Notes and Queries articles from December 1995

Notes and Queries archives from December 1995

Old English poetic compounds.
December 1, 1995... Much good work, based on new thinking, is being done on Old English metre, and Jun Terasawa's Nominal Compounds in Old English. A Metrical Approach [Anglistica, XXVII (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1994). Pp. x + 138] is a valuable...

'Juliana,' 719: the this gied wraece.
December 1, 1995... Bidde ic monna gehwone gumena cynnes, the this gied wraece, thaet he mec neodful bi noman minum gemyne modig, . . . (Juliana 718b-721a)(1) Editors and translators of this passage are agreed that the antecedent of the relative clause the...

Napier XLII and Wulfstan's Homily V.
December 1, 1995... The body of Napier XLII consists of a free translation, with some adaptation and augmentation, of Adso's De Antichristo.(1) To this has been added, as Wilcox has shown, 'a beginning and ending compiled from vernacular homilies, predominantly...

Abbreviations in the orthographies of 'The Owl and the Nightingale' and their textual implications.
December 1, 1995... Wells was the first to observe that the single scribe of the Caligula A.ix manuscript of The Owl and the Nightingale [hereafter C] reproduced two spelling systems [hereafter I and II], differing in half-a-dozen features. There have been further...

New light on the 'summergame.'
December 1, 1995... The Middle English Dictionary defines the summergame as 'a summer entertainment or festivity', and summergame light as 'a candle burned in church on a summer feast day, probably the feast of the Nativity of St John the Baptist, June 24' (Middle...

Langland's tree of Charity and Usk's wexing tree.
December 1, 1995... The theory that Thomas Usk, author of The Testament of Love, borrowed material from the C-text of Piers Plowman (notably the allegorical Tree of Charity from passus XVIII) has remained unexamined and unchallenged for too long. This is...

New dating for 'Ecce sedes posita in caelo': a sermon by Richard Fleming at the Council of Constance.
December 1, 1995... Scholars of the Latin sermons delivered at the Council of Constance (1414-18) are much indebted to Johannes B. Schneyer, the doyen of medieval Latin sermon studies, for a series of articles he published during the late 1960s and early 1970s...

Tyndale's 'Bruterar' 'Prophesier, soothsayer': Welsh 'brudiwr' 'soothsayer.'
December 1, 1995... 'There shall not be found among you,' declares Deuteronomy 18:10, 'any one that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire, or that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch.' Where AV has 'that useth...

Words for OED from the Newdigate newsletters. (Oxford English Dictionary)
December 1, 1995... The Newdigate newsletters at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC, provide the following supplements to OED, among them six intransitive and four transitive antedatings of command in chief, v., and four antedatings of more than a...

Donne through contemporary eyes: new light on his participation in the Convocation of 1626.
December 1, 1995... The second parliament of Charles I assembled on 6 February 1626. On the following day the clergy of the province of Canterbury met in Convocation at Westminster Abbey. The connection of these events is explained by R. C. Bald: Convocation,...

Elizabeth Middleton: early modern copyist.
December 1, 1995... Elizabeth Middleton was 'discovered' for early modern women's writing by Margaret Ezell in The Patriarch's Wife (1987). A manuscript signed by Middleton was used by Ezell to support her claim that despite the lack of published women's writing...

An allusion to Henry More's poetry by Thomas Vaughan.
December 1, 1995... In debunking the idiom of common alchemists Thomas Vaughan in his Magia Adamica of 1650 writes: Talk not then of flint stones and antimonie; they are the poet's pin-dust and egg-shells.(1) Vaughan's expression is striking and curious. What...

Elders' ears in Appleton House.
December 1, 1995... In 'Upon Appleton House', Marvell in his walk around the estate comes to a grove where, The Nightingale does here make choice To sing the Tryals of her Voice. Low Shrubs she sits in, and adorns With Musick high the squatted Thorns. But...

Chrysostom, Prudentius and the fiends of 'Paradise Lost.'
December 1, 1995... This note aims to redress the neglect of one Patristic source in studies of Milton's demonology, and to point out some unnoticed debts to a more familiar one. At Paradise Lost II.746-814, Sin reminds her father how, upon issuing from his head,...

The Duchess of Newcastle and John Lacy's 'Sauny the Scot.'
December 1, 1995... In John Lacy's 1667 adaptation of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, he changes the names of many of the play's secondary characters, reflecting his decision to set his play in Restoration Britain. With one intriguing exception, however,...

