October
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 20.0517 Friday, 16 October 2009 [Editor's Note: I am sorry that an apparently innocent question opened up a line of inquiry that I thought I had made clear was NOT welcome on this list as long as I am its editor. My apologies. Although I welcome any sane, rational, literate post from David Kathman or Terry Ross, I thought that I had made it clear that I was NOT interested in distributing any submissions regarding coding, anagrams, or other esoteric approaches or methods that are not accepted by academics as legitimate scholarly forms of argumentation. I hope this Editor's Note makes my position clear; and from now on I simply will ignore any such submissions without comment. -- Hardy] [1] From: David Kathman <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 15 Oct 2009 11:42:49 -0500 Subj: Re: SHK 20.0506 Wriothesley Anagrams in the Sonnets? [2] From: David Basch <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 15 Oct 2009 16:53:32 -0400 Subj: Re: SHK 20.0506 Wriothesley Anagrams in the Sonnets? [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: David Kathman <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 15 Oct 2009 11:42:49 -0500 Subject: 20.0506 Wriothesley Anagrams in the Sonnets? Comment: Re: SHK 20.0506 Wriothesley Anagrams in the Sonnets? Steve Roth wrote: >I would be very interested to hear the opinions of other list members on >R. H. Winnick's new piece in _Literary Imagination_, on anagrams for >"Wriothesley" in the sonnets. Oxford has published this article ungated: > >http://litimag.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/imp049v1 > >Winnick makes what strikes me as a very strong case for, and gives many >examples of, the widespread and quite explicit use and discussion of such >anagrams by poets in Shakespeare's day (including by S., obviously including >instances like Twelfth Night's "M.O.A.I."). I don't have the breadth of >knowledge to evaluate his survey, would love to hear thoughts from those who do. I wasn't impressed at all with Winnick's article, which looks like standard-issue Shakespearean cipher-mongering, of the type that's been going on for over a century (often, but not always, by antistratfordians). It's especially easy to find spurious examples of supposed anagrams, especially when you allow yourself to bend the rules as much as Winnick does. All the examples of contemporary anagrams that Winnick gives involve authors who explicitly said they were constructing an anagram, but I am not aware of any genuine examples of plausible anagrams from the time in the absence of such a statement. I forwarded the post about Winnick's paper to Terry Ross, with whom I co-founded the Shakespeare Authorship web site (http://shakespeareauthorship.com), and who has spent some time debunking such alleged ciphers. Below are the relevant portions of his replies (posted here with his permission). Dave KathmanThis email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. ******************** This Winnick piece, judging by what you quote, sounds remarkably silly. 400 sonnets seems a rather small control sample (but I love it when cypher-seekers get all scientific in their lingo), but since he makes a point about the letters for "Wriothesley" appearing twice in some Shakespeare lines, that may be an admission that the set of letters occurs at least once in lines elsewhere. It would be easy for me to write a Perl script to check this odd happening against various chunks of verse available on the internet. Whatever his rules are for cheating, they may only make it easier to find further accidental Wriothesleys elsewhere. That "Where you list" = "Wriothesley" plus a left-over "u" must have been frustrating until Winnick realized that Shakespeare was an early texter and meant "You" when he wrote "U"; I wonder if there are any likes that have a name plus the letters to form "BFF" or (more likely) "LOL"? ******************** I wrote a "double-letters-in-'Wriothesley'" checking script and found an example in a line from *Emaricdulfe* (which Winnick didn't check); my script only found two in *Delia* where Winnick had three -- perhaps we're using slightly different texts. Looking at other Shakespeare texts I found over 200, including 3 in *Venus and Adonis* and 2 in *Lucrece*; since these texts are dedicated to Wriothesley one might have expected more. Outside of Shakespeare I found 29 in *The Faerie Queene* (ho hum) but a very impressive 194 in Golding's *Metamorphoses*. There are about 10 times as many lines in Golding's *Metamorphoses* as in *Shakespeare's Sonnets*: if the three instances in the *Sonnets* were a random result, one might expect that there would be about 30 in Golding, but there are far more than one would expect. The question becomes "why are there SO FEW double-Wriothesley-letter lines in *Shakespeare's Sonnets*"? The answer is, I think, that there are simply more letters in a line of Golding than in a line of Shakespeare. Golding's use of fourteeners increases the odds that all 22 double-Wriothesley letters will occur. It might also help that there seem