Notes and Queries articles from March 1997

Notes and Queries archives from March 1997

Scottish books in the Bodleian Library.
March 1, 1997... An exhibition in the summer of 1996, arranged in conjunction with the Eighth International Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Scottish Language and Literature held at Oxford, has led the organizer of both, Dr Sally Map-stone, to produce an...

An Irish precursor of Caedmon. (English poet)
March 1, 1997... Critics acknowledge Bede's account of Caedmon's composition of a poem in praise of the Creator as the first recorded Old English poetry. The event took place at the monastery of Whitby on the Cleveland coast between 657 and 680 during the reign...

Earl Godwin's son as a barnacle goose. (mythical bird born of driftwood or a tree; allegorical poetry)
March 1, 1997... In a poem written 1065-6, Godwin and his children are compared to the four rivers of paradise and the fountain that is their source. Then come ten lines that puzzled the editor Barlow.(1) The children, who boast that they have one mother, fall...

'The Owl and the Nightingale,' line 1539. (poetry)
March 1, 1997... In the C-text of The Owl and the Nightingale (British Library MS Cotton Caligula A.9 [C]), the first three words of line 1539 are this nan mon;(1) and most editors have chosen to emend to [Ni]s nan mon in accordance with the only other extant...

The source of John Lydgate's 'The Churl and the Bird.' (poet)
March 1, 1997... The immediate source of John Lydgate's The Churland the Bird has never been clearly established. The author himself describes his work as a translation from a 'Frenssh . . . paunflet'.(1) Schleich suggested that this was the Lai de l'Oiselet,...

An early paper copy of John Hardyng's 'Chronicle.' (15th century English author)
March 1, 1997... Seven articles on Hardyng's Chronicle have appeared since 1980, which in relative terms, describes a positive renaissance in the field.(1) Unfortunately, this new level of interest has not been accompanied by an edition of the second version of...

Thomas Wyatt, Anne Boleyn, and Henry VIII's lyric 'Pastime With Good Company.' (English poet; second Queen Consort of King Henry VIII of England)
March 1, 1997... In a previous note,(1) Robert Jungman employs a (then) recently noticed allusion in a poem by Wyatt to a motto used for a short time by Anne Boleyn, and in turn the joint similarity of each to a line in a lyric by Henry VIII, to argue that 'the...

Dromo: a minor dramatic character adopted for Protestant propaganda. (character in plays 'Adelphi' and 'Andria' by dramatist Terence)
March 1, 1997... Dromo is a stock comic dramatic character usually depicted as a servant and a messenger. He appears very briefly in both Adelphi and Andria by Terence(1) and makes his first appearance in English literature in the translation (probably by John...

Philip Sidney's letter to Charles L'Ecluse in 1577. (English poet; Viennese botanist)
March 1, 1997... James S. Osborn in his Young Philip Sidney prints the text, or rather the English translation, of a letter written from Philip Sidney from Prague on 8 April 1577. The addressee is a Charles L'Ecluse, better known under the name of Clusius, the...

Lyly's 'Campaspe' and the Tudor 'Owlglass.' (English dramatist John Lyly).
March 1, 1997... Critics have often commented on the way in which John Lyly raids the classics for material in his first play Campaspe (1584).(1) But it has not been noticed that at one point Lyly also turns to the less august tradition of the popularjest-book...

Persons cannibalized again. (Elizabethan Jesuit priest Robert Persons)
March 1, 1997... The most enduring work of the notorious Elizabethan Jesuit, Robert Persons, began life as Tile first booke of the Christian exercise, appertayning to resolution (Rouen, 1582). Its subsequent fate, most recently described by Ceri Sullivan,(1) is...

A new Marprelate allusion. (English author Martin Marprelate)
March 1, 1997... This article describes a previously overlooked contemporary reference to the Martin Marprelate affair, of particular interest because it attempts to accommodate Marprelate within classical literary models, and because it may shed light on the...

