Far from the Madding Crowd
Encyclopedia
Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) is Thomas Hardy
's fourth novel and his first major literary success. It originally appeared anonymously as a monthly serial in Cornhill Magazine
, where it gained a wide readership. Critical notices were plentiful and mostly positive. Hardy revised the text extensively for the 1895 edition, and made further changes for the 1901 edition.
. With the savings of a frugal life, he has leased and stocked a sheep-farm. He falls in love with a newcomer eight years his junior, Bathsheba Everdene, a proud beauty who arrives to live with her aunt, Mrs. Hurst. She comes to like him well enough, and even saves his life once, but when he makes her an unadorned offer of marriage, she refuses; she values her independence too much and him too little. Gabriel's blunt protestations only serve to drive her to haughtiness. After a few months, she moves to Weatherbury, a village some miles off.
When next they meet, their circumstances have changed drastically. An inexperienced new sheepdog drives Gabriel's flock over a cliff, ruining him. After selling off everything of value, he manages to settle all his debts, but emerges penniless. He seeks employment at a work fair in the town of Casterbridge
(a fictionalised version of Dorchester). When he finds none, he heads to another fair in Shottsford, a town about ten miles from Weatherbury.
On the way, he happens upon a dangerous fire on a farm and leads the bystanders in putting it out. When the veiled owner comes to thank him, he asks if she needs a shepherd. She uncovers her face and reveals herself to be none other than Bathsheba. She has recently inherited the estate of her uncle and is now a wealthy woman. Though somewhat uncomfortable, she hires him.
Meanwhile, Bathsheba has a new admirer: the lonely and repressed William Boldwood. Boldwood is a prosperous farmer of about forty whose ardour Bathsheba unwittingly awakens when – her curiosity piqued because he has never bestowed on her the customary admiring glance – she playfully sends him a valentine
sealed with red wax on which she has embossed the words "Marry me". Boldwood, not realising the valentine was a jest, becomes obsessed with Bathsheba, and soon proposes marriage. Although she does not love him, she toys with the idea of accepting his offer; he is, after all, the most eligible bachelor in the district. However, she postpones giving him a definite answer. When Gabriel rebukes her for her thoughtlessness, she fires him.
When her sheep begin dying from bloat
, she discovers to her chagrin that Gabriel is the only man who knows how to cure them. Her pride
delays the inevitable, but finally she is forced to beg him for help. Afterwards, she offers him back his job and their friendship
is restored.
At this point, the dashing Sergeant Francis (Frank) Troy returns to his native Weatherbury and by chance encounters Bathsheba one night. Her initial dislike turns to infatuation after he excites her with a private display of swordsmanship
. Gabriel observes Bathsheba's interest in the young soldier and tries to discourage it, telling her she would be better off marrying Boldwood. Totally smitten, however, she elopes to Bath with Troy. On their return, Boldwood offers his rival a large bribe to give up Bathsheba. Troy pretends to consider the offer, then scornfully announces they are already married. Boldwood withdraws, humiliated and vowing revenge.
Bathsheba soon discovers that her new husband is an improvident gambler with little interest in farming. Worse, she begins to suspect that he does not love her. In fact, Troy's heart belongs to her former servant, Fanny Robin. Before meeting Bathsheba, Troy had promised to marry Fanny; on the wedding day, however, the luckless girl goes to the wrong church. She explains her mistake, but Troy, humiliated at being left waiting at the altar, angrily calls off the wedding. When they part, unbeknownst to Troy, Fanny is pregnant with his child.
Some months afterward, Troy and Bathsheba encounter Fanny on the road, destitute, as she painfully makes her way toward the Casterbridge workhouse
. Troy sends his wife onward with the horse and gig before she can recognise the girl, then gives her all the money in his pocket, telling her he will give her more in a few days. Fanny uses up the last of her strength to reach her destination. A few hours later, she dies in childbirth, along with the baby. Mother and child are then placed in a coffin and sent home to Weatherbury for interment. Gabriel, who has long known of Troy's relationship with Fanny, tries to conceal the child's existence – but Bathsheba, suspecting the truth and wild with jealousy, arranges for the coffin to be left in her house overnight. When all the servants are in bed, she unscrews the lid and sees the two bodies inside – her husband's former lover and their child.
