Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World

In Act V Scene I of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, the character Miranda declares ‘O wonder! How many Godly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O Brave new world! That has such people in it!’. It is perhaps the only line of Shakespeare to be made famous by someone else, for Brave New World is not associated with Prospero’s Island of sprites, magic and wondrous noises, but with Aldous Huxley’s dystopia of eugenics, soma and zero gravity tennis. A world, incidentally, upon which literary references to Shakespeare would be entirely lost. Brave New World is a lurid, satirical dystopia in which the hopes and fears of the 1930s are writ large and yet the book seems uncannily prescient about our own time. But why did Huxley feel the need to write it and is Brave New World really as dystopian as we are led to believe?

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Guests

• David Bradshaw 2 episodes
  
• Daniel Pick No other episodes
  
• Michele Barrett 2 episodes
  

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Programme ID: b00jn8bc

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00jn8bc

Auto-category: 823.912 (English fiction, 1900-1945)

Hello (First sentence from this episode)

Hello, in Shakespeare's play The Tempest, the character Miranda declares when confronted by a group of young men, of whom on her isolated island she has never seen the like, oh wonder how many godly creatures are there here, how beauteous mankind is, oh brave new world that has such people in it.