The Acting Head, by Judy Sproxton

Recent Writing

Acting Head — Sun, 29 May 2011 13:07:00 +0000

I have recently written the librettos for two operas with music by composer Richard Springate. The first ‘The Raffle’ is being produced in a concert version at the Shipston Proms on June 19th 2011.

Tickets are availble from www.oxboffice.com

The second opera ‘The Message in a Bottle’ will also be produced in due cpourse

The Women of Muriel Spark

Acting Head — Tue, 24 May 2011 11:03:30 +0000

From Caroline Rose in The Comforters to Margaret Murchie in her most recent novel Symposium, Muriel Spark conveys exceptional insight in revealing the minds of her women characters. These women are not exemplary figures, however,. Some are clearly flawed and wilfully contrive their own malevolent relationships.

The women Judy Sproxton discusses are expressions of Muriel Spark’s extensive and imaginative creativity. For all their essential individuality, they nonetheless appear as fragments in an existence that can never be totally understood.

The Women of Muriel Spark (1992) Available from Amazon

Violence and Religion

Acting Head — Tue, 24 May 2011 11:03:08 +0000

This book examines a recurrent theme in history: that of the tension between religious faith and political and militant action. It offers a detailed and fascinating reading of the writings of some of the major figures of the time including Calvin, d’Aubigne, Cromwell, Winstanley and poet Andrew Marvell and explores the division between their different understanding of the self-interest of humanity and the will of God.

Christopher Hill wrote, ‘Judy Sproxton is unusual in having a deep knowledge both of the French civil wars of the 16th century and of the 17th century English Revolution. Even more unusually, she is soaked in the literature of the two countries. In consequence her work sheds much new light on both’.

Violence and Religion (1995) Available from Amazon

The Idiom of Love

Acting Head — Tue, 24 May 2011 11:02:44 +0000

This book discusses the differences in the accounts of love to be found in the work of writers as distinct as Petrarch and Donne. It shows how the idiom of love became an idiom of life, referring to the dimensions of existence, which, like love often enforce a confrontation with the self.
It examines the ways in which love has been conceived and expressed in Western Europe from the invention of the sonnet until the seventeenth century tragedies of Jean Racine.

Muriel Spark said, ‘Judy Sproxton has a wide encompassment of scholarly reference. Her book The Idiom of Love ranges far, and penetrates deeply into one of the most fascinating of all subjects’.

Fay Weldon called the book ‘Elegant and eloquent’.

The Idiom of Love (2000) Available from Amazon