Notes and Queries articles from September 1993

Notes and Queries archives from September 1993

Echoes of the 'Periphyseon' in the third book of Alfred's 'Soliloquies.'
September 1, 1993... D. P. WALLACE recently offered some analogues to what has seemed a peculiar teaching in the third book of Alfred's Soliloquies, that in the afterlife not only the blessed but also the damned see God.(1) Wallace contended that there is nothing...

Aelfric's devils.
September 1, 1993... AELFRIC's excellent memory and his ability to meld material from divergent sources can sometimes obscure the identification of these sources, yet, on the positive side, his tendency to reproduce in similar words the same concept in separate...

Celtic etymologies for Old English cursung 'curse,' gafeluc 'javelin,' staer 'history,' syrce 'coat of mail,' and Middle English clog(ge) 'block, wooden shoe,' cokkunge 'striving,' tirven 'to flay,' warroke 'hunchback.'
September 1, 1993... THERE is at present no agreement about the etymology of late Old English curs and cursian, even though Tolkien accepted a derivation from the Old Irish verb cursaigim |I reprove'.(1) When Norman Davis revised Tolkien and Gordon's edition of...

Welsh cais 'sergeant' and 'Sawles Warde.'
September 1, 1993... IN a classic allegory, Sawles Warde describes Man's self as a house, whose treasure is his soul. The house is guarded by virtues; but each of them has always'the opposite vice to seek entry around the walls and murder those within. Their...

Chaucer's man of law and collusive recovery. (Geoffrey Chaucer)
September 1, 1993... PART of what J. M. Manly calls |the encomium which Chaucer pronounces on the legal knowledge of the Sergeant'(1) in the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales concerns his handling of real estate transactions: So greet a purchasour was...

A London chronicle in Yorkshire: an addendum to Handlist VI of the 'Index of Middle English Prose.'
September 1, 1993... WHEN Susan Powell and I were compiling Index of Middle English Prose, Handlist V], covering Yorkshire libraries and archives, we were unaware of MS 32D86/42 (otherwise known as Hopkinson MS 42) in the Bradford District Archives department of...

More's 'Lyfe of Picus' and Blacman's 'Collectarium.' (Thomas More's 'Lyfe of Johan Picus Erle of Mirandula,' John Blacman's 'Collectarium Mansuetudinem et bonorum morum regis Henrici. VI.')
September 1, 1993... THOMAS MORE's Lyfe of Johan Picus Erle of Mirandula, first published c. 1510 has been claimed as the first secular biography composed in English.(1) It is a translation, with some substantial deletions and occasional additions,(2) of the Vita...

'Context' in eighteenth-century usage.
September 1, 1993... SAMUEL JOHNSON's Dictionary (1755 and 1773) offers a twofold definition of the word context: |the general series of a discourse; the parts of the discourse that precede and follow the sentence quoted.' Johnson illustrates only the second of...

Autograph letters by Owen Felltham.
September 1, 1993... OWEN FELLTHAM (1604?-1668), author of Resolves and A Brief Character of the Low Countries, spent most of his active life as steward of the Great Billing (Northamptonshire) estate belonging to Barnabas O'Brien, sixth Earl of Thomond (d. 1657,...

Milton's vituperative technique: Claude Saumaise and Martial's Olus in the 'Defensio Prima.' (John Milton)
September 1, 1993... MILTON's personalized attacks upon Claude Saumaise as an incompetent scholar and foreign-born busybody adhere to the Graeco-Roman rhetorical strategy of attacking an individual's ethos from any perspective. Milton repeatedly denounced...

Ported spears and waving corn: 'Paradise Lost' IV.977-980.
September 1, 1993... AT the close of Book IV of Paradise Lost, Milton describes how the angels under Gabriel's command encircle the defiant Satan: the angelic squadron bright Turned fiery red, sharpening in mooned horns Their phalanx, and...

An echo of Virgil in 'Absalom and Achitophel.'
September 1, 1993... IN the following lines, John Dryden describes the outward appearance of the Duke of Monmouth as he is about to address his Protestant supporters: His looks, his gestures, and his words he frames, And with familiar case repeats...

