#gilbert sheldon

Our choir at Portsmouth are performing Haydn's Creation this weekend, with its fabulous depiction of chaos and light, so it was interesting to see what seems such an eighteenth century concept represented nearly 150 years earlier at Staunton Harold Church in Leicestershire. This is a rare example of a church built during the interregnum, and a Laudian one at that, at a time when what we know of today as Anglican worship, with the Book of Common Prayer and its formal style of dress and worship, was outlawed.

The church was commissioned by royalist activist Sir Robert Shirley, who died of smallpox in the Tower of London in 1656. Shirley was too young to have fought in the civil wars of the 1640s, but an example of a new royalist, ardently loyal to the banned rituals of the Church of England.

Reproduction in the church of a painting of Sir Robert by Robert Walker - it is not clear where the original resides. Evidently he was a handsome fellow, and managed to produce five children before his untimely death.

Yet his design, while Laudian in its inclusion of a high altar, contains little else to offend puritan sensibilities. It is plain in style, its only significant imagery on the ceiling being sufficiently abstract to avoid contravening parliamentary ordinances against superstitious images. It compares and contrasts chaos (including a black dog said to represent Cromwell) on the left and order on the right, including the word for God in Hebrew and Greek.

The design was completed after Shirley's death and Archbishop Gilbert Sheldon, a beneficiary of Shirley's will, erected this plaque at the entrance to the church, praising Shirley for doing the 'best things in the worst times' by building the church, as well as supporting 'distressed and orthodox' clergy who had lost their livings for refusing to support the puritan changes to the church.

BHOC: HOWARD THE DUCK #18

This was another comic book that I got rather than bought–another “extra” in one of those plastic-wrapped bundled of coverless comic books that my local drug store had begun to sell. I bought the bundle in question for other books, but this one came along with them, and thus it was mine. And to be honest, I really didn’t know what to make of it. Eventually, a few years later, HOWARD THE DUCK…

Each year thousands of people are attacked by Martians posing as human beings.  The only - repeat: ONLY - way to stop them is with the Martian handgreeting, pictured above.  This signal must be flashed within one half-second, or the loathsome alien will turn on you.

Fantagraphics will collect ‘The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers’ into four volumes