Curculio 2: ‘Pervert the Present Wrath’: a Conjecture on Cymbeline

Posted on Monday: August 26, 2013 by Michael Hendry

I am experimenting with publishing original scholarly notes on this site. My first attempt, a week ago, was a single page on the structure of Silius Italicus’ Punica. I have just uploaded a PDF file of my second paper, two pages on the text of Shakespeare, Cymbeline 2.4.151, titled as above (link).

Feedback on the substance of either paper will be much appreciated. Comments are set up so that your first will be moderated, but once you’ve had one approved, others will be approved automatically, unless you behave so badly that I am forced to blacklist you. If you have anything to say about my note on Silius, please leave your comments on that post, and leave comments on my note on Cymbeline here. My next post will tell more about what I’m up to in general, so general comments should wait for that.

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Curculio 1: Silius Italicus: Why Seventeen Books?

Posted on Monday: August 19, 2013 by Michael Hendry

The unusual length of Silius Italicus’ Punica has often caused puzzlement. Antony Augoustakis discusses the point in the first chapter of the recent Brill companion to Silius. He credits Michael von Albrecht with noting that the number of books “corresponds to the number of years of the war”. (1) Although Silius did not cover the war annalistically, that is certainly plausible, as far as it goes. However, I think we can go one step further.

It seems to me that the number seventeen would have had another significance for Silius, at least as important as the length of the Second Punic War. We know from the Younger Pliny’s obituary (Epistulae 3.7) that Silius was a passionate admirer of Vergil, celebrating his birthday with more solemnity than his own, and venerating his portrait above all others, and his tomb as if it were a temple (3.7.8). I do not think it is coincidental that Vergil’s canonical works – the single book of Bucolica, four books of Georgics, and twelve of the Aeneid – also add up to seventeen. Silius could not hope to compete with Vergil in quality, and wisely chose not to compete directly in subject, or variety of subjects, but he could at least write an equal number of books. (2)

I would like to imagine that Silius mixed twelve parts epic, four parts didactic, and one part pastoral to make his poetic stew. However, I’d have to sit down and read the epic with some care to find out, and I won’t be doing that any time soon. I am fairly certain that the answer is no, and that didactic and pastoral elements are much smaller than that. Silius seems to have confined himself to putting Livian substance into Vergilian form, at Vergilian length. (3)

Notes

  1. A. Augoustakis, Brill’s Companion to Silius Italicus (Leiden, 2010), 8-10, quoting (9 n22) M. von Albrecht, Silius Italicus. Freiheit und Gebundenheit römischer Epik (Amsterdam, 1964), 133 n 35. The idea that the epic is unfinished, and that Silius intended to match Ennius’ eighteen books, is now out of style (Augoustakis, op. cit., 9).
  2. But not an equal number of lines. Lacunae and interpolations in both authors (some of each possibly quite large) make an exact count impossible. However, as transmitted, Silius’ epic is something like 800 lines or 6% shorter than the three canonical works of Vergil taken together. I take it that Silius did not agree with Martial’s apparent assumption (14.185) that Vergil wrote the Culex.
  3. Much more than Vergilian length, if we just compare Punica and Aeneid.

(PDF Version)

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Anachronistic Joke

Posted on Wednesday: August 14, 2013 by Michael Hendry

The hero of John Webster’s Duchess of Malfi, the only decent adult other than the title character, is her steward, Antonio Bologna. With a name like that, I can’t help wondering if his middle-school classmates called him ‘Tony Baloney’.

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Shakespeare Puzzle

Posted on Wednesday: August 14, 2013 by Michael Hendry

Legal Disclaimer: There is no prize, and if there were, employees and customers of the American Shakespeare Center would not be eligible for it, since anyone who has seen the production already knows the answer.

Can you identify the play being acted in this picture: smaller – larger? The number, costumes, and arrangements of the nine actors on stage should tell you which of Shakespeare’s plays it is. Don’t forget the props, which are few but important at the ASC.

By the way, for those who don’t already know me, I’m the guy in the best seat in the house.

I’ll add the link to where I got the picture as soon as someone solves the puzzle – a direct link would include the play’s abbreviation in the URL. No fair trolling the ASC website.

Posted in Blackfriars, Culture: Plays | Tagged | 2 Comments

Too Bad About the Gender

Posted on Wednesday: August 14, 2013 by Michael Hendry

I love puns, even (or especially) the unintentional and bilingual kind. Browsing Cicero’s Verrines recently, I was very glad to run across a ‘most experienced and hardworking ploughman’ (experientissimus ac diligentissimus arator) named ‘Nympho’ (2.3.53-54).

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A Significant Anniversary

Posted on Saturday: May 18, 2013 by Michael Hendry

Today is the 100th birthday of Nicolás Gómez Dávila. If you don’t know his work, probably the best place to start is this page. If you don’t think you have time to take on a new author, you’re wrong: he wrote almost nothing except aphorisms – thousands of them, so you won’t run out any time soon, either. Here’s a personal favorite:

Sólo debemos leer para descubrir lo que debemos releer eternamente.