An allusion to Horace in 'Absalom and Achitophel.'
September 1, 1993... EVERY student of Dryden knows by heart the following portrait of Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury: A daring Pilot in extremity; Pleas'd with the danger, when the Waves went high He sought the Storms; but for a Calm unfit,...

Roman skies in 'Threnodia Augustalis.'
September 1, 1993... IN the opening section of Threnodia Augustalis, that grand |Pindaric' Ode on the death of Charles 11, John Dryden describes a cataclysmic event--the collapse of the king. At this critical moment, the weather plays an important part in setting...

Nahum Tate's 'On Their Majesties Pictures' as a source for Dryden's 'To Sir Godfrey Kneller.' ('On Their Majesties Pictures drawn by the Life, by Mr. Kneller,' John Dryden)
September 1, 1993... IN his poem |To Sir Godfrey Kneller' (1694), Dryden comments on Kneller's capacity to combine, in his portraits, |Roman' |design' with |Lombard' (i.e. Venetian) |colour', to produce an harmonious overall design which has a powerful appeal for...

Lee's 'Lucius Junius Brutus' V.ii and Bacon's 'Of Seditions and Troubles.' (Nathaniel Lee, Sir Francis Bacon)
September 1, 1993... AT the beginning of V.ii, the final scene of Nathaniel Lee's Lucius Junius Brutus, father of his country, Brutus enters to perform an act of exemplary justice by ordering the execution of his sons Tiberius and Titus as traitors to the newly...

Documents relating to Samuel Butler (1613-1680).
September 1, 1993... IN his edition of Hudibras, John Wilders mentions a protection from arrest that Richard Vaughan, Second Earl of Carbery wrote for Samuel Butler in September 1667.(1) As Dr Wilders noted, the protection belonged to Sir Hugh Hale Bellot, who...

Richard Burridge's 'Religio Libertini' and Sir Thomas Browne's 'Pseudodoxia Epidemica': a case of undiscovered plagiarism. (Religio Libertini: or, the faith of a converted atheist)
September 1, 1993... RELIGIO LIBERTINI: OR, THE FAITH OF A CONVERTED ATHEIST (1712), like its author Richard Burridge,(1) has attracted little attention. Keynes lists the book in his bibliography in the Appendix on Religio Medici and its imitators, but does not...

Addison's underacknowledged influence on eighteenth-century fable theory. (Joseph Addison)
September 1, 1993... IN his Theories of the Fable in the Eighteenth Century (New York and London, 1975), Thomas Noel went to considerable lengths to show not only that the fable in England was a |pastime' while it was afforded serious attention in France and...

Johnson and the art of flying. (Samuel Johnson)
September 1, 1993... SEVERAL previous commentators have documented Samuel Johnson's interest in aeronautics, as a gloss to the celebrated |Dissertation on the Art of Flying' in Rasselas, ch. vi. The most important discussion, that of Gwin J. Kolb, has shown that...

Samuel Johnson, Shakespeare, Milton, Rowe, and Otway: some resurrected notes. (William Shakespeare, John Milton, Nicholas Rowe, Thomas Otway)
September 1, 1993... I HAVE been re-examining Johnson's notes on Shakespeare in the two volumes (7 and 8) devoted to that subject in the Yale edition of Johnson's works and think the following suggestions of influence or imitation worth resurrecting, as they have...

Samuel Johnson: a portrait in OED-antedatings. (Oxford English Dictionary)
September 1, 1993... Of his works; though they have little of originality, and his style has a certain atrabiliousness . . . it must be confessed that his Dictionary, Rambler, and the two imitative translations of Juvenal, &c. are very...

A new source for Goldsmith's 'Citizen of the World.' (Oliver Goldsmith)
September 1, 1993... ALTHOUGH the most recent collected edition of Oliver Goldsmith's works(1) succeeds in pinpointing many of the sources he made use of in writing The Citizen of the World, the precise provenance of certain passages in the series continues to...

A star is born. (David Garrick and stardom)
September 1, 1993... IN the English-speaking world, the cult of the star began in the theatres of London when audiences crowded to watch the likes of Thomas Betterton, Catherine Clive, or Colley Cibber. Yet Johnson's Dictionary (1755) includes three definitions...