Sir Alexander Cumming and Defoe's 'Mercator.'
December 1, 1995... As is well known, in May 1713 a journal entitled Mercator: or, Commerce Retrieved, to appear three times a week, was launched to support Bolingbroke's proposed Treaty of Commerce with France; and, though the Treaty was rejected in the House of...

A contemporary annotated manuscript of Swift's poem 'A Character, Panegyric, and Description of the Legion Club.'
December 1, 1995... The Manuscripts and Special Collections Department of Nottingham University Library contains a previously undiscovered, early eighteenth-century, manuscript copy of Jonathan Swift's poem 'A Character, Panegyric, and Description of the Legion...

Swift's 'As Sure as God's in Gloc'ster' and the assurance of the Moderns.
December 1, 1995... Jonathan Swift's Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift, D.S.P.D. includes 18 lines (lines 281-98) reflecting adversely on Thomas Woolston (1670-1733), the clergyman and freethinker who questioned Christ's miracles in a series of Discourses (1727-29)...

Popean order and Epicurean chaos in 'The Dunciad, in Four Books.'
December 1, 1995... The critical apparatus prefixed to and pervading The Dunciad obviously targets the scholastic pretensions and follies of Theobald and Bentley. Yet I have come across no examination of the connection between Pope's addition of 'Ricardus...

The death of Sterne's Yorick.
December 1, 1995... As early as 1760 the account of Yorick in Tristram Shandy, I.x-xii, culminating in the parson's death and the inscription on his tomb, 'Alas, poor Yorick', was reprinted in the Gentlemen's Magazine as an autobiographical sketch of Sterne...

A Classical source for Johnson on Augustus and Lord Bute.
December 1, 1995... According to Boswell (Life, II, 470-1), Johnson observed of Lord Bute, 'It was said of Augustus, that it would have been better for Rome that he had never been born, or had never died. So it would have been better for this nation if Lord Bute...

A deathbed anecdote of Dr. Johnson.
December 1, 1995... From the moment of his death, anecdotes about the last days of Samuel Johnson abounded. They particularly concerned his mental state and the extent to which the Anglican beliefs to which he had adhered all his life eased his final days. By the...

John Henry Colls and the 'Remarks on the Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides.'
December 1, 1995... Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides was published on 1 October 1785. A few weeks later appeared Remarks on the Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, in a letter to James Boswell, Esq. (hereafter Remarks), signed 'Verax', and dated 'London,...

Readings in Medieval English Romance.
December 1, 1995... This collection of essays is the result of the third conference on 'Romance in Medieval England', held at the University of Bristol in 1992. An introductory page tells us that the central themes were the wide-ranging ones of genre, nationalism,...

New Readings of Late Medieval Love Poems.
December 1, 1995... The seven essays collected here focus on fifteenth-century examples of what R. H. Robbins termed 'courtly love aunters': English responses to the French genre of the dit amoureux, drawing not only on the tradition of love allegory in the style...

English Mystics of the Middle Ages.
December 1, 1995... This anthology is very welcome. It provides enough work of the major figures - Rolle, the author of The Cloud of Unknowing, Hilton, Julian of Norwich, and Margery Kempe - to show what they have in common as English mystical writers of the...

The Vision of Edmund Leversedge: A 15th-century Account of a Visit to the Otherworld edited from BL MSS Additional 34,193 with an Introduction, Commentary and Glossary.
December 1, 1995... Edmund Leversedge was a medieval fashion victim. His near-death experience in May 1465 involves him being punished by similarly clad gallant-demons, who claim him as one of their own and display his extravagant sartorial tastes in a humiliating...

The Poetics of Personification.
December 1, 1995... Paxson's aims for his study of personification (in the Cambridge Literature, Culture, Theory series) are ambitious by any standards: the provision of a taxonomy; the production of a poetics; a study of selected narrative texts; some suggestions...

the Classical Legacy in Renaissance Poetry.
December 1, 1995... It is a common anxiety among university teachers of English literature that today's students seem to know little of the classical culture that constitutes such a ubiquitous point of reference and source of inspiration for so much English poetry...

Early Cambridge Theatres: College, University and Town Stages, 1464-1720.
December 1, 1995... The Records of Early English Drama (REED) project is a remarkable one, but one of the most remarkable things about it is how little it appears to be being used. One would expect its influence to be strongly felt in studies of drama in the...

The Usurer's Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in Sixteenth-Century England.
December 1, 1995... This important new study of the centrality of fictions of women to the rhetoric of humanism is impressive in its breadth of scholarship and stimulating in its challenging of received ideas. As its title implies, this book seeks to enhance our...