Troy then comes home from Casterbridge, where he had gone to keep his appointment with Fanny. Seeing the reason for her failure to meet him, he gently kisses the corpse and tells the anguished Bathsheba, "This woman is more to me, dead as she is, than ever you were, or are, or can be." The next day, he spends all his money on a marble tombstone with the inscription "Erected by Francis Troy in beloved memory of Fanny Robin..." Then, loathing himself and unable to bear Bathsheba's company, he leaves. After a long walk, he bathes in the sea, leaving his clothes on the beach. A strong current carries him away.
A year later, with Troy presumed drowned, Boldwood renews his suit. Burdened with guilt over the pain she has caused him, Bathsheba reluctantly consents to marry him in six years, long enough to have Troy declared dead.
Troy, however, is not dead. When he learns that Boldwood is again courting Bathsheba, he returns to Weatherbury on Christmas Eve to claim his wife. He goes to Boldwood's house, where a party is underway, and orders Bathsheba to come with him; when she shrinks back in surprise, he seizes her arm, and she screams. At this, Boldwood shoots Troy dead and tries unsuccessfully to turn the shotgun on himself. Although he is condemned to hang for murder, his friends petition the Home Secretary
for mercy, citing insanity. This is granted and Boldwood's sentence is changed to "confinement at Her Majesty's Pleasure
". Bathsheba, profoundly chastened by guilt and grief, buries her husband in the same grave as Fanny and their child, and adds a suitable inscription.
Throughout her tribulations, she comes to rely more and more on her oldest and (as she admits to herself) only real friend, Gabriel. When he gives notice that he is leaving her employ, she finally realises how important he has become to her well-being. That night, she goes alone to visit him in his cottage, to find out why he is (in her eyes) deserting her. Pressed, he reluctantly reveals that it is because people have been injuring her good name by gossiping that he wants to marry her. She exclaims that it is "...too absurd – too soon – to think of, by far!" He bitterly agrees that it is absurd, but when she corrects him, saying that it is only "too soon", he is emboldened to ask once again for her hand in marriage. She accepts, and the two are quietly wed.
's poem Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
(1751):
"Madding" means "frenzied" here. The title may be ironic: the five main characters – Bathsheba, Troy, Boldwood, Oak, and Fanny Robin – are all passionate beings who find the "vale of life" neither quiet nor cool.
Hardy's growing taste for tragedy
is also evident in the novel: Fanny, Troy, and Boldwood all come to bad ends. Certain incidents, such as Fanny's pregnancy with an illegitimate child and Boldwood's sudden lapse into murderous violence, foreshadow events in Tess of the d'Urbervilles
, where (as in Jude the Obscure
) the protagonist
is plagued by relentless misfortunes, and dies young at the end. In Madding Crowd, however, the fates still favour the lead character, who escapes two unfortunate entanglements, survives the mistakes of her youth, and finally finds contentment.
The book might also be described as an early piece of feminist
literature, since it features an independent woman with the courage to defy convention by running a farm herself. Although Bathsheba's passionate nature leads her into serious errors of judgment, Hardy endows her with sufficient resilience, intelligence, and good luck to overcome her youthful folly.
Finally, in Far from the Madding Crowd Hardy explores the proper basis for a happy marriage. Bathsheba's physical attraction to the broadsword
-wielding Troy leads to a disastrous marriage that might have ended in financial ruin. A marriage to the strait-laced Boldwood, to whom she is bound only by feelings of guilt and obligation, would have meant emotional suffocation. Gabriel Oak is her colleague, friend, and advocate. He offers her true comradeship and sound farming skills; and, although she initially spurns him, telling him she doesn't love him, he turns out to be the right man to make her happy.
starred Marion Terry
.
