on the 13th or 14th then?

(It was a quote from the Tempest when I wrote it but it is now something from Arcadia, it's def. not a stupid question )

yup you're the only person I've found who's applying to my course and college. I might have to designate you my nemesis. I hope you don't mind.

14th.
I mean, I know the different interview dates were why they sent it out in batches. Logically speaking. It was just frustrating. I take it yours is on the 7th?

Oh phew - I don't know the Tempest that well, but I was worried I'd missed something.
Arcadia I know I know nothing about. It's stoppard, right?

Will have to track down your location and pay some thugs to steal all your books or something similarly devious. Yeah, I'm on the 7th - I don't know how I could have waited until today!

Stoppard did write a play called Arcadia but the Arcadia I'm quoting is this book of poetry/prose written by Sir Philip Sidney in the late 16th century. It's cracking stuff, it really is, even if I haven't read the whole thing (hope that isn't an issue come the 7th )

That's not particularly devious. I would demonstrate how deviousness works, but the first rule is not to tell people your plan.

I have to say, it was a struggle. I may have whined quite a bit. Possibly irritated a few people...

Oh really - I had no idea, looks like I genuinely don't know anything about it.
You'll probably be fine if you know most of it, and the general substance. That's what I'm hoping with Beowulf, anyway...

I will be especially vigilant over the next few weeks. Nothing will get past me.

I didn't actually say that I'd read the whole thing; anticipating my laziness, I just wrote that I'd read 'parts of' it, so I have a 'get out of jail free' card there I guess. I'm really hoping they don't ask me about the more incoherent parts of my PS. Some of it's quite cringe-worthy.

If it isn't too devious a question - - what sort of periods/authors are you into?

Well. That's what Mad-Eye Moody said. And we all know what happened to him...

Ah, that was a clever tactic. I should've done that, but I mentioned it in terms of an essay I wrote, so I couldn't really admit I hadn't read it all. I'll finish it. I have time. Yeah.
(It's so boring though...)

haha, I think it's okay - neither of us really have time to switch at this point :P

right let's see, mine are all over the place

I have a strange fondness for Jacobean drama (including, but not limited to, Shakespeare), I've written lots about flawed first person protagonists, I really like early 20th satirists like Saki and Evelyn Waugh (but they're really the only ones I've read) and David Lodge is like my god.

Oh and Wendy Cope. She's awesome. I met her. I was the most fangirly I have ever been in my life, it was quite shameful.

So there's no uniformity whatsoever, but it means I have a few options of things to talk about.
And yourself?

Haha, I'm similarly eclectic; I'm v keen on Shakespeare and Marlowe (Hero and Leander rocks my world) and that period in general. Sidney, as you already know. Spenser too - should read some more 'Faerie Queene' over the next week or so. I also really like some modernists like T S Eliot, Beckett, Yeats and Dylan Thomas, if the latter two count as modernists. I really liked 'Decline and Fall' but I haven't really read any other Waugh...

(Ah, it's a week on Wednesday; may die in the interim)

Okay, so same era, different works, I read a lot of MIddleton - I haven't got round to Marlowe or a Winter's Tale yet - I so wanted to see Doctor Faustus with Arthur Darvill, but I didn't get tickets in the end

Lord, Faerie Queene is so dense. I wrote this essay on fantasy (which is also where Beowulf came in), and ended up only using the introduction to make my points. Don't think I actually read more than a paragraph... Is it actually worth it?

I loved the Wasteland and Waiting for Godot (AS coursework, yay :/ ) but otherwise modernism isn't really my thing. Isn't Yeats a romantic? Or am I making that up...?

Decline and Fall's brilliant, but of all the Waugh I've read Brideshead Revisited is genuinely the best. It's a little less... eclectic is possibly the word. I'd recommend it just as a general read

Oh gosh of course - it hit me today that mine's almost two weeks away, and that threw me. Just breathe lots and drink tea. Don't die though, because then I'll have to find someone new to focus all of my competitiveness on.