Reverend William Jones 'Of Nayland' (1726-1800): some new light on his years in Kent.
September 1, 1993... IN recent years there has been a renewal of interest in the high church Anglican tradition of the eighteenth century. This has taken the form of a recognition of religion as central to an understanding of the politics of the period, a...

Philip Francis and '54': the record of a clandestine correspondence.
September 1, 1993... FOR some time it has been suspected that one of the two unnamed correspondents in a series of letters copied into a quarto volume among the manuscripts at Castle Fraser, Aberdeenshire(1) was Philip Francis, the putative author of The Letters...

From 'B' to 'Z': signatures in the 'Westminster,' 'Monthly Ledger,' and 'Universal Magazine.'
September 1, 1993... IN my 1982 study of the |Z' signature in the Westminster (1773-85),(1) I linked Henry Mackenzie to the magazine and tentatively identified him as |Z', author of a score of stories and essays. It was necessary then, as now, to assert the...

The original not identical to the collected 'Bristol and Bath Magazine,' 1782-1783.
September 1, 1993... WHEN the Bristol and Bath Magazine; or, Weekly Miscellany was initiated by T. K. Blagden of Bristol in June of 1782, it was conceived as a one penny, sixteen-page serial, with essays, stories and poems, partly original, and partly compiled...

Sources for 'The Exploits of Robinson Crusoe.'
September 1, 1993... IN The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe (1720) Daniel Defoe oppugned the Chinese who, he claimed, had nothing to boast in any field. He was obliged, however, to provide evidence to...

Salting freshmen: an old academic tradition.
September 1, 1993... IN the early days of Syracuse University, in Syracuse, New York, from the 1870s on, upperclassmen greeted freshmen with salt: they salted the chapel benches of freshmen, threw salt at freshmen, and rubbed salt into the hair of any freshman...

Allegories of War: Language and Violence in Old English Poetry.
September 1, 1993... ALLEGORIES OF WAR contains two parts. The first considers the influence of psychomachia traditions in Anglo-Saxon England and the use of personification allegory to represent conflict in Old English poetry. Although ten manuscripts of the...

Le Roi Marc aux Oreilles de Cheval.
September 1, 1993... THIS is a study of the origins of one of the most curious episodes in the Tristan of Beroul: the revelation of Mark's secret (that he has horse's ears) by the dwarf and his punishment for the offence, a version of the tale of Midas (782 in...

Reinterpreting Christine de Pizan.
September 1, 1993... KENNEDY's concluding contribution to this volume admirably documents the recent explosion in Christine studies (the number of publications since 1980 is roughly equal to the number published before 1980). This research interest in Christine...

Lawman's 'Brut,' An Early Arthurian Poem: A Study of Middle English Formulaic Composition.
September 1, 1993... THIS volume is an updated version of the author's 1976 New York doctoral dissertation entitled |Thematic and Formulaic Composition in Lawman's Brut'. This work was both useful and necessary. It spelled out the theoretical basis of the...

Romance in Medieval England.
September 1, 1993... THIS volume gathers twelve articles originally presented as papers at the first meeting of the Society for the Study of Medieval Romance in 1988. The contributions cover a wide range of concerns and approaches, from women's studies and...

The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Biography.
September 1, 1993... These two good books resemble one another. Both are carefully written, nearly free of error, deeply learned in their subjects, everywhere sensible and judicious -- books one could unreservedly recommend. They share a respect, contrary to...

Oxford Guides to Chaucer: 'Troilus and Criseyde.'
September 1, 1993... These two good books resemble one another. Both are carefully written, nearly free of error, deeply learned in their subjects, everywhere sensible and judicious -- books one could unreservedly recommend. They share a respect, contrary to...

Religion in the Poetry and Drama of the Late Middle Ages in England.
September 1, 1993... COLLECTIONS of articles under so broad a theme are bound to be uneven in quality, but reading this one is like a ride on the big dipper at the fun fair: some heights, some reassuring plateaux, and not a few hair-raising, precipitous descents....

The Be/Have Variation with Intransitives in English: With Special Reference to the Late Modern Period.
September 1, 1993... WITH this study of systemic variation between be and have with intransitives in modern English (1700-1900), Mats Ryden and Sverker Brorstrom have provided a thorough and scholarly piece of work on relevant developments within this particular...