to be more "Y"s used as vowels in Golding where Shakespeare would use an "I". On the other hand, I found no double-Wriothesley-letter lines in *Paradise Lost* (I'll recheck when I get a chance). I'm guessing that as spelling became normalized, lines tended to have fewer letters, making such accidents as double-Wriothesley-letter lines rarer. Without looking, one might predict that Turberville and Googe team with such lines, and that Chapman's *Illiad* (fourteeners) would have such lines at a higher rate than his *Odyssy* (heroic couplets) -- but I would expect Chapman's more modern spelling to result in fewer matches in his fourteeners than I found in Golding's. The most surprising thing about Winnick's paper is that (unless I missed something) he found NOT ONE perfect anagram of "Wriothesley" -- an anagram that used all the letters of the name but no additional letters to form some meaningful word or phrase. There always seem to be extra letters or missing letters. I count 286 lines in the *Sonnets* include all the letters of *Wriothesley* at least once; yet in none of those lines did Shakespeare craft a perfect anagram. What Winnick's work would show (if we bought his argument) is that Shakespeare was a monstrously incompetent anagrammer (no Henry Peacham he). [2]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: David Basch <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 15 Oct 2009 16:53:32 -0400 Subject: 20.0506 Wriothesley Anagrams in the Sonnets? Comment: Re: SHK 20.0506 Wriothesley Anagrams in the Sonnets? I much enjoyed R.H. Winnick's romp of discovery, his finding anagrammatic instances of the names of Wriothesley in the lines of the Sonnets. It impelled me to do a few calculations of my own concerning this. The name Wriothesley has ten individual letters, repeating the letter e, which repetition is no big deal since you can hardly have a line in any poem that does not have a few of letter e's since this is the most frequent letter of the alphabet. The choke points of this name are the letters W and Y which have the frequencies, respectively, of 3.5% and 2.9% (at least in the one standard sonnet that I checked). Multiplying these frequencies together, we arrive at a rarity of about 1% in having both letters in a single line, a percentage varying somewhat higher and lower, but in this range. Since the sonnets have about 2,156 lines and assuming this occurrence has a frequency of 1%, there should be about 21 or 22 lines that have the letters w and y and a pretty good chance of having all the other remaining letters of Wriothesley so as to be able to spell it anagrammatically. We may conclude that having this name appear anagrammatically in individual lines of sonnets, each line having about 30 to 40 letters, is not a particularly rare phenomenon. But what appears to be the rarity that Winnick exposes is that in three lines in all the Sonnets the name appears anagrammatically fully lettered twice and that two of these three lines happening to locate in Sonnet 17. The other instance of such a two time appearance in a single line appears in Sonnet 126, the last of the "young man series" of sonnets. What is more, Sonnet 17 seems to allude to this "twice-two-times-phenomenon" in its last line, which reads: You should liue twise in it,and in my rime. Winnick uses these observations as well as the concentration of occurrences and that in some instances these appear to interact with the substance of the sonnet in which they are found to conclude that these were intended and hardly the result of accident. Not only does this occur but it occurs with the name of a person that the poet had a relationship with. Wriothesley was his patron, not a random name. In sum, Winnick makes a strong case that the poet wished to place this name in his sonnets. I would point out that the appearance of this particular name in the Sonnets should not come altogether as a surprise to those already acquainted with the equal letter skip (ELS) devices in the Sonnets dedication. (I am surprised that at this late date Winnick doesn't mention it.) This ELS device conveys Wriothesley's full name, including his first name Henry. The former name is found in three pieces, each with letters separated by skips of 18 letters (WR -IOTH ESLEY) and the latter name arrives at through skips of 15 letters. This is shown below in the 18 letter line matrix of the dedication with the embedments marked by | and /: Matrix 18 letters wide T O T H E O N L I|E B E G E T T E R O F T\H E S E I N|S V I N G S O N N\E T S M r W H A L|L|H A P P I\N E S S E A N D T H A T|E|T E\R N I T I E P R O M I S E D B|Y|O V R E V E R L I V I N G P O E T W|I S H E T H T H E|W E L L W I S H I N G A D V E N T V|R E R I N S E T T I N G F O R T H T T E H S E L H N E T R Y O I W R Ironically, in this case, instead of accepting what is an obvious fact, there are commentators who consider themselves code experts and who, in a creative spate of denying reality, manage to deny the validity of these elements as presenting a name and to insist that those who would accept the presence of these ELS devices are somehow defective mentally and