The 10 most-cited articles in Notes and Queries, 2017

In Shakespeare’s Richard III, V.iii, during the night before his fatal Battle of Bosworth Field, King Richard is visited by the ghosts of those he has slain—Prince Edward of Wales, Henry VI, Clarence, Rivers, Grey, Vaughn, the two young princes Edward V and Richard of Shrewsbury, Hastings, Lady Anne, and Buckingham. As King Richard awakens, he is terrified, as though these visits were real events. Only then does he realize he had a nightmare—‘Soft, I did but dream./ O coward conscience, how dost thou afflict me!’ (V.iii.178–179). His dream prefigures his defeat and death the next day. A hitherto overlooked literary source for Richard’s prophetic nightmare of noble but vindictive ghosts is found in Book One of Francesco Guicciardini’s 1561 A History of Italy (Geoffrey Fenton’s English translation was published by Thomas Vautrollier in 1579, and republished by Richard Field in 1599). As Sidney Alexander notes, ‘Guicciardini might be called a psychological historian—for him the motive power of the huge clockwork of events may be traced down to the mainspring of individual behavior.’1…

CHARLES Dickens learned stenography at around the age of 16 using a self-help manual, Gurney’s Brachygraphy,1 and went on to complete his shorthand training between 1829 and 1831 by writing law reports at Doctors Commons, the colloquial name given to the London ecclesiastical courts. By the time he made his debut as a fully-fledged reporter in the Gallery of Parliament in 1831, shorthand had become an integral part of his writing practice and although very little of his shorthand survives, he is known to have used it to draft articles, reports, letters, memos, and private notes throughout his writing career. An important part of Dickens’s shorthand legacy are the notes that he made in the winter of 1859 while teaching shorthand to Arthur Stone, an aspiring journalist and son of his friend and neighbour, Frank Stone. In a handwritten memo accompanying the notebook,2 Arthur writes that ‘This paper book was made up by the late Charles Dickens at the end of 1859 when he was kind enough to give me lessons in shorthand. A large part of it is in my writing, probably from his dictation, but…

Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia has long been regarded as one of the most widely read works of natural history in the Western canon. Jonathan Woolfson characterizes the thirty-seven-book tome as the ‘most comprehensive ancient Roman source on the natural world and on natural science’, and evidence of the Natural History’s circulation can be found in every century since its initial publication in 77 ce.1 Yet despite historians’ awareness of Pliny’s potential familiarity with Renaissance readers, literary scholarship charting Pliny’s influence has been slight, especially relative to studies of other Roman authors like Ovid or Plutarch. This circumstance results, at least in part, from Shakespeare’s dominancy in discussions of literary behaviours; Shakespeare’s relatively restricted use of Pliny has caused scholars to overlook the author as a ubiquitous encyclopedic resource in the works of his contemporaries. By outlining the literary and scholarly history of Pliny’s Naturalis Historia in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, this note highlights early dramatists’ casual…

In an article entitled ‘The History of Transhumanism’, published in Notes & Queries in July 2015, Peter Harrison and Joseph Wolyniak1 rightly point out a common error found in standard academic articles and on the Internet—particularly Wikipedia, which cites these academic sources in good faith—according to which the word transhumanism was ‘invented’ by Julian Huxley in 1957 (or even in 1927, certain sources claim). Referring to the use of the term by the Canadian essayist W. D. Lighthall (1857–1954)—who evokes ‘St Paul’s transhumanism’—the authors draw a connection between this religious use of the term (transhumanism as man’s capacity to transcend the human condition in his encounter with God) and Dante’s use of the term in The Divine Comedy (through the Italian verb he coined, trasumanar, which Carey, the English translator of Dante, translated in 1814 as transhuman change). As the authors suggest, tracing the history of the word transhumanism is an important matter given the contemporary upsurge in the use of the term. The fact that the term is practically identical in the Latin…

IN his influential study of John Marston’s drama, Philip Finkelpearl acknowledges that the playwright’s satirical comedy What You Will is connected to ‘the so-called War of the Theaters’, which he defines as a ‘brief outburst of animosity between Jonson and Marston which culminated in Jonson’s Poetaster and Dekker’s Satiromastix’ in 1601.1 Finkelpearl bases this assessment on the fact that What You Will ‘reacts at various points to Jonson’s Cynthia’s Revels and Every Man out of his Humour’. Yet he insists that ‘these few moments are not vital determinants in the shape of the play’ and rejects the notion ‘that one of its main characters, Lampatho Doria, was meant to represent Ben Jonson’ (164). Not only does this character not stress Jonson’s ‘best known characteristics’, Finkelpearl writes, but he does not share a common background. Unlike Jonson who did not have a university education, Lampatho Doria is ‘a scholar with a special interest in philosophy’ who has ‘pursued his studies in an academic environment’ and composes a play called Temperance that ‘a cloistered academic might…

IN a brilliant article that has not yet received the breadth of recognition it deserves, Julie Maxwell builds a case for Shakespeare’s Hamlet being in debt to the historical writings of the exiled Swedish brothers, Johannes and Olaus Magnus. In addition to shedding new light on the counter-reformed ideologies that helped to shape the Amleth story elaborated by Belleforest, Maxwell draws our attention to a series of woodcuts in the eleventh book of Olaus’s Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus (1555; frequently reprinted, translated, and epitomized in the century after its initial publication). The sense of Horatio’s claim that Hamlet’s father ‘smote the sledded Polacks on the ice’ need perplex us no more.1 The only remaining difficulty, as Maxwell acknowledges, is that the textual prehistory of Hamlet does not allow us to classify any of this as definitively Shakespearean. Unless and until the Ur-Hamlet makes itself known, we cannot come to a firm view on whether Shakespeare or the author of the Ur-Hamlet (be that Thomas Kyd or another) was the reader of the Magnus brothers.

The last fifteen years have been very hard on William Langland’s personification Patience. Down to the ’noughties, scholars generally perceived this figure’s appearance as initiating a central (although far from final) development in the argument of Piers Plowman. His triumphant ‘patient poverty’ was seen to mark one significant and constructive argumentative stage in the poem, following on and dissipating the confusions attendant upon the dreamer’s search for ‘Do-well’.1 However, more recently, Patience’s cogency and his moral status have come under attack at the hands of two distinguished students of the poem, David Aers and Nicholas Watson.2 Central to both their discussions is Patience’s conversation with the sin-ridden, work-obsessed Hawkyn in passus 14 of Langland’s B Version. There both authors, although they approach this dialogue from rather different positions, find Patience a great deal less than a sanctified figure. Both, in various ways, associate Patience with the pursuit of perfection. For Aers he is a spokesman for an antique Franciscanism that identifies absolute…

On 8 August 1503, Henry VII’s eldest daughter Margaret Tudor married James IV, King of Scotland, in a symbolic union of the Treaty of Perpetual Peace between England and Scotland. In celebration of this union and her new status as Queen of Scotland, Margaret received the gifts of two luxurious Books of Hours; one from her new husband and the other from her father. Whilst some research has been conducted into the iconography and origins of these personal prayer books, consideration of the provenance and ownership history of these Books of Hours can shed new light on