Brief Lives

AuthorPatrick Garland

Patrick Garland (b 1935)

Patrick Garland is a writer, actor and a director of theatre, television and film. He started Poetry International in 1963 with Ted Hughes and Charles Osborne. He was a director and producer for the BBC's Music and Arts Department (1962-1974), and worked on its 'Monitor' series. In 1964, he directed the 'Monitor' film, 'Down Cemetery Road' about Philip Larkin, in which John Betjeman also appeared. He served as the Artistic Director for the Chichester Festival Theatre twice, 1981-1985 and 1990-1994, where he directed over 20 productions. His 1971 television film of 'The Snow Goose' won a Golden Globe for Best Movie made for TV, and was nominated for both a BAFTA and an Emmy. He was made an Honorary Fellow of St Edmund Hall, Oxford in 1997. Other productions of his, include the revival of 'My Fair Lady' on Broadway in the early 1980s with Rex Harrison (about whom he wrote 'The Incomparable Rex') and the musical 'Billy' with Michael Crawford at Drury Lane. He is married to the actress Alexandra Bastedo.

BiographerJohn Aubrey

John Aubrey (1626 - 1697)

John Aubrey was an antiquary and writer, best known as the author of the collection of short biographical pieces usually referred to as 'Brief Lives' and as the discoverer of the Aubrey holes in Stonehenge.

He was born near Malmesbury, Wiltshire to a well-off gentry family. For many years an only child, he was educated at home, with a private tutor although he was later educated at the Malmesbury and Blandford Forum grammar schools. He entered Trinity College, Oxford, in 1642, but his studies were interrupted by the English Civil War. His earliest antiquarian work dates from this period in Oxford. He spent a pleasant time at Trinity in 1647, making friends among his Oxford contemporaries, and collecting books. He spent much of his time in the country, and in 1649 he first 'discovered' the megalithic remains at Avebury, which he later mapped and discussed in his important antiquarian work 'Monumenta Britannica'. His father died in 1652, leaving Aubrey large estates, but with them some complicated debts.

Blessed with charm, generosity of spirit and enthusiasm, Aubrey went on to become acquainted with many of the most celebrated writers, scientists, politicians and aristocrats of his day. He claimed that his memory was 'not tenacious' by seventeenth-century standards, but from the early 1640s he kept thorough (if haphazard) notes of observations in natural philosophy. He also began to write 'Lives of Scientists' in the 1650s. In 1660 Aubrey produced a huge 2-volume (if unfinished) collection, the 'Wiltshire Antiquities', including some biographical material.

In 1663 Aubrey became a member of the Royal Society. He lost estate after estate due to lawsuits, until in 1670 he parted with his last piece of property and ancestral home, Easton Piers. From this time he was dependent on the hospitality of his numerous friends. In 1667 he had made the acquaintance of Anthony Wood at Oxford, and when Wood began to gather materials for his 'Athenae Oxonienses', Aubrey offered to collect information for him. Aubrey approached the work of the biographer much as his contemporary scientists had begun to approach the work of empirical research by the assembly of vast museums and small collection cabinets. Collating as much information as he could, he left the task of verification largely to Wood, and thereafter to posterity. As a hanger-on in great houses, he had little time and little inclination for systematic work, and he wrote the 'Lives' in the early morning while his hosts were sleeping off the effects of the night before.

As private, manuscript texts, the 'Lives' were able to contain the richly controversial material which is their chief interest today, and Aubrey's chief contribution to the formation of modern biographical writing. When he allowed Anthony Wood to use the texts, however, he entered the caveat that much of the content of the Lives was 'not fitt to be let flie abroad' while the subjects, and the author, were still living.

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