A Treatise on the Provincial Dialect of Scotland.
September 1, 1993... SYLVESTER DOUGLAS's Treatise on the Provincial Dialect of Scotland has hitherto only been accessible in the form of two manuscripts, one by Douglas himself, the other a copy (dated 1779) probably made by one of Douglas's own clerks at...

A Dictionary of English Normative Grammar: 1700-1800.
September 1, 1993... |WHAT has been lacking so far... is an inventory and classification of the data embodying the normative principles, terminology and grammatical typology of the genre', write the authors in their introduction to this study of prescriptive...

Linguistic Variation and Change: On the Historical Sociolinguistics of English.
September 1, 1993... |THE drama of linguistic change is enacted not in manuscripts nor inscriptions, but in the mouths and minds of men' wrote H. C. Wyld in his Short History of English early in this century. It is this position on linguistic change which Milroy...

English Women's Voices: 1540-1700.
September 1, 1993... THESE two books have in common a delightful range and vivid engagement. There the likeness ends. As anthologist, Charlotte F. Otten shuns the literary and directs her choice towards |actual lives' which offer to present-day readers...

Women, Texts and Histories: 1575-1760.
September 1, 1993... THESE two books have in common a delightful range and vivid engagement. There the likeness ends. As anthologist, Charlotte F. Otten shuns the literary and directs her choice towards |actual lives' which offer to present-day readers...

The Rhetoric of Courtship in Elizabethan Language and Literature.
September 1, 1993... THIS is one of those subtle books that make one aware of how easy it is to underestimate the complexity of Renaissance texts. Catherine Bates takes as her subject the extraordinarily rich semantic field that surrounds a single word in...

Stages of History: Shakespeare's English Chronicles.
September 1, 1993... THIS stimulating and original book works on several different levels. It sets Shakespeare's English history plays in the context of the historiographical debates of his own time, and shows how the medium of the public theatre not only adapted...

From Text to Performance in the Elizabethan Theatre: Preparing the Play for the Stage.
September 1, 1993... DAVID BRADLEY begins his study by claiming that if the recent excavations of the Rose and Globe theatres and Sam Wanamaker's plans to build a replica of the latter are to enrich our knowledge of the Elizabethan drama fully |we shall need to...

Casting Shakespeare's Plays: London Actors and Their Roles, 1590-1642.
September 1, 1993... DAVID BRADLEY begins his study by claiming that if the recent excavations of the Rose and Globe theatres and Sam Wanamaker's plans to build a replica of the latter are to enrich our knowledge of the Elizabethan drama fully |we shall need to...

Shakespeare and Classical Tragedy: The Influence of Seneca.
September 1, 1993... R. S. MIOLA's new book takes up the important question of the influence of Seneca on Shakespeare's tragedies and tragicomedies. As Miola notes in his opening chapter, the |new understanding' of how sources |often come mediated through various...

Monsters of the Deep: Social Dissolution in Shakespeare's Tragedies.
September 1, 1993... R. S. MIOLA's new book takes up the important question of the influence of Seneca on Shakespeare's tragedies and tragicomedies. As Miola notes in his opening chapter, the |new understanding' of how sources |often come mediated through various...

Shakespearean Subversions: The Trickster and the Play-Text.
September 1, 1993... MR HILLMAN is an able critic, with a large task to achieve. He aims to comment on aspects of |subversion' and |trickery'in nearly the whole canon of Shakespeare's plays, and also to relate his own views to those of recent |schools' of...

Shakespearean Tragedy and Its Double: The Rhythms of Audience Response.
September 1, 1993... IT is difficult to imagine two books, which ostensibly share similar Artaudian concerns of the theatrical |double' and |cruelty', with emphases as different as Kent Cartwright's Shakespearean Tragedy and Its Double: The Rhythms of Audience...

A Theater of Envy: William Shakespeare.
September 1, 1993... IT is difficult to imagine two books, which ostensibly share similar Artaudian concerns of the theatrical |double' and |cruelty', with emphases as different as Kent Cartwright's Shakespearean Tragedy and Its Double: The Rhythms of Audience...

Revising Shakespeare.
September 1, 1993... THE purpose of Revising Shakespeare is to prove that Shakespeare revised his own plays during and after the original process of composition, and that he did so throughout his career. The book opens with a concise but admirably lucid history...