There are several films based on this book. The best known is John Schlesinger
's 1967 adaptation
starring Julie Christie
, Terence Stamp
, Peter Finch
, and Alan Bates
. The others are:
There have also been several radio plays, a musical (2000) and an opera, Far from the Madding Crowd by Andrew Downes
(2006).
As of 2008, David Nicholls
is adapting the novel for BBC Films
.
Tamara Drewe
is a comic strip serial based upon a modern reworking of the novel by Posy Simmonds
. The mischievous valentine becomes an e-mail, while death in childbirth becomes death from a drug overdose. It was adapted into a film of the same name
directed by Stephen Frears
in 2010.
In Autumn 2008, English Touring Theatre (ETT) toured Britain with a new stage adaptation of Far from the Madding Crowd directed by Kate Saxon
(ETT).
Thomas Hardy
Thomas Hardy, OM was an English novelist and poet. While his works typically belong to the Naturalism movement, several poems display elements of the previous Romantic and Enlightenment periods of literature, such as his fascination with the supernatural.While he regarded himself primarily as a...
's fourth novel and his first major literary success. It originally appeared anonymously as a monthly serial in Cornhill Magazine
Cornhill Magazine
The Cornhill Magazine was a Victorian magazine and literary journal named after Cornhill Street in London.Cornhill was founded by George Murray Smith in 1860 and was published until 1975. It was a literary journal with a selection of articles on diverse subjects and serialisations of new novels...
, where it gained a wide readership. Critical notices were plentiful and mostly positive. Hardy revised the text extensively for the 1895 edition, and made further changes for the 1901 edition.
Plot summary
Gabriel Oak is a young shepherdShepherd
A shepherd is a person who tends, feeds or guards flocks of sheep.- Origins :Shepherding is one of the oldest occupations, beginning some 6,000 years ago in Asia Minor. Sheep were kept for their milk, meat and especially their wool...
. With the savings of a frugal life, he has leased and stocked a sheep-farm. He falls in love with a newcomer eight years his junior, Bathsheba Everdene, a proud beauty who arrives to live with her aunt, Mrs. Hurst. She comes to like him well enough, and even saves his life once, but when he makes her an unadorned offer of marriage, she refuses; she values her independence too much and him too little. Gabriel's blunt protestations only serve to drive her to haughtiness. After a few months, she moves to Weatherbury, a village some miles off.
When next they meet, their circumstances have changed drastically. An inexperienced new sheepdog drives Gabriel's flock over a cliff, ruining him. After selling off everything of value, he manages to settle all his debts, but emerges penniless. He seeks employment at a work fair in the town of Casterbridge
The Mayor of Casterbridge
The Mayor of Casterbridge , subtitled "The Life and Death of a Man of Character", is a tragic novel by British author Thomas Hardy. It is set in the fictional town of Casterbridge . The book is one of Hardy's Wessex novels, all set in a fictional rustic England...
(a fictionalised version of Dorchester). When he finds none, he heads to another fair in Shottsford, a town about ten miles from Weatherbury.
On the way, he happens upon a dangerous fire on a farm and leads the bystanders in putting it out. When the veiled owner comes to thank him, he asks if she needs a shepherd. She uncovers her face and reveals herself to be none other than Bathsheba. She has recently inherited the estate of her uncle and is now a wealthy woman. Though somewhat uncomfortable, she hires him.
Meanwhile, Bathsheba has a new admirer: the lonely and repressed William Boldwood. Boldwood is a prosperous farmer of about forty whose ardour Bathsheba unwittingly awakens when – her curiosity piqued because he has never bestowed on her the customary admiring glance – she playfully sends him a valentine
Valentine
Valentine may refer to:* Valentine's Day, a holiday, or a card or gift given on that day-People:* Valentine , the pseudonym of Archibald Thomas Pechey* Saint Valentine, the name of several martyred saints of ancient Rome* Pope Valentine...
sealed with red wax on which she has embossed the words "Marry me". Boldwood, not realising the valentine was a jest, becomes obsessed with Bathsheba, and soon proposes marriage. Although she does not love him, she toys with the idea of accepting his offer; he is, after all, the most eligible bachelor in the district. However, she postpones giving him a definite answer. When Gabriel rebukes her for her thoughtlessness, she fires him.