Greene's 'Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay' and 'A Most Wicked Worke of a Wretched Witch': a link. (plays in 1592 by English dramatist Robert Greene)
March 1, 1997... We know from Henslowe's Diary that Robert Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay was performed on 19 February and 25 March 1592 by Lord Strange's Men at the Rose Theatre.(1) The pamphlet A Most Wicked worke of a wretched Witch was entered in the...

'Locrine' and the Babington Plot. (English play 'The Lamentable Tragedie of Locrine' and Englishman Anthony Babington)
March 1, 1997... It has been shown that The Lamentable Tragedie of Locrine dates, in its original form, from before 1586, and that the printed version of 1595 represents a later revision by another hand.(1) This assertion rests on the evidence of a copy of the...

Ann Downriche's 'The French History' and Innocent Gentillet's Contre-Machiavel. (English author's obscure verse-narrative; French writer)
March 1, 1997... The reception of Machiavelli's political thought in early modern England has long been a subject of scholarly debate, in part because ideas similar to or more extreme than his were often attributed to him or combined with his own.(1)...

Arundel and Maltravers: a textual problem in Edward II. (play by English dramatist Christopher Marlowe)
March 1, 1997... Naming of parts is often inconsistent in the text of Marlowe's Edward II, but it is most problematic in the case of the minor character of the Earl of Arundel, who appears in three scenes in the middle of the play. 'Enter earle of Arundell'...

Nashe's dedicatees: William Beeston and Richard Lichfield. (English writer Thomas Nashe and characters to whom Nashe dedicated some of his works)
March 1, 1997... 1. William Beeston There is a famous passage in Strange Newes where Nashe speaks of the 'fatall banquet' which supposedly killed Robert Greene. It is the only mention of that banquet by one of its partakers, of whom the only ones named are...

Edmund Spenser's family: two notes and a query. (English poet)
March 1, 1997... Even though the Elizabethan historian William Camden lauded Edmund Spenser as the greatest of English poets, claiming that he had surpassed even Chaucer, nothing is known of his birth and very little about his boyhood.' Spenser himself claimed...

Spenser in Westminster: his marriage and his death. (English poet Edmund Spenser)
March 1, 1997... Edmund Spenser's praise of John Young, Bishop of Rochester, in the September Eclogue of The Shepheardes Calender may be regarded as a pious valediction to his early patron, whose service he left at the end of 1578. The Bishop's palace at...

Shakespeare, John Derricke, and Ireland: 'The Comedy of Errors,' III.ii.105-6. (William Shakespeare's play; Irish poet John Derricke)
March 1, 1997... T. W. Baldwin, in his massive study of The Comedy of Errors, takes as his starting point the suggestion that the play 'was written within the political and intellectual background of London in the late 'eighties, and the political background...

Romeo's niece: a note on 'Romeo and Juliet,' II.ii.167. (play by William Shakespeare)
March 1, 1997... One of Shakespeare's more notable cruxes occurs in the second act of Romeo and Juliet, in the 'balcony scene' (which is in fact a window scene). Towards the end of the exchange, after many vows, interruptions, and adieus, Juliet once again...

What Cicero said. (historical character Marcus Tullius Cicero in William Shakespeare's play Julius Caesar, I.ii)
March 1, 1997... In I.ii of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Caska describes for the benefit of Cassius and Brutus the circumstances of Antony's off-stage offer of a crown to Caesar. As Caska completes his tale of Antony's three offers, Caesar's refusal, his swoon,...

Narcissus, Olivia, and a Greek tradition. (characters in William Shakespeare's play 'Twelfth Night or What You Will')
March 1, 1997... Twelfth night reveals a world where 'perspective' is lost and not regained until the moment of 'anagnorisis (recognition) that constitutes the play's denouement when at last 'the glass seems true' (V.i.248). The confusion of appearance and...

The rat and Hamlet's Arras. (William Shakespeare's play Hamlet; Arras, France)
March 1, 1997... The civic symbolism of the town of Arras has long been dominated by the image of the rat. Rats appeared on the town's coat of arms for the first time in 1311, and over the succeeding centuries they were displayed on military insignia, on civic...