Shakespeare's Romance of the Word.
September 1, 1993... THE current vogue of linguistic and literary theory has had an inevitable spin-off. Critics who have no great entry or interest in such matters -- and why should they necessarily? -- produce works touching marginally upon them, or taking up...

The Romantics on Shakespeare.
September 1, 1993... FITTING the spirit of 1992, Jonathan Bate's collection of Romantic critics of Shakespeare, published as part of the New Penguin Shakespeare Library, is very European in scope. Generous selections from Goethe, A. W. von Schlegel, and Francois...

Royal Family, Royal Lovers: King James of England and Scotland.
September 1, 1993... DAVID BERGERON is Professor of English at the University of Kansas, and his treatment of the private and family life of James VI and I is proclaimed as |a true novel'. His aim is to depict the king's entire family, |its failures, frustrations...

Jonsonian Discriminations: The Humanist Poet and the Praise of True Nobility.
September 1, 1993... THIS book performs a praiseworthy service in taking issue with the received definition of a Jonsonian |plain style' initiated some thirty years ago by Wesley Trimpi. McCanles proposes to demonstrate the true complexity of Jonson's poetry, and...

New Latitudes: Theory and English Renaissance Literature.
September 1, 1993... THOMAS HEALY's New Latitudes, offering a lively and informative introduction to a variety of theoretical approaches to English Renaissance texts and culture, is clearly aimed at the first year undergraduate market. In emphasizing the current...

Cultural Aesthetics: Renaissance Literature and the Practice of Social Ornament.
September 1, 1993... THOMAS HEALY's New Latitudes, offering a lively and informative introduction to a variety of theoretical approaches to English Renaissance texts and culture, is clearly aimed at the first year undergraduate market. In emphasizing the current...

Ceremony and Civility in English Renaissance Prose.
September 1, 1993... PROFESSOR ANNE DRURY HALL seeks, first, to |describe the ceremonial discourse that underlies much medieval and Renaissance literature and its transformation with the rise of "prosaicism", that is, the characteristically modern resistance to...

Milton's 'History of Britain': Republican Historiography in the English Revolution.
September 1, 1993... PROFESSOR ANNE DRURY HALL seeks, first, to |describe the ceremonial discourse that underlies much medieval and Renaissance literature and its transformation with the rise of "prosaicism", that is, the characteristically modern resistance to...

Andrew Marvell and Edmund Waller: Seventeenth-Century Praise and Restoration Satire.
September 1, 1993... THIS is a very odd book, with an eccentricity, engaging in its own way, which makes it unreliable. It has no discernible argument, but is a series of extended annotations -- footnotes without a text -- on several poems by the two authors...

The First English Actresses: Women and Drama, 1660-1700.
September 1, 1993... ELIZABETH HOWE's book explores the lives, roles, and influence of the highly individual actresses who graced (and perhaps disgraced) the Restoration Stage. Its predecessor in the field, John Harold Wilson's All the King's Ladies (1958), is...

Dryden in Revolutionary England.
September 1, 1993... TESTIMONY to the fact that academic literary criticism in America is still crawling towards a remote Thermidor is offered by the Preface to David Bywaters's book, a study of Dryden's post-Revolution writings that argues for their thorough and...

Dryden's 'Aeneid': The English Virgil.
September 1, 1993... TESTIMONY to the fact that academic literary criticism in America is still crawling towards a remote Thermidor is offered by the Preface to David Bywaters's book, a study of Dryden's post-Revolution writings that argues for their thorough and...

Judging New Wealth: Popular Publishing and Responses to Commerce in England, 1750-1800.
September 1, 1993... THIS is an important study of how and why tradesmen, manufacturers, and the newly wealthy came under prolific literary attack in the second half of the eighteenth century. A wide-ranging work, though one that largely ignores the press, it is...

Mrs Piozzi's Tall Young Beau: William Augustus Conway.
September 1, 1993... WILLIAM AUGUSTUS CONWAY was an undistinguished nineteenth-century actor whose career was so undermined by Theodore Hook's criticisms in John Bull that he abandoned the stage. After a period of penury he was persuaded by James and Henry Wellek...