When her sheep begin dying from bloat
Bloat
Bloat is a medical condition in which the stomach becomes overstretched by excessive gas content. It is also commonly referred to as torsion, gastric torsion, and gastric dilatation-volvulus when the stomach is also twisted. The word bloat is often used as a general term to cover gas distension...
, she discovers to her chagrin that Gabriel is the only man who knows how to cure them. Her pride
Pride
Pride is an inwardly directed emotion that carries two common meanings. With a negative connotation, pride refers to an inflated sense of one's personal status or accomplishments, often used synonymously with hubris...
delays the inevitable, but finally she is forced to beg him for help. Afterwards, she offers him back his job and their friendship
Friendship
Friendship is a form of interpersonal relationship generally considered to be closer than association, although there is a range of degrees of intimacy in both friendships and associations. Friendship and association are often thought of as spanning across the same continuum...
is restored.
Swordsmanship
Swordsmanship refers to the skills of a swordsman, a person versed in the art of the sword. The term is modern, and as such was mainly used to refer to smallsword fencing, but by extension it can also be applied to any martial art involving the use of a sword...
. Gabriel observes Bathsheba's interest in the young soldier and tries to discourage it, telling her she would be better off marrying Boldwood. Totally smitten, however, she elopes to Bath with Troy. On their return, Boldwood offers his rival a large bribe to give up Bathsheba. Troy pretends to consider the offer, then scornfully announces they are already married. Boldwood withdraws, humiliated and vowing revenge.
Bathsheba soon discovers that her new husband is an improvident gambler with little interest in farming. Worse, she begins to suspect that he does not love her. In fact, Troy's heart belongs to her former servant, Fanny Robin. Before meeting Bathsheba, Troy had promised to marry Fanny; on the wedding day, however, the luckless girl goes to the wrong church. She explains her mistake, but Troy, humiliated at being left waiting at the altar, angrily calls off the wedding. When they part, unbeknownst to Troy, Fanny is pregnant with his child.
Workhouse
In England and Wales a workhouse, colloquially known as a spike, was a place where those unable to support themselves were offered accommodation and employment...
. Troy sends his wife onward with the horse and gig before she can recognise the girl, then gives her all the money in his pocket, telling her he will give her more in a few days. Fanny uses up the last of her strength to reach her destination. A few hours later, she dies in childbirth, along with the baby. Mother and child are then placed in a coffin and sent home to Weatherbury for interment. Gabriel, who has long known of Troy's relationship with Fanny, tries to conceal the child's existence – but Bathsheba, suspecting the truth and wild with jealousy, arranges for the coffin to be left in her house overnight. When all the servants are in bed, she unscrews the lid and sees the two bodies inside – her husband's former lover and their child.
Troy then comes home from Casterbridge, where he had gone to keep his appointment with Fanny. Seeing the reason for her failure to meet him, he gently kisses the corpse and tells the anguished Bathsheba, "This woman is more to me, dead as she is, than ever you were, or are, or can be." The next day, he spends all his money on a marble tombstone with the inscription "Erected by Francis Troy in beloved memory of Fanny Robin..." Then, loathing himself and unable to bear Bathsheba's company, he leaves. After a long walk, he bathes in the sea, leaving his clothes on the beach. A strong current carries him away.
A year later, with Troy presumed drowned, Boldwood renews his suit. Burdened with guilt over the pain she has caused him, Bathsheba reluctantly consents to marry him in six years, long enough to have Troy declared dead.