The English Faust Book: A Critical Edition Based on the Text of 1592.
December 1, 1995... In providing the first scholarly edition of the English Faust Book (EFB), John Henry Jones has performed a major service to students of the Faust legend in English literature. Compiled in about 1588 from the German Faust Book (GFB) of 1587,...

Approaches to Teaching Spenser's Faerie Queene.
December 1, 1995... Spenser is by no means the easiest Renaissance author to teach to undergraduates although some students do become keen devotees. The perennial problems are those of teaching narrative poetry, deciding exactly how much of the text to set and how...

Edmund Spenser: A Literary Life.
December 1, 1995... Spenser is by no means the easiest Renaissance author to teach to undergraduates although some students do become keen devotees. The perennial problems are those of teaching narrative poetry, deciding exactly how much of the text to set and how...

Mirrors of Celestial Grace: Patristic Theology in Spenser's Allegory.
December 1, 1995... There has been something of a backlash against New Historicist readings of Renaissance literature in terms of its cultural, social, and political existence, and an awareness that perhaps the religious significance of literary texts has been...

Spenser's Famous Flight: A Renaissance Idea of a Literary Career.
December 1, 1995... There has been something of a backlash against New Historicist readings of Renaissance literature in terms of its cultural, social, and political existence, and an awareness that perhaps the religious significance of literary texts has been...

The Power of Eloquence and English Renaissance Literature.
December 1, 1995... Neil Rhodes's book is exciting and perceptive about English Renaissance literature, thin and often misleading about the power of eloquence. This is unfortunate, because the first part of the book deals with the latter subject. Impatient readers...

The Authorship of Shakespeare's Plays: A Sociolinguistic Study.
December 1, 1995... The title implies that Shakespeare's plays may well have been written by Anon., and conversely. The rest of this slim, repetitive, and expensive monograph, including a seven-page summary avowedly aimed at any literary scholars who would rather...

Biblical References in Shakespeare's Comedies.
December 1, 1995... This book consists largely of chapters on individual Shakespeare comedies, from The Two Gentlemen of Verona to All's Well that Ends Well, which list lines from the plays immediately followed by discussions of their biblical references. The...

Anthony and Cleopatra.
December 1, 1995... The Tragedie of Anthonie, and Cleopatra was first printed in the 1623 Folio. It is not certain that the play was acted in Shakespeare's lifetime, even if the King's Men were tempted to perform it. Michael Neill makes a point of this in his...

William Shakespeare: Antony and Cleopatra.
December 1, 1995... The Tragedie of Anthonie, and Cleopatra was first printed in the 1623 Folio. It is not certain that the play was acted in Shakespeare's lifetime, even if the King's Men were tempted to perform it. Michael Neill makes a point of this in his...

Macbeth (Shakespeare in Performance).
December 1, 1995... One of the services performed by this series is to provide volumes on both the widely studied and the lesser known plays. Tastes change and the theatrical repertoire follows suit. Both Love's Labour's Lost and Titus Andronicus are held in...

King Henry VIII (Shakespeare in Performance).
December 1, 1995... One of the services performed by this series is to provide volumes on both the widely studied and the lesser known plays. Tastes change and the theatrical repertoire follows suit. Both Love's Labour's Lost and Titus Andronicus are held in...

The Real Shakespeare: Retrieving the Early Years, 1564-1594.
December 1, 1995... The Real Shakespeare begins: 'Shakespeare was a Stratford butcher's son, whose father took him away from school to help in hard times'; one may be pardoned for imagining this to be a shot across the bows of bourgeois complacency by some...

The Influence of John Donne: His Uncollected Seventeenth-Century Printed Verse.
December 1, 1995... The term 'uncollected' in this book's title might mislead prospective purchasers: the list of works it alludes to on pages xi-xvii shows that no Donne verse hitherto unknown to modern readers is to be revealed. Indeed, of the 99 poems...

Donne and the Politics of Conscience in Early Modern England.
December 1, 1995... To John Carey's apostate and Thomas Docherty's undone Donne, Meg Lota Brown adds the casuist Donne, in explaining the old chestnut, his scepticism. Donne asserts that 'to me there appeares no other interpretation safe, but this, that there is...

'This Booke of Starres': Learning to Read George Herbert.
December 1, 1995... This book's imagined audience is 'not so much the expert on Herbert... as any reader who has a general interest in poetry, and in what reading poetry involves'. What might the especial merits of such an approach be, besides a prospective...

