Elizabethan Club
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The Elizabethan Club is a literary discussion club at Yale University named for Gloriana and her era. Its library contains Elizabethan folios and quartos, sketches and engravings, including a first folio of Shakespeare and first editions of Milton's Paradise Lost, Spenser's Faerie Queene, and Francis Bacon's Essayes. The library collection is only available for member and guest inspection at certain times of the week, or to outside researchers by request, at Yale's Beinecke Library several blocks away. Tea is served daily with a rotating selction of cookies or sandwiches. Dues are $10 for life. A club tie features a repeating small pattern of a phoenix.
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[edit] History
The club began during the literary renaissance at the university between 1909 and 1920, and attracted such book collectors as William Lyon Phelps, Chauncey Brewster Tinker, and John Berdan. Cole Porter, initially rejected as a member, signified his indignation with the song "The Lizzie", and eventually was admitted. It has a reciprocal relationship with the Signet Society at Harvard, and the two organizations sporadically hold a lawn croquet tournament, for which a handled silver pudding cup in a wooden case serves as the trophy.
The Elizabethan Club's Library was founded in 1911 by a gift of books (and $100,000) from Alexander Smith Cochran, who had graduated in 1896, and has some three hundred volumes of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature, including the first four folios of Shakespeare, the Huth Shakespeare quartos, and first or early quartos of all the major dramatists. In a back parlor where tea is served, a large portrait of the Virgine Queene herself presides.
[edit] Activity
The club is dedicated to conversation, tea, the art of the book, and literature, focused on -- but not exclusively of -- the Elizabethan era. Inside the clubhouse, current British and American periodicals are neatly lined up on tables, configurations of other little tables, sofas and chairs provide many nooks for quiet discussion or reading, and upstairs even includes a room dedicated almost entirely to archives of Punch, the former English magazine of humor and satire. Outside, the club has a deep back garden with a pavilion, understated elegant plantings, and featuring a bust of the Bard himself, to facilitate the enjoyments of finger sandwiches, cookies and croquet.
Yale's annual Maynard Mack Lecture, named for the longtime member of the faculty and former chair of the English department, (Yale B.A. 1932, Ph.D. in 1936) is endowed under the auspices of the Elizabethan Club. It brings to campus speakers primarily about performance of the drama of Shakespeare's period. Maynard Mack lecturers have included Sam Waterston, Joanne Akalaitis, John Barton, Tony Church, Lisa Harrow, Michael Kahn, Mark Lamos and Carey Perloff.
[edit] Membership
The "Lizzie" accepts about fifteen members from the sophomore, junior, and senior classes yearly. Membership is by a nomination and selection process, and candidates may additionally include Yale graduate students, faculty and administrators, and prominent literary figures.
Accomplished members have included, as may be expected, a large number of published authors and cultural figures. Among them have been:
- John M. Berdan, author, scholar of Tudor history and literature
- William F. Buckley, Jr., author, journalist, conservative commentator
- A. Bartlett Giamatti, scholar, former Yale President, Commissioner of Major League Baseball
- William Lyon Phelps, author, critic, scholar
- Cole Porter, composer
- Chauncey Brewster Tinker (Yale BA 1899, MA '00, PhD '02), Yale Professor of English, translator (Beowulf), scholar (especially of James Boswell),
[edit] Architecture
- The Elizabethan Club is housed in a landmarked well-preserved Federal building, the Leverett Griswold House, built circa 1775 and renovated between 1810-1815 and 1995-1996. It was previously owned successively by the Leverett Griswold and Wilbur Gilbert families. Pictured at: [[1]]
Architectural historian Patrick Pinnell in his 1999 history of Yale's campus says this "crisp little white house... shows off an early example of a gable fronting the street, rather than being turned parallel to it... predicting the temple-front individuality of Greek Revival..."[[2]] Indeed it provides the only remaining Federal-era aspect on this stretch of College Street, one that Pinnell discusses as having been in the mid 19th century a residential street.[[3]]
- Kenneth Boroson designed the rear garden in 1995-1996.
[edit] References
- Holden, Reuben A., Yale: A Pictorial History, Yale University Press, New Haven and London. 1967.
- Parks, Stephen, The Elizabethan Club of Yale University and Its Library, New Haven and London, 1986.
- Pinnell, Patrick L., The Campus Guide: Yale University, Princeton University Press, 1999.
- Birnbach, Lisa, ed. The Official Preppy Handbook, Workman Publishing, 1980