Troy, however, is not dead. When he learns that Boldwood is again courting Bathsheba, he returns to Weatherbury on Christmas Eve to claim his wife. He goes to Boldwood's house, where a party is underway, and orders Bathsheba to come with him; when she shrinks back in surprise, he seizes her arm, and she screams. At this, Boldwood shoots Troy dead and tries unsuccessfully to turn the shotgun on himself. Although he is condemned to hang for murder, his friends petition the Home Secretary
Home Secretary
The Secretary of State for the Home Department, commonly known as the Home Secretary, is the minister in charge of the Home Office of the United Kingdom, and one of the country's four Great Offices of State...
for mercy, citing insanity. This is granted and Boldwood's sentence is changed to "confinement at Her Majesty's Pleasure
At Her Majesty's pleasure
At Her Majesty's pleasure is a legal term of art derived from all legitimate authority for government stemming from the Crown. Originating from the United Kingdom, it is now used throughout the Commonwealth realms...
". Bathsheba, profoundly chastened by guilt and grief, buries her husband in the same grave as Fanny and their child, and adds a suitable inscription.
Throughout her tribulations, she comes to rely more and more on her oldest and (as she admits to herself) only real friend, Gabriel. When he gives notice that he is leaving her employ, she finally realises how important he has become to her well-being. That night, she goes alone to visit him in his cottage, to find out why he is (in her eyes) deserting her. Pressed, he reluctantly reveals that it is because people have been injuring her good name by gossiping that he wants to marry her. She exclaims that it is "...too absurd – too soon – to think of, by far!" He bitterly agrees that it is absurd, but when she corrects him, saying that it is only "too soon", he is emboldened to ask once again for her hand in marriage. She accepts, and the two are quietly wed.
Analysis
Far from the Madding Crowd offers in ample measure the details of English rural life that Hardy so relished. Hardy took the title from Thomas GrayThomas Gray
Thomas Gray was a poet, letter-writer, classical scholar and professor at Cambridge University.-Early life and education:...
's poem Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard is a poem by Thomas Gray, completed in 1750 and first published in 1751. The poem’s origins are unknown, but it was partly inspired by Gray’s thoughts following the death of the poet Richard West in 1742. Originally titled Stanza's Wrote in a Country...
(1751):
- Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife
- Their sober wishes never learn'd to stray;
- Along the cool sequester'd vale of life
- They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.
"Madding" means "frenzied" here. The title may be ironic: the five main characters – Bathsheba, Troy, Boldwood, Oak, and Fanny Robin – are all passionate beings who find the "vale of life" neither quiet nor cool.
Hardy's growing taste for tragedy
Tragedy
Tragedy is a form of art based on human suffering that offers its audience pleasure. While most cultures have developed forms that provoke this paradoxical response, tragedy refers to a specific tradition of drama that has played a unique and important role historically in the self-definition of...
is also evident in the novel: Fanny, Troy, and Boldwood all come to bad ends. Certain incidents, such as Fanny's pregnancy with an illegitimate child and Boldwood's sudden lapse into murderous violence, foreshadow events in Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented, also known as Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman, Tess of the d'Urbervilles or just Tess, is a novel by Thomas Hardy, first published in 1891. It initially appeared in a censored and serialised version, published by the British...
, where (as in Jude the Obscure
Jude the Obscure
Jude the Obscure, the last of Thomas Hardy's novels, began as a magazine serial and was first published in book form in 1895. The book was burned publicly by William Walsham How, Bishop of Wakefield, in that same year. Its hero, Jude Fawley, is a working-class young man who dreams of becoming a...
) the protagonist
Protagonist
A protagonist is the main character of a literary, theatrical, cinematic, or musical narrative, around whom the events of the narrative's plot revolve and with whom the audience is intended to most identify...
is plagued by relentless misfortunes, and dies young at the end. In Madding Crowd, however, the fates still favour the lead character, who escapes two unfortunate entanglements, survives the mistakes of her youth, and finally finds contentment.
The book might also be described as an early piece of feminist
Feminism
Feminism is a collection of movements aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights and equal opportunities for women. Its concepts overlap with those of women's rights...
literature, since it features an independent woman with the courage to defy convention by running a farm herself. Although Bathsheba's passionate nature leads her into serious errors of judgment, Hardy endows her with sufficient resilience, intelligence, and good luck to overcome her youthful folly.