Approaches to Teaching Montaigne's Essays.
December 1, 1995... Based on the practicalities of teaching Montaigne at all levels, this unusual book serves both as a pedagogical guide and as an etat present of critical approaches. The preparation of the volumes in this series involved wide-ranging surveys of...

Writing and the Rise of Finance: Capital Satires of the Early Eighteenth Century.
December 1, 1995... Rather than being necessarily ground-breaking work, this study of how credit replaced landed wealth as the basis for English political economy during the early eighteenth century - and how the accompanying shifts in social behaviour were...

Samuel Johnson and the Politics of Hanoverian England.
December 1, 1995... 1994 saw the publication of two works on Johnson and politics, that under review and Jonathan Clark's Samuel Johnson. Literature, religion and English cultural politics from the Restoration to Romanticism (Cambridge University Press). Both are...

The Patriot Opposition to Walpole. Politics, Poetry and National Myth.
December 1, 1995... In her interesting and well-written book, Dr Gerrard re-examines a much-studied question, the causes, nature, and consequences of the relationships between politics and literature in the age of Walpole. Her particular subject is not the Tories,...

English Comedy.
December 1, 1995... Intended as a companion volume to mark the publication of Anne Barton's Essays, Mainly Shakespearean by Cambridge University Press, English Comedy is at once a tribute to and reflection of Professor Barton's influence on critical thinking about...

Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman.
December 1, 1995... This paperback edition of Wollstonecraft's Maria, with a new Introduction by Anne Mellor, is a welcome and accessible addition to the all-too-short list of texts in print by women writers of the Romantic period. The novel could fit well into a...

Blake and the Idea of the Book.
December 1, 1995... There is no shortage of publications on William Blake and, in particular, his illuminated books. No other writer, artist, or book designer has made such an original contribution to the idea of the book, which explain's Viscomi's choice of...

The Poems of Charlotte Smith.
December 1, 1995... 'None of the canonical male Romantic poets who lived long enough to grow old got better' says Stuart Curran in his brief but admirably informative and forthright introduction to The Poems of Charlotte Smith. Smith is in many ways typical of the...

The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, vol. 8, A Supplement of New Letters.
December 1, 1995... Seven volumes of letters from William and Dorothy Wordsworth were published between 1967 and 1988, and towards the end of this period additional family papers were found in an attic in Carlisle. This supplementary volume has been published to...

Imageless Truths: Shelley's Poetic Fictions.
December 1, 1995... After Wasserman, after de Man, Miller, Hogle, can anything arrest the spiral of Shelley's self-validated metaphorical excess into the abysm or the intense inane? Epistemological anchorages have been persuasively urged in Shelley's view of...

The Art of the Brontes.
December 1, 1995... Charlotte Bronte hoped to become a professional artist in order to escape the drudgery of governessing, and exhibited two drawings at the Leeds exhibition of 1834. Their timid insipidity was due to the training practices of the day, which...

Parentage and Inheritance in the Novels of Charles Dickens.
December 1, 1995... Parentage and Inheritance is mainly concerned with six Dickens novels - Oliver Twist, Dombey and Son, Bleak House, Little Dorrit, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend - and two central themes. First, it explores ways in which various forms...

'A Tale of Two Cities': An Annotated Bibliography.
December 1, 1995... It is probable that A Tale of Two Cities is the single most widely read of all the novels of Charles Dickens, at any rate after A Christmas Carol and The Pickwick Papers. The brevity of the former (easily made into a school play) and the...

The Oxford Pamphlets, Leaflets and Circulars of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson.
December 1, 1995... The publication of a complete and annotated collection of Charles Dodgson's surviving ephemeral printed works is a formidable task. This volume, the first of six, includes all the known pamphlets, leaflets, and circulars which appeared 'in...

William Morris: News From Nowhere and Other Writings.
December 1, 1995... The first thing to be said about this book is that it is not just a reprint of the popular edition by Asa Briggs published in 1962 with the same title. In contrast with the earlier unannotated edition's brief introduction, Clive Wilmer has over...

The Tables Turned, or Nupkins Awakened: A Socialist Interlude.
December 1, 1995... The Tables Turned, or Nupkins Awakened: A Socialist Interlude was first presented on 15 October 1887 in the hall of the Socialist League; the play was anonymously reviewed in the Pall Mall Gazette on 17 October, the bold headline running...