not up to their own sophisticated understanding. On the other hand, a professional mathematician I consulted informed me that he hardly needed to indulge in a mathematical analysis of probability to show these ELS devices were contrived. The mere presence of a full name of such complexity with an association to the poet within a literary specimen of only 144 letters, on the face of it, indicates that it is something contrived. However, what remains as a mystery in all of these devices of Wriothesley's name is how to interpret their finding. Is it there to tell us that Henry Wriothesley is the mysterious friend of the Sonnets, as some would conclude but without the smoking gun to back it up? Or are these present for other reasons? Without concluding that his findings settle the issue of the identity of the "Fair Friend," Winnick points out that they do give important information on how the sonnets are constructed. We see also that, however murky, they do give clues as to the actual thinking of the poet. Winnick believes that this shows that studies on the identity of the poet's mysterious friend have great potential and are hardly beside the point in understanding the great poetry of the Sonnets. David Basch _______________________________________________________________ S H A K S P E R: The Global Shakespeare Discussion List Hardy M. Cook,This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. The S H A K S P E R Web Site <http://www.shaksper.net> DISCLAIMER: Although SHAKSPER is a moderated discussion list, the opinions expressed on it are the sole property of the poster, and the editor assumes no responsibility for them.
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 20.0516 Friday, 16 October 2009 [1] From: Larry Weiss <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 15 Oct 2009 13:55:14 -0400 Subj: Re: SHK 20.0512 English Language Day [2] From: John W Kennedy <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 15 Oct 2009 19:55:44 -0400 Subj: Re: SHK 20.0512 English Language Day [3] From: John E. Perry <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 15 Oct 2009 22:41:06 -0400 Subj: Re: SHK 20.0512 English Language Day [4] From: Robert Projansky <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 16 Oct 2009 00:32:52 -0700 Subj: Re: SHK 20.0512 English Language Day [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Larry Weiss <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 15 Oct 2009 13:55:14 -0400 Subject: 20.0512 English Language Day Comment: Re: SHK 20.0512 English Language Day Bad as "that's" is, it doesn't hold a candle to a banner someone told me she saw: JESUS SAVE'S. "Save us" maybe? [2]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: John W Kennedy <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 15 Oct 2009 19:55:44 -0400 Subject: 20.0512 English Language Day Comment: Re: SHK 20.0512 English Language Day Nancy Charlton <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > wrote: >"That's"? A genitive ('possessive' to the Latin-challenged) of "that"? >Has such a barbarity taken hold as accepted usage, or am I missing >something? Hardly a barbarism (or a barbarity for that matter), as I suppose it could be justified by OE "
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 20.0515 Friday, 16 October 2009 From: Larry Weiss <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 15 Oct 2009 14:10:32 -0400 Subject: 20.0513 The Book of William by Paul Collins Comment: Re: SHK 20.0513 The Book of William by Paul Collins >If the Folio hadn't appeared we'd still have nearly half the canon in >editions printed before 1623. Gabriel Egan's observations lead me to pose a question which I have used as an icebreaker at dinner parties and which List Members might find interesting to pursue: We agree, I suppose, that Shakespeare is qualitatively unique ("in a category by himself") or perhaps just vastly superior to other poets ("light years ahead") or maybe just "ahead of the pack" (with Thomas Middleton running a close second), and that the name "Shakespeare" evokes an awed respect shared by no one else (not even Middleton). My question is at what point in the Canon did William Shakespeare become SHAKESPEARE. Presumably, WS's shares of Two Noble Kinsmen and Henry VIII don't add much to his aura. What about Tempest? Would Shakespeare be SHAKESPEARE if he hadn't written any of the late romances? Surely Timon isn't needed. What about the rest of the mature tragedies -- suppose he stopped after the Scottish Play? At the other end, would we remember Shakespeare as anything other than a potentially interesting contemporary of Marlowe if he died after the first tetralogy, Errors, Shrew, Two Gents, etc.? _______________________________________________________________ S H A K S P E R: The Global Shakespeare Discussion List Hardy M. Cook,This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. The S H A K S P E R Web Site <http://www.shaksper.net> DISCLAIMER: Although SHAKSPER is a moderated discussion list, the opinions expressed on it are the sole property of the poster, and the editor assumes no responsibility for them.