Finally, in Far from the Madding Crowd Hardy explores the proper basis for a happy marriage. Bathsheba's physical attraction to the broadsword
Broadsword
Broadsword may refer to:*Broadsword , a military sword used by heavy cavalry during the 17th to early 19th centuriesIn more modern times, it has also been used to refer to:...
-wielding Troy leads to a disastrous marriage that might have ended in financial ruin. A marriage to the strait-laced Boldwood, to whom she is bound only by feelings of guilt and obligation, would have meant emotional suffocation. Gabriel Oak is her colleague, friend, and advocate. He offers her true comradeship and sound farming skills; and, although she initially spurns him, telling him she doesn't love him, he turns out to be the right man to make her happy.
The novel and Hardy's Wessex
- Hardy first employed the term "WessexThomas Hardy's WessexThe English author Thomas Hardy set all of his major novels in the south and southwest of England. He named the area "Wessex" after the medieval Anglo-Saxon kingdom that existed in this part of that country prior to the Norman Conquest. Although the places that appear in his novels actually exist,...
" in Far from the Madding Crowd to describe the "partly real, partly dream-country" that unifies his novels of Southwest England. He found the word in the pages of early English history as a designation for an extinct, pre-Norman Conquest kingdom. In the first edition, the word "Wessex" is used only once, in chapter 50; Hardy extended the reference for the 1895 edition. - The village of PuddletownPuddletownPuddletown is a village in Dorset, England, 5 miles east of Dorchester in the River Piddle valley. The village has a population of 1,177 , of which 30.3% are retired....
, near Dorchester, is the inspiration for the novel's Weatherbury. Dorchester, in turn, inspired Hardy's Casterbridge. - In The Mayor of CasterbridgeThe Mayor of CasterbridgeThe Mayor of Casterbridge , subtitled "The Life and Death of a Man of Character", is a tragic novel by British author Thomas Hardy. It is set in the fictional town of Casterbridge . The book is one of Hardy's Wessex novels, all set in a fictional rustic England...
, Hardy briefly mentions two characters from Far from the Madding Crowd– Farmer Everdene and Farmer Boldwood, both in happier days.
Honours
- The book finished 10th on the GuardianThe GuardianThe Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
's list of greatest love stories of all time.
Adaptations
An 1882 stage adaptation, written by Hardy with J. Comyns CarrJ. Comyns Carr
Joseph William Comyns Carr was an English drama and art critic, gallery director, author, poet, playwright and theatre manager....
starred Marion Terry
Marion Terry
Marion Bessie Terry was an English actress. In a career spanning half a century, she played leading roles in more than 125 plays. Always in the shadow of her more famous sister Ellen, Terry nevertheless achieved considerable success in the plays of W. S...
.
There are several films based on this book. The best known is John Schlesinger
John Schlesinger
John Richard Schlesinger, CBE was an English film and stage director and actor.-Early life:Schlesinger was born in London into a middle-class Jewish family, the son of Winifred Henrietta and Bernard Edward Schlesinger, a physician...
's 1967 adaptation
Far from the Madding Crowd (1967 film)
Far from the Madding Crowd is a 1967 British drama film directed by John Schlesinger, adapted from the book of the same name by Thomas Hardy. It was Schlesinger's fourth film and marked a stylistic shift away from his earlier works which explored contemporary urban mores. The cinematography was by...
starring Julie Christie
Julie Christie
Julie Frances Christie is a British actress. Born in British India to English parents, at the age of six Christie moved to England, where she attended boarding school....
, Terence Stamp
Terence Stamp
Terence Henry Stamp is an English actor. Since starting his career in 1962 he has appeared in over 60 films. His title role as Billy Budd in his film debut earned Stamp an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor and a BAFTA nomination for Best Newcomer.His other major roles include...
, Peter Finch
Peter Finch
Peter Finch was a British-born Australian actor. He is best remembered for his role as "crazed" television anchorman Howard Beale in the film Network, which earned him a posthumous Academy Award for Best Actor, his fifth Best Actor award from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, and a...