A Spacious Vision: Essays on Hardy.
December 1, 1995... This book is dedicated to Dr James Gibson, the chairman of the Thomas Hardy Society and distinguished editor of his Complete Poems. There are essays by some leading Hardy critics, poems by Simon Curtis and J.P. Ward, and, most memorable of all,...

The Correspondence of Henry James and Henry Adams: 1877-1914.
December 1, 1995... George Monteiro has collected thirty-six letters together, forming the surviving correspondence between Henry James and Henry Adams. There are four letters from James to Mrs Henry Adams (nee Marian Hooper). There must have been more letters,...

Degeneration, Culture and the Novel: 1880-1940.
December 1, 1995... In July 1896, Oscar Wilde petitioned the Home Secretary for release from prison on the grounds that his homosexuality was a degenerate 'sexual madness' of a sort peculiar to the 'literary and aesthetic temperament', and that it belonged to a...

The Visionary D.H. Lawrence: Beyond Philosophy and Art.
December 1, 1995... In Thought, Words and Creativity (1976), F. R. Leavis refuted T. S. Eliot's well-known stricture that Lawrence had 'an incapacity for what we ordinarily call thinking', showing how what may appear initially to be anti-rationalist and...

The Collected Writings of T.E. Hulme.
December 1, 1995... The importance of T. E. Hulme in the history of modernism has never been in doubt: between the publication of his first articles in 1909 and his death in battle in 1917, he carved a niche for himself as the inventor of Imagism, as an expositor...

The Dead.
December 1, 1995... This volume is an addition to a popular series which, according to its general editor, is designed to 'provide college' students with an entree into the current critical and theoretical ferment in literary studies'. Already Joyce is represented...

The Early Poetry, vol.2, 'The Wanderings of Oisin' and Other Early Poems to 1895.
December 1, 1995... Our ideas of what constitutes a 'text' of a particular author have been drastically revised in recent times. The notion that there can be, in this world, a definitive text of any writer now seems, as Yeats might say, mere dreams. The quest for...

The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats, vol.3, 1901-1904.
December 1, 1995... It has been a long time coming, but it was worth waiting for. This is only the second volume of the Yeats Collected Letters to appear, volume I having been published in 1986; we have still to see volume II covering the years 1896 to 1900, not...

The Prose and the Passion: Anthropology, Literature and the writings of E.M. Forster.
December 1, 1995... Nigel Rapport is an anthropologist, and it is to his colleagues that his book is primarily addressed. It is deliberately personal in its approach, being intended as 'a riposte to a current social-scientific drive towards an authorless...

The Servant's Hand: English Fiction from Below.
December 1, 1995... The servant's hand examines, selectively, representations of servants in literature from Odysseus' housekeeper to Mrs Ramsay's Swiss maid, with particular reference to their appearance in some nineteenth-century fiction. Professor Robbins is...

Reading Dialogics.
December 1, 1995... Many of us who have turned to the writings of the Bakhtin School will have done so via The Dialogic Imagination, an accessible collection of essays detailing the principal applications of dialogism to literary study. In his prefatorial comments...

Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology.
December 1, 1995... Here is an anthology, the very inclusiveness of which attempts to re-focus our understanding of American poetry of the last fifty years on the premiss that we accept the importance of the postmodern analysis. Which writers who came to...

A History of Russian Women's Writing: 1820-1992.
December 1, 1995... In August 1875 Ivan Turgenev wrote to the young Elena Blaramberg with his opinion of the manuscript of a novel she had sent him: You are clearly talented but [your novel] . . . Naturally bears the stamp of immaturity . . . you return too...

An Anthology of Russian Women's Writing: 1772-1992.
December 1, 1995... In August 1875 Ivan Turgenev wrote to the young Elena Blaramberg with his opinion of the manuscript of a novel she had sent him: You are clearly talented but [your novel] . . . Naturally bears the stamp of immaturity . . . you return too...

Peer Gynt: A Dramatic Poem.
December 1, 1995... John Northam's new translation of Ibsen's Peer Gynt adds to those of Ginsbury, McFarlane, Meyer, and McLeish. Some translations - for example, Ginsbury's, Meyer's, and McLeish's - were commissioned for particular productions in 1944, 1962, and...

Hungarian Folksongs: Complete Collection, vol.1, Class A1, Nos. 1-416.
December 1, 1995... This is the English version of a Hungarian-language edition that finally saw the light of day in 1991, half a century after Bartok left Hungary for unhappy exile in the United States and more than a century after the earliest of the songs...