NB: Reading this thread I want to go read everything. Can anyone recommend something good that is worth reading and yet holds up with constant interruption? I am trapped indoors with special Ed/Behavioural Problem brother and my reading is suffering. Actually my work is suffering too but at least with reading I feel as if I have fulfilled some purpose (and I enjoy it).

I saw that with school! It was quite well-done, though I felt a number of decisions were clearly made that with a view more to pleasing the 'groundlings' than to doing a good, 'literary' performance of the play (whatever that might entail). Don't know how much I liked Arthur in that; may have been my knowledge of his performance as the meek and self-effacing Rory that coloured my perception a bit but he generally looked more like a bored car park attendant than a servant of Lucifer...

I think it is. Spencerean verse is an extremely cool form. I've only read about half of book 1, which is top stuff, but what I really liked reading was 'Book 12' (unfinished, though, and thought possibly to be a totally separate work), where he goes into a really well-written account of the attempted coup of 'Dame Mutabilitie'. Her argument's basically that since all the gods in the pantheon are prone to the effects of change, she should be in charge of everything, and eventually they have to get 'Great Dame Nature' in to sort her out with a pretty baffling/unconvincing response.

The Waste Land makes me very happy. I actually wrote about it and Godot for this English essay competition Peterhouse run - was 'highly commended', however significant that is... Yeats is kind of hard to classify - his later poems definitely go a bit modernist, like 'Byzantium' for instance, but I think on the whole he straddles the boundary between Victorian and Modernist stuff.

Ah, jealous! although to be honest, I'd rather it was entertaining than dense in an intellectual fashion. Have you even seen any pinter? No Man's Land had an incredible cast, Michael Gambon and David Bradley, and it made me want to gouge my own eyes out.
The globe is really cool - but yeah, I don't know if I would have been able to get past his 'roryness' - bit like seeing Tennant and Tate in Much Ado. Except they were brilliant, so it was okay.
Ah, that actually sounds quite interesting. Maybe I'll give it another go. At some point. Somehow I don't see it happening in the next two weeks...
Unfinished works stress me out though. Like the Salmon of Doubt. Although Adams died before he finished that, so I suppose it's not really his fault...
Oh really? I entered that too - they sent me a very nice letter telling me that I had been shortlisted, but then not won anything. Only slightly better than being thanked for participating, but hey, every little helps *shrugs*
Which question did you do?

I haven't seen any Pinter but I understand he's quite Beckett-y? It's the same deal with Faerie Queene, actually - his big plan for the poem was an absurdly long thing of 24 books (I think 11 were written and it's colossal anyway) but then he died before he could finish it.

That's a drag. I did mine on 'What effect is achieved when a writer does or does not 'suit the action to the word, the word to the action?' Which question/texts did you write about?

Yup, but while I loved reading godot, I'm not sure I would have wanted to watch it. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead was enough for me, and that's very becketty

Ah, it's not so bad - to be fair, I wrote it in about five hours on the day it was due, and it gave me an excuse to introduce myself to the english fellow on the open day...
I did "Analyse the effects writers create through their use of hyperbole and understatement" on Lolita and Never Let me Go.
I'm not even sure what your question means...

Oh, cool, I wanted to see the film of Never Let Me Go but never got round to it. My question was pretty open-ended - I never really defined 'word' or 'action' but I pretty much just talked about the idea that Waste Land is a 'music of ideas' and that he separated his words from their 'actions' by nicking them from other writers. For the Waiting for Godot bit I gave a long-winded argument about how it makes actors and audience 'equal players in the narrative', but what I was basically saying was that it is a play about boredom which bores its audience in a self-referential kind of way. Not a great argument in retrospect...

No, that sounds quite interesting - I like the self-referential boredom thing, though I'm not sure how much consolation it would be to sit in the audience and know that my boredom was actually me engaging intellectually with the actors. Or something.

Yeah, that's why I thought it was a bit of a dodgy argument - I was basically just saying that it is a really boring play... I guess it was just so circuitously put that they thought it worked!