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 20.0514 Thursday, 15 October 2009 [1] From: Michele Marrapodi <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 15 Oct 2009 08:39:21 +0100 Subj: Re: SHK 20.0508 Women, Passion, and Lack of Self-Control [2] From: Claire Bowditch <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 15 Oct 2009 09:38:56 +0100 Subj: Re: SHK 20.0508 Women, Passion, and Lack of Self-Control [3] From: Maurizio Calbi <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 15 Oct 2009 12:45:03 +0200 Subj: RE: SHK 20.0508 Women, Passion, and Lack of Self-Control [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Michele Marrapodi <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 15 Oct 2009 08:39:21 +0100 Subject: 20.0508 Women, Passion, and Lack of Self-Control Comment: Re: SHK 20.0508 Women, Passion, and Lack of Self-Control Unhae Langis says: >I would like to solicit your help for an article that I need to >revise. Here is the excerpt that needs revision: > >Because women were considered less capable of exercising self- >control because through their "loose, soft and tender" flesh, they >were humorally "subject to all passions and perturbations" (274, 273) >in the words of the Dutch physician, Levinus Lemnius (1658). > >Can anyone direct me to an early modern source that presents this >same idea but from the late 1500s/early 1600s rather than mid-1600s? One of the most influential early modern sources is surely Castiglione's _Il libro del Cortegiano_. I quote a relevant excerpt from my chapter "Shakespeare's Romantic Italy: Novelistic, Theatrical, and Cultural Transactions in the Comedies" included in _Italian Culture in the Drama of Shakespeare & his Contemporaries_ (Ashgate, 2007). I skip the original text and quote from Hoby's translation: "The dispute between the count Gasparo Pallavicino and the Magnifico Juliano on the construction of the ideal _donna di palazzo_ in the third book of the _Cortegiano_ offers significant cues to detect the kind of male fantasy at work in early modern discourses on the nature of women. As a defendant of the woman's part, Juliano provides an ideal of femininity whose language of sexuality responds to the male's erotic desire without losing the virtues of grace and honour. In so doing, he fashions a representation of female values as opposed to manly strength and valour: 'But principally in her fashions, manners, wordes, gestures, and conversation (me thinke) the woman ought to be much unlike the man. For right as it is seemely for him to shew a certaine manliness full and steadie, so doth it well in a woman to have a tendernesse, soft and milde, with a kinde of womanlye sweetenesse in every gesture of hers, that in going, standing, and speaking what ever she lusteth, may always make her appear a woman without anye likenesse of man.' Gasparo explains his antifeminism with the old philosophical principle of the imperfection of women with respect to men ('when a woman is borne, it is a slackenesse or default of nature, and contrarie to that she would doe'), whereas Juliano easily rebuts this accusation, leading his defence to the sexual superiority of women: 'In the man overmuch heate doth soone bring the naturall warmth to the last degree, the which wanting nourishment, consumeth away: and therefore, because men in generation sooner waxe drye than women, it happeneth oftentimes that they are of a shorter life. Wherefore this perfection may also be given to women, that living longer than men they accomplish it, that is the entent of nature more than men.'" (pp. 63-64). The rise of the new gentlewoman, affirming herself as a new dramatic subject in both novelistic literature and drama, can be explained -- in fact -- by the influence of female _corteziania_, the (male) construction of the perfect lady deriving from the _Cortegiano_'s representation of the double power of sexuality and chastity of the _donna di palazzo_ and from other misogynist attitudes taken up in other Italian conduct books and pamphlets of manners. (The parodic and subversive response by Aretino's _La Cortegiana_ is yet another aspect of the same topic). For an extended treatment of the social and political gynaephobia "of gender and sex" in early modern England, see Harry Berger Jr., _The Absence of Grace: Sprezzatura and Suspicion in Two Renaissance Courtesy Books_ (Stanford UP, 2000). Best wishes, Michele Marrapodi, University of Palermo. [2]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Claire Bowditch <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 15 Oct 2009 09:38:56 +0100 Subject: 20.0508 Women, Passion, and Lack of Self-Control Comment: Re: SHK 20.0508 Women, Passion, and Lack of Self-Control Hi, Unhae, I'm not sure whether it's early-modern Dutch or European medical culture that you're working on, but if it's the European(/English?) treatises that you're looking at, you're sure to find some stuff of this sort in Helkiah Crooke's 'Mikrokosmographia' (extant copies from 1615, 1616, and 1632 are available on EEBO). There is, though, something that you might like to look at along these lines: Thomas Raynalde's 'The Birth of Mankind' (in print from 1540-1645). You might find (as I did) that it radically -- and gloriously -- disrupts the kinds of things that you might've seen in sources such as those that you quote below. As the introduction to the recent critical edition of 'The Birth of Mankind' says, the publication was originally German ('Der swangern Frauwen und hebammen Rosegarten'), and was translated into Dutch ('Den Rosegaert'), so hopefully it'll tie in somewhere for you! The publication details are: Thomas Raynalde, The Birth of Mankind, Otherwise Named The Woman's Book, ed. by Elaine Hobby (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009) Best wishes, Claire Bowditch [3]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Maurizio Calbi <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 15 Oct 2009 12:45:03 +0200 Subject: 20.0508 Women, Passion, and Lack of Self-Control Comment: RE: SHK 20.0508 Women, Passion, and Lack of Self-Control I'm sure you'll find many earlier references than this in Gail Kern Paster's *The Body Embarassed*. Maurizio Calbi _______________________________________________________________ S H A K S P E R: The Global Shakespeare Discussion List Hardy M. Cook,This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. The S H A K S P E R Web Site <http://www.shaksper.net> DISCLAIMER: Although SHAKSPER is a moderated discussion list, the opinions expressed on it are the sole property of the poster, and the editor assumes no responsibility for them.
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 20.0513 Thursday, 15 October 2009 From: Gabriel Egan <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 15 Oct 2009 12:58:20 +0100 Subject: 20.0504 The Book of William by Paul Collins Comment: Re: SHK 20.0504 The Book of William by Paul Collins Alan Horn wrote >Could you imagine a world without "Macbeth" or >"A Midsummer Night's Dream"? If the answer is >no, direct your thanks to John Heminge and >Henry Condell . . . Why not thank Thomas Fisher for publishing "A Midsummer Night's Dream" in 1600? If the Folio hadn't appeared we'd still have nearly half the canon in editions printed before 1623. Leaving aside the matter of just what is meant by "Elizabethan theater producers" (two of the three words of which are anachronistic), the claim that >Without their foresight, Shakespeare might have >been remembered as "just another industrious quill- >scratcher" . . . rather understates the considerable reputation that Shakespeare had acquired by 1600, as charted by Lukas Erne. He was canonized by Francis Meres among the acknowledged greats in "Palladis Tamia" (1598), and represented in Robert Allott's collection "England's Parnassus" (1600) amongst "the choicest flowers of our modern poets", as the collection's subtitle calls them. Likewise A. M.'s (probably Anthony Munday's) compilation "Belvedere, or the Garden of the Muses" (1600) in which plays are given place amongst literature, and Shakespeare's most of all. It might seem churlish to object to a blurb to a book, but addressed to this email list it doesn't recommend the book to readers; rather its inaccuracies might well put them off. Gabriel Egan _______________________________________________________________ S H A K S P E R: The Global Shakespeare Discussion List Hardy M. Cook,This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. The S H A K S P E R Web Site <http://www.shaksper.net> DISCLAIMER: Although SHAKSPER is a moderated discussion list, the opinions expressed on it are the sole property of the poster, and the editor assumes no responsibility for them.