James I's homosexuality and the revision of the folio text of 'King Lear.' (King of England; play by William Shakespeare)
March 1, 1997... One of the most controversial differences between the Quarto and Folio texts of King Lear is the absence of the mock trial of Goneril from the Folio text in Act III. This has been much debated in recent discussion of the two texts, with...

A proposed emendation for King Lear, V.iii.237. (play by William Shakespeare)
March 1, 1997... In the last scene of King Lear, after Edgar has defeated his evil brother Edmund and Regan and Goneril have died, the play seems to be working towards its (presumably happy) conclusion. Then Kent enters to ask about Lear. Albany responds:...

'Sir Thomas More' without stylometry. (play supposedly written by English dramatist Anthony Munday in collaboration with other dramatists)
March 1, 1997... M. W. A. SMITH concluded a recent article: For more than a decade Merriam has been trying to impress on sceptical scholars that his stylometry has revealed that the conventional ascription of Sir Thomas More to Munday is wrong and that most...

'Cheaters Booted:' a note on 'The Roaring Girl.' (1611 play)
March 1, 1997... At the close of Middleton and Dekker's The Roaring Girl (1611) Moll Cutpurse announces her resolve to remain single until society changes for the better: When you shall hear Gallants void from sergeants' fear, Honesty and truth unslandered,...

Phrase lengths in 'Henry VIII' Shakespeare and Fletcher. (play; dramatists William Shakespeare and John Fletcher)
March 1, 1997... Responding to a hint from Tennyson that some of the verse in Henry VIII sounded more like John Fletcher's than William Shakespeare's, James Spedding in 1850 produced metrical data in support of a division of the play between the two dramatists....

The date of John Donne's 'A Valediction: Of My Name in The Window: 'a query. (poem by English poet John Donne)
March 1, 1997... In verses six and seven of 'A Valediction: Of my Name in the Window' Donne comments on the 'virtuous powers which are fixed in the stars' and which are 'said to flow into such characters, as graved be when these stars have supremacy'. He is...

The date of John Donne's 'A Valediction: Of My Name in the Window: 'a response. (English poet)
March 1, 1997... The suggestion that the 'love and grief' which have their 'exaltation' in line 38 are not just analogous but literal references to the planets Venus and Saturn and their actual situation in the sky at the time the name was engraved is ingenious...

Notes on 'asides' in Elizabethan drama. (stage action)
March 1, 1997... Having recently been startled to hear a well-known expert on Elizabethan drama venture the opinion that the dramatists of the time had no vocabulary for the stage action that modern editors call 'aside', I guess it may be worthwhile to draw...

God's 'Scholer:' The Countess of Pembroke's 'Psalmes' and Beza's 'Psalmorum Davidis...' Libri Quinque. (English poet Philip Sidney's sister Mary Sidney Herbert; author Theodore Beza)
March 1, 1997... William Ringler noted in his commentary on Sir Philip Sidney's metrical psalms that one of the poet's sources was Theodore Beza's Psalmorum Davidis et Aliorum Prophetarum, Libri Quinque. Argumentis et Latina Paraphrasi illustrati, ac etiam...

Prentices and prodigals: a new allusion to 'The Hogge Hath Lost His Pearl.' (play by English dramatist Robert Tailor)
March 1, 1997... An unexpected source adds to what is already known about the unlicensed performance of Robert Tailor's The Hogge hath lost his Pearl at the Whitefriars Theatre on Sunday, 21 February 1613.(1) Bodleian MS Don. c.54, a poetical commonplace book...

Ben Jonson's 'On My First Son' and the common prayer catechism. (English dramatist Ben Jonson's poem)
March 1, 1997... Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy; My sinne was too much hope of thee, lov'd boy. Seven yeeres tho'wert lent to me, and I thee pay, Exacted by thy fate, on the just day. O, could I lose all father, now. For why5 Will man lament the...