Lyrical Ballads.
September 1, 1993... HERE was a good book to receive: a meticulously annotated edition of the 1805 volume of Lyrical Ballads which, for readers not committed to the texts of 1798 and 1800, should supersede all earlier editions of the poems. The book consists of a...

Jane Austen's Novels: The Art of Clarity.
September 1, 1993... THIS is a very handsome volume, excellently printed, and sporting a most attractive dustjacket, the blurb of which includes enthusiastic recommendations by, presumably, academic acquaintance of the author. One claims that this study is...

Byron's Historical Dramas.
September 1, 1993... THIS book is a thesis and reads like one. It has the expected virtues and customary fault -- for nowhere is the special flavour of Byron's verse defined. Lansdown begins with a chapter on Drury Lane quite properly since Byron |came to...

The Adytum of the Heart: The Literary Criticism of Charlotte Bronte.
September 1, 1993... UNLIKE George Eliot, Charlotte Bronte was not a professional reviewer of other people's books. Such literary commentary of hers as survives (apart from prefaces to her own novels and introductions to the novels of her dead sisters) is to be...

Emily Bronte: 'Wuthering Heights.'
September 1, 1993... THE revisions to the Wuthering Heights Casebook consist of four new essays, an updated, annotated bibliography and a new introduction. The third section, |Opinions and criticism 1873-1949', now includes |Wuthering Heights as Dramatic Poem'...

Daughters of the House: Modes of the Gothic in Victorian Fiction.
September 1, 1993... WOMEN, the home, and Victorian ideology examined through the glass of eighteenth-century Gothic is what the title of this book promises. Surprisingly, Alison Milbank has achieved something fresh in taking one well-worn topic and examining it...

Representing Femininity: Middle-Class Subjectivity in Victorian and Edwardian Women's Autobiographies.
September 1, 1993... AUTOBIOGRAPHY, the writing down of one's self, constitutes a special problem for women brought up to regard selflessness as the very quality that makes them most womanly, and its opposite as so unladylike as to be unnatural. Everything that a...

George Eliot and the Conflict of Interpretations.
September 1, 1993... DAVID CARROLL in his reading of George Eliot's fiction argues that it can best be understood in the context of nineteenth-century hermenutics -- a discpline that was then in the process of developing from a body of rules for understanding...

Edwardian Poetry.
September 1, 1993... EDWARDIAN poetry does not loom large on many people's literary map -- it is often seen as the product which Modernism rejected and superseded, but since it is a back number there is no need to pay particular attention to it. It is something...

Auden, MacNeice, Spender: The Thirties Poetry.
September 1, 1993... IN theoretical justification, and stylistically, this study leaves something to be desired. In terms of its underlying theory, because there isn't any. The authors do not approve Stan Smith's approach (in his 1985 W. H. Auden volume of Terry...

Rosamond Lehmann.
September 1, 1993... LIKE so much about Rosamond Lehmann the bare facts of her life are equally revealing and deceptive. Born on the day of Queen Victoria's funeral she survived until 1990: thus being made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and awarded a...

Philip Larkin: The Man and His Work.
September 1, 1993... When a celebrated poet dies, the literary market is inevitably flooded with commemorative collections of essays and reminiscences. Such publications often prove to be largely ephemeral, consisting of contributions that, with the passing of...

Philip Larkin.
September 1, 1993... When a celebrated poet dies, the literary market is inevitably flooded with commemorative collections of essays and reminiscences. Such publications often prove to be largely ephemeral, consisting of contributions that, with the passing of...

Whitman and the American Idiom.
September 1, 1993... PROFESSOR BAUERLEIN has a theory, semiotics, and he is determined to make Walt Whitman fit that theory. The result of this book, which focuses on Professor Bauerlein's thesis that |although Whitman's guiding intention is to overcome language,...

Italian Hours.
September 1, 1993... THIS is the first scholarly edition of Italian Hour, and certainly it is a James work that deserves such treatment. It was first published in 1909, and brought together essays from the previous thirty years or so, in addition to other pieces...

Meaning in Henry James.
September 1, 1993... IN reading novels for the first time the reader often has a sense of where the plot might go, and this anticipation is often commonplace and even banal. Extensive reading gives us expected paradigms, and we expect novels, and sometimes even...