, and Alan Bates
Alan Bates
Sir Alan Arthur Bates CBE was an English actor, who came to prominence in the 1960s, a time of high creativity in British cinema, when he demonstrated his versatility in films ranging from the popular children’s story Whistle Down the Wind to the "kitchen sink" drama A Kind of Loving...
. The others are:
- Far from the Madding Crowd (1915)Far from the Madding Crowd (1915 film)Far from the Madding Crowd is a 1915 British silent drama film directed by Laurence Trimble and starring Florence Turner, Henry Edwards and Malcolm Cherry. It is an adaptation of the novel Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy.-Cast:...
- Far from the Madding Crowd (1998)Far from the Madding Crowd (1998 film)Far from the Madding Crowd is a 1998 drama television film adaptation of the Thomas Hardy novel of the same name....
There have also been several radio plays, a musical (2000) and an opera, Far from the Madding Crowd by Andrew Downes
Andrew Downes (composer)
Andrew Downes is a British classical composer.Downes was born in Handsworth, Birmingham. In 1969, he won a choral scholarship to St. John's College, Cambridge, where he gained an MA degree specializing in composition, and in 1974 went on to study with Herbert Howells at the Royal College of Music...
(2006).
As of 2008, David Nicholls
David Nicholls (writer)
-Background:Nicholls is the middle of three siblings. He attended Barton Peveril sixth-form college at Eastleigh, Hampshire, from 1983 to 1985 , and playing a wide range of roles in college drama productions...
is adapting the novel for BBC Films
BBC Films
BBC Films is the feature film-making arm of the BBC. It has produced or co-produced some of the most successful British films of recent years, including An Education, StreetDance 3D, Fish Tank, Stage Beauty, A Cock and Bull Story, Nativity! and Match Point.It aims to make strong British films with...
.
Tamara Drewe
Tamara Drewe
Tamara Drewe is a weekly comic strip serial by Posy Simmonds published in The Guardian's Review section. The strip is based upon a modern reworking of Thomas Hardy's nineteenth century novel Far from the Madding Crowd....
is a comic strip serial based upon a modern reworking of the novel by Posy Simmonds
Posy Simmonds
Rosemary Elizabeth "Posy" Simmonds MBE is a British newspaper cartoonist and writer and illustrator of children's books. She is best known for her long association with The Guardian, for which she has drawn the cartoons Gemma Bovery and Tamara Drewe , both later published as books...
. The mischievous valentine becomes an e-mail, while death in childbirth becomes death from a drug overdose. It was adapted into a film of the same name
Tamara Drewe (film)
Tamara Drewe is a 2010 comedy film directed by Stephen Frears.The screenplay was written by Moira Buffini, based on the newspaper comic strip of the same name written by Posy Simmonds...
directed by Stephen Frears
Stephen Frears
Stephen Arthur Frears is an English film director.-Early life:Frears was born in Leicester, England to Ruth M., a social worker, and Dr Russell E. Frears, a general practitioner and accountant. He did not find out that his mother was Jewish until he was in his late 20s...
in 2010.
In Autumn 2008, English Touring Theatre (ETT) toured Britain with a new stage adaptation of Far from the Madding Crowd directed by Kate Saxon
Kate Saxon
Kate Saxon is a British freelance theatre director who lives in London. She is Associate Director of Shared Experience Theatre.- Theatre :Kate Saxon's productions include the premiere of Mark Healy's adaptation of Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd , for English Touring Theatre and of Fowles' The...
(ETT).
External links
- Helen Paterson Allingham's illustrations for the serial edition, with extensive commentary, from Victorian Web.
- Andrew DownesAndrew Downes (composer)Andrew Downes is a British classical composer.Downes was born in Handsworth, Birmingham. In 1969, he won a choral scholarship to St. John's College, Cambridge, where he gained an MA degree specializing in composition, and in 1974 went on to study with Herbert Howells at the Royal College of Music...
operaOperaOpera is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text and musical score, usually in a theatrical setting. Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery, and costumes and sometimes includes dance...
Far from the Madding Crowd on DVD http://www.andrewdownes.com - Far From the Madding Crowd Map