We ought to read only to discover what we ought to reread forever.

(Escolios a un Texto Implícito, 1.214)

Is Gómez Dávila worth rereading forever? You won’t know until you read some more, will you?

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Where’s the Party?

Posted on Monday: April 29, 2013 by Michael Hendry

Today is the 150th anniversary of the birth of Constantine Cavafy, and the 80th anniversary of the death of . . . Constantine Cavafy. I can think of many better ways to celebrate one’s 70th birthday than dying on it, but it does make for a nice symmetry.

So where’s the party? I have not seen the doubly significant date mentioned on any of the many websites that I read, some of which are devoted to literature or culture in general. Even www.cavafy.com, “the official website of the Cavafy archive”, and The Cavafy Museum in Alexandria website have nothing posted for the day.

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Best Name for the Next Pope?

Posted on Wednesday: March 6, 2013 by Michael Hendry

As a Latinist inordinately fond of puns, I’m hoping whoever is elected will take the name Sixtus. Since the last Sixtus was Sixtus V, he would be Sixtus VI.

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Typecasting Joke

Posted on Thursday: February 28, 2013 by Michael Hendry

In the last two years, Patrick Earl of the American Shakespeare Center‘s touring troupe has played Giovanni in John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore and Ferdinand in John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi. Each one is the brother of the title character, each is entirely too fond of his sister – Giovanni to the point of getting her pregnant – and each one (spoiler alert) ends up killing his sister, directly or indirectly. To avoid typecasting, perhaps next year Earl should expand his range a bit, and play the title role in Oedipus Rex.

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Happy Birthday, M. R. James

Posted on Wednesday: August 1, 2012 by Michael Hendry

Today is the 150th birthday of M. R. (Montague Rhodes) James. If you haven’t already done so, go to this University of Adelaide website and read at least one of his ghost stories.

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Announcement: Numeri Innumeri

Posted on Friday: June 29, 2012 by Michael Hendry

I haven’t posted much in the last few months because I’ve been working on three web-based projects, each one larger than the one before. All three are classics-related, and use PHP and MySQL. Though the basic kernels of the ideas for two of them go back thirty years, I finally got around to doing serious work on them last summer, and that has cut into my blogging time.

The first of the three, though still only partially done, is now ready for the public:

1. Numeri Innumeri, the ancient numbers website, now uploaded here (note the V in the domain name). There are many features still to add, but it already has calculators to translate Roman numbers to Arabic, Arabic to Roman, and Arabic to the Greek alphabetic system, as well as a quiz module where you can test your knowledge of Roman numerals by translating them into Arabic numbers while the clock ticks. In the calculators and the quiz module, Roman numbers go as high as 399,999,999 and 11/12ths, and Greek numbers as high as 999,999.

I’ll be announcing the second project in the next few days, but the third will take a few more weeks to be presentable, even in partial form.

Comments and questions will be gratefully received, either by e-mail or as comments on this post.

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Happy Birthday, Ivan Alexandrovich

Posted on Monday: June 18, 2012 by Michael Hendry

I’d been thinking of tackling some long novel I’d never read over the summer break, and having trouble deciding which of the many such books to begin with, when I noticed that today is Ivan Goncharov’s 200th birthday. That settled it. Here are some of the bits that caught my eye in the first three chapters of Oblomov (Everyman edition, translated by Natalie Duddington):

1. I had thought that this famous passage was the opening of the novel, but it actually comes on the second page (4):

“Lying down was not for Ilya Ilyitch either a necessity as it is for a sick or a sleepy man, or an occasional need as it is for a person who is tired, or a pleasure as it is for a sluggard:it was his normal state. When he was at home – and he was almost always at home – he was lying down, and invariably in the same room, the one in which we have found him and which served him as bedroom, study, and reception-room.”

3. Just a little further on, after mentioning the dirty plate left (as always) from last night’s dinner (5):

“If it had not been for this plate and for a freshly smoked pipe by the bed, and for the owner himself lying in it, one might have thought that the room was uninhabited – everything was so dusty and faded and devoid of all traces of human presence. It is true that there were two or three open books and a newspaper on the chiffoniers, an inkstand and pens on the bureau; but the open pages had turned yellow and were covered with dust – evidently they had been left so for weeks; the newspaper dated from last year, and if one dipped a pen into the inkstand a startled fly might perhaps come buzzing out of it.”

3. Nice work if you can get it – Oblomov’s friend Volkov (28):

“I have a post that doesn’t oblige me to go the office, thank goodness; I only go twice a week to see the general and have dinner with him.”

There is much more on the banal horrors of bureaucracy – too much to quote here. I’m surprised that LanguageHat, with his love for Russian literature, has not mentioned the anniversary.

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Maybe I’ve Been Reading LanguageHat Too Long . . .

Posted on Monday: May 28, 2012 by Michael Hendry

. . . since I misread Tim Blair’s post about a Prince concert in Sydney as saying that it took place at “Allophones Arena”. I suppose Allphones is an Australian telephone company. (Don’t tell me. If I cared I could find out easily enough. In less time than it took to write this parenthesis, actually.)