Ben Jonson's drunken Hamburgians: an entertainment for King James. (English dramatist)
March 1, 1997... Sir William Cockayne, a London Alderman, is famous (or perhaps I should say notorious) for his attempt to reorganize the export trade in cloth in the early seventeenth century, with catastrophic consequences for the English economy.(1) Early in...

Jonson's 'Neptune's Triumph' and Martial's 'Epigram VIII.15: concerning two triumphs never celebrated. (English dramatist Ben Jonson; 1st century AD Roman epigrammatist Marcus Valerius Martialis)
March 1, 1997... Ben Jonson's masque Neptune's Triumph for the Return of Albion was planned, with fair expense, for Twelfth Night, 1624.(1) The occasion for the masque was the safe return from Spain of Prince Charles and the Duke of Buckingham. However, the...

A lost Elizabethan actors' company: Sir William Holles's players. (English aristocrat and drama patron)
March 1, 1997... The role of aristocratic patrons in the development of Elizabethan drama has long been familiar. The part played by patrons of lesser rank, especially in the provinces, is much less familiar and poorly documented. In most cases we know of such...

Justus Lipsius and 'The Changeling.' (Roman writer Justus Lipsius)
March 1, 1997... In Middleton and Rowley's The Changeling Lollio, observing Antonio's attempted seduction of Isabella in the madhouse, speaks this aside: How now, fool, are you good at that? Have you read Lipsius? (III.iii.184-5) Editors attribute the...

Does the Duke rape Bianca in Middleton's 'Women Beware Women?' (character in English dramatist Thomas Middleton's play)
March 1, 1997... In a provocative essay, 'Women Beware omen and the Economy of Rape', Anthony B. Dawson notes that 'virtually every critic' calls the Duke's action against Bianca in II.ii 'a seduction'.(1) He is surely right that such a description is too...

The fourth text of Middleton's 'Mayor of Quinborough.' (play by English dramatist Thomas Middleton)
March 1, 1997... The 1661 quarto of Thomas Middleton's Mayor of Quinborough differs markedly from the two surviving manuscripts of the play (the Lambarde manuscript, Fol. MS J. b. 6., or 'L', and the Portland manuscript, University of Nottingham Library,...

John Ford and Cyprus. (English dramatist's use of location)
March 1, 1997... In his edition of Ford's play The Lover's Melancholy, R. F. Hill notes that various elements in the depiction of the setting, Cyprus, 'suggest Ford's general acquaintance with its chequered fortunes as a pawn in the power struggle in the...

Ford and the name 'Philema.' (English dramatist John Ford)
March 1, 1997... When John Ford gave the name 'Philema' to one of the waiting-maids in his play The Broken Heart (1633), he might perhaps have been remembering its use much earlier in the comedy The Taming of a Shrew (1594), which may represent a source or a...

Hell in 'Hamlet' and ''Tis Pity She's a Whore.' (plays by English dramatists William Shakespeare and John Ford)
March 1, 1997... But soft, methinks I scent the morning's air(1) But soft, methinks I see repentance work(2) 'Tis pity she's a whore is a play packed with references and echoes of previous dramas, and the minor verbal parallel indicated above, between lines...

John Walker and Alexander Ellis: antedating 'RP.' (literary term 'received pronunciation')
March 1, 1997... The antecedents of the term received pronunciation are, in general, firmly located in the work of the nineteenth-century phonetician and philologist Alexander Ellis. The first three usages attested in OED indeed derive from his work, beginning...

Anglo-Saxon England 24.
March 1, 1997... The latest volume of Anglo-Saxon England, consisting of ten articles and the comprehensive annual bibliography of publications in Anglo-Saxon studies, continues to maintain impressive academic standards while representing all major areas of...

The St. Gall Tractate: A Medieval Guide to Rhetoric Syntax.
March 1, 1997... This book is a diplomatic edition and translation of an early medieval text entitled 'Quomodo Septem Circumstantiae Rerum in Legendo Ordinandae Sint' known as The Saint Gall Tractate. In this text the rhetorician's argumentative loci, the seven...