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Testimonial

Posted on Sunday: December 11, 2011 by Michael Hendry

Last Sunday, I inadvertently washed a SanDisc Cruzer USB drive with a load of laundry and plenty of soap. To my great surprise, it still worked after I found it rattling around in the bottom of the washing machine. I of course immediately copied everything on it to my PC, thinking that it would surely be susceptible to long-term damage, since the insides are not hermetically sealed and therefore (I thought) would be prone to rust or mildew when wet. However, it still works almost a week later. One more thing to like about modern technology: it’s a lot less fragile than a floppy disc.

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How Do You Make Hamlet Even More Tragic?

Posted on Sunday: November 13, 2011 by Michael Hendry

Do what the grad students in Shakespeare Studies at Mary Baldwin did in the performance I saw tonight (directed by Zach Brown):

1. Leave out Fortinbras entirely.

2. Have Horatio ignore Hamlet’s plea at the end of the play, drink the poison, and die. His last words were, of course, “The rest is silence”.

The result: I believe Osric is the only member of the upper classes left alive to inherit the throne. The accession of King Osric I would be a truly tragic outcome.

If any of my readers are in the Shenandoah Valley, there is a second performance tomorrow night at 7:30. The theater’s website is here.

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This Takes Me Back

Posted on Saturday: November 5, 2011 by Michael Hendry

In a post at The Volokh Conspiracy, Stewart Baker includes a picture of the statue that stands outside the Federal Trade Commission (he credits JoeInSouthernCA):

When I worked in D.C. 20+ years ago, I often walked past the statue. My friends and I liked to think of it as the allegorical depiction of Bureaucracy restraining Trade.

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Truer Today, But Already True Then

Posted on Saturday: November 5, 2011 by Michael Hendry

Dicaearchus, that great and prolific Peripatetic, wrote a work called On the Extinction of Human Life. Having assembled the other causes – floods, epidemics, ravages of nature, sudden invasions by hordes of wild beasts, the onset of which he demonstrates has caused the exstirpation of certain races – he then shows how many more men by contrast have been wiped out by attacks made by other men in wars or civil commotions, than by all other disasters.

(Cicero, De Officiis 2.16, tr. P. G. Walsh, Oxford, 2000)

The Latin:

Est Dicaearchi liber de interitu hominum, Peripatetici magni et copiosi, qui collectis ceteris causis eluvionis, pestilentiae, vastitatis, beluarum etiam repentinae multitudinis, quarum impetu docet quaedam hominum genera esse consumpta, deinde comparat, quanto plures deleti sint homines hominum impetu, id est bellis aut seditionibus, quam omni reliqua calamitate.

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Best Unintentional Pun Ever

Posted on Thursday: September 29, 2011 by Michael Hendry

Volume II of The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, edited by Fredson Bowers (Cambridge, 1955), contains these five titles:

  • The Honest Whore, Parts I and II
  • The Magnificent Entertainment
  • Westward Ho
  • Northward Ho
  • The Whore of Babylon

Four out of five is not bad, though it would be better if the second title were omitted.

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Blackfriars Quiz

Posted on Saturday: September 24, 2011 by Michael Hendry

The following eight foodstuffs represent eight different plays presented at the Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton, Virginia in the last three years. Can you identify them all? These are not verbal jokes, and the quantities (such as the three apples in #4) are not significant. (The eyes in 4 are also not significant: it was the only picture I could find.) Answers may be posted in the comments or mailed to me.

1:

2:

3:

4:

5:

6:

7:

8:

To cut down on the possibilities slightly, the plays put on at the Blackfriars in the last three years are:

Shakespeare: As You Like It, The Comedy of Errors, 1-2 Henry IV, Henry V, 1-3 Henry VI, King Lear, Macbeth, Measure for Measure, The Merry Wives of Windsor, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew, The Tempest, Titus Andronicus, Twelfth Night, The Winter’s Tale; Marlowe: Dr. Faustus and Tamburlaine (Part I); Chapman: The Blind Beggar of Alexandria; Jonson: The Alchemist; Middleton: The Revengers’ Tragedy, The Changeling, A Trick to Catch the Old One; Massinger: The Roman Actor; Ford: ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore; Wilde: The Importance of Being Ernest; Stoppard: Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.

There were one or two more, but they are not correct answers for this quiz.

All images are from the web, except #7, which was part of my lunch today.

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D. M. G. K. Chesterton and J. L. Borges

Posted on Tuesday: June 14, 2011 by Michael Hendry

Two more author anniversaries today, and again authors best known for their short stories. It is the 75th anniversary of the death of G. K. Chesterton, and the 25th anniversary of the death of Jorge Luis Borges. Here’s a bit from Chesterton’s ‘lost’ Father Brown story (collected here), “Father Brown and the Donnington Affair” (1914):

“Human troubles are mostly of two kinds. There is an accidental kind, that you can’t see because they are so close you fall over as you do over a hassock. And there is the other kind of evil, the real kind. And that a man will go to seek however far off it is – down, down, into the lost abyss.”

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