Alexander the Great in the Literature of Medieval Britain.
March 1, 1997... Like the story of Troy or the battles of Charlemagne, the victories and exploits of Alexander the Great belong to the great 'matters' of medieval romance, historiography, and exemplum that must have appealed to a great variety of authors and...

The Later Versions of Sir Degarre: A Study in Textual Degeneration.
March 1, 1997... This study concludes a quarter of a century's investigation by Mr Jacobs of the ten extant texts of this Middle English romance, ranging from that in the Auchinleck manuscript to that in the Percy Folio. The present work focuses on the seven...

Prophetic Songs: The Psalms as Moral Discourse in Late Medieval England.
March 1, 1997... This is an ambitious book. As its title indicates, it considers the influence of the psalms on the moral discourse of late medieval England (xv); its thesis is that many Middle English moralists learned a language of ethics directly from David...

Critical Essays on Edmund Spenser.
March 1, 1997... Designed to highlight the application of theoretically oriented approaches to Spenser's poetry as a useful and stimulating guide for students at various levels, Mihoho Suzuki's collection contains a number of significant pieces written on The...

Refashioning 'Knights and Ladies Gentle Deeds:' The Intertextuality of Spenser's Faerie Queene and Malory's Morte D'Arthur.
March 1, 1997... Although scholars have long agreed that there must be some relationship between Spenser's romance-epic and Malory's lengthy prose romance, until Paul Rovang's study there has been little attempt to substantiate the links between the two...

Spenser's Allegory of Love: Social Vision in Books III, IV, and V of The Faerie Queene.
March 1, 1997... Although scholars have long agreed that there must be some relationship between Spenser's romance-epic and Malory's lengthy prose romance, until Paul Rovang's study there has been little attempt to substantiate the links between the two...

'Rooted Sorrow:' Dying in Early Modern England.
March 1, 1997... Rooted Sorrow describes the experience of dying and attitudes towards death in early modern England. Doebler argues that the symbolism of medieval ideas about dying shaped what she calls the 'root' metaphor of early modern views, and her sense...

Shakespeare, the King's Playwright: Theater in the Stuart Court: 1603-1613.
March 1, 1997... This book sets out to ruffle feathers in the pigeon loft, but ends up exposing the limitations of the methodology which it espouses. Alvin Kernan argues that Shakespeare should be regarded as 'James's official playwright', a dramatist with a...

Ben Jonson and the Art of Secrecy.
March 1, 1997... By 'secrecy', William W. E. Slights means three interrelated preoccupations in Jonson's drama: the structures of surveillance, censorship, and state control which made up the arts of power in Renaissance society; the dramatist's art of creating...

The Works of John Webster: An Old-Spelling Critical Edition, vol. 1, The White Devil; The Duchess of Malfi.
March 1, 1997... Webster studies can celebrate a new epoch. The long-awaited Cambridge edition of the dramatist's works makes as significant and substantial a contribution to editorial history as F. L. Lucas's magisterial collection, The Works of John Webster...

The Persecutory Imagination: English Puritanism and the Literature of Religious Despair.
March 1, 1997... Grace abounding, which affirms that 'the elect only attained eternal life', records a doubt that haunted Bunyan: 'How can you tell if you are elected? And what if you should not? How then?' The consequence for those tormented by the possibility...

Samuel Johnson's Critical Opinions: A Reexamination.
March 1, 1997... The critical opinions of Samuel Johnson by Joseph Epes Brown, published in 1926, was elegantly and sturdily produced; the library copy which I consulted had stood up well to seventy years of open-shelf use. The Preface, with phrases like...

Poetry and Jacobite Politics in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland.
March 1, 1997... Murray Pittock has a melancholy tale to tell. Although his book presents itself as a challenge to the Whiggish/Protestant view of British history, propounded through the twentieth century by writers as different - and as influential as G. M....

Romanticism.
March 1, 1997... Of these two volumes, the shorter may be regarded as a kind of stepping-stone to the more ambitious one. Both advance the view that the time has come to modify some conventional ways of discussing the Romantic frame of mind, and both make use...

Questioning Romanticism.
March 1, 1997... Of these two volumes, the shorter may be regarded as a kind of stepping-stone to the more ambitious one. Both advance the view that the time has come to modify some conventional ways of discussing the Romantic frame of mind, and both make use...

Wordsworth and Feeling: The Poetry of an Adult Child.
March 1, 1997... This is one of the few studies on Wordsworth in recent years to profess a disbelief in most theoretically based assessments of the poet; it is, accordingly, distinguished by the refreshingly direct and straightforward manner in which it is...

The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Critical Biography.
March 1, 1997... Rosemary Ashton's straightforward and balanced biography of Coleridge offers both students and the general reader a reliable alternative to the thematic and often sensational accounts of his life written recently by others. She deals with the...

Somatic Fictions: Imagining Illness in Victorian Culture.
March 1, 1997... This difficult, subtle, and thought-provoking interdisciplinary study examines fictions of illness in many areas of Victorian thought. The forms of discourse on which Vrettos focuses are medicine and social science, and novels. There is...

The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle.
March 1, 1997... During the years covered by the latest volumes of the Duke-Edinburgh edition, Carlyle was between major projects. He revised Cromwell's Letters and Speeches for new editions, was bedevilled by the controversy over the Squire forgeries, and made...

The Letters of Charles Dickens, vol. 8: 1856-1858.
March 1, 1997... The Pilgrim edition pursues its course, each volume seeming more enthralling than the last as more facets of Dickens's inner and outer life are illuminated. Volume eight includes such momentous events as the conclusion of Little Dorrit, the...

Men and Women.
March 1, 1997... This edition of Men and Women reminds us from time to time, by specific references, how much everyone seriously interested in Browning's poetry owes to the ground-breaking edition by Pettigrew and Collins published by Penguin in 1981, which is...

Thomas Hardy: Conservation Architect: His Work for The Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings.
March 1, 1997... This book is a detailed study of sixteen cases, fourteen of them in Dorset, in which Hardy was involved as a life member of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. Letters are quoted in full and there are several contemporary...

The Collected Letters of George Gissing, vol. 4: 1889-1891; vol. 5: 1892-1895; vol. 6: 1895-1897; vol. 7: 1897-1899.
March 1, 1997... The publication of Gissing's collected letters is proving to be an epic enterprise in modern literary scholarship. The editors, tireless in their search for materials, are equally indefatigable in their commentaries and notes. Each volume...

Henry James's New York Edition: The Construction of Authorship.
March 1, 1997... We have been brought up to believe that the New York Edition of Henry James's work is a monumental compilation, supreme, firm, authoritative, and final. The combined thesis of David McWhirter and the thirteen contributors to this volume is that...

A Portrait in Letters: Correspondence to and about Conrad.
March 1, 1997... This selection from more than 700 surviving letters addressed to, or written about, Conrad is intended 'to supplement' Karl and Davies's Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad (8 vols, 1983-00) and to 'provide a context for some of the more...

Women's Poetry of the 1930s: A Critical Anthology.
March 1, 1997... This Anthology is long overdue, and, in the best traditions of historicist feminist criticism, brings to light a whole host of forgotten or neglected women writers. 'The Thirties' in particular have been defined in literary historical terms as...

Out of Reach: The Poetry of Philip Larkin.
March 1, 1997... It is a curious reflection upon literary criticism in general and the Larkin industry in particular that anyone would be willing to publish a work whose very title appears to declare an inability to get to grips with its chosen subject. But in...

Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction.
March 1, 1997... Students of English today bring with them deep anxieties about the study of poetry, the main reasons being lack of familiarity with the terms of poetic analysis and apprehension about its aims and motives. Such is the context for these two...

Rethinking Meter: A New Approach to the Verse Line.
March 1, 1997... Students of English today bring with them deep anxieties about the study of poetry, the main reasons being lack of familiarity with the terms of poetic analysis and apprehension about its aims and motives. Such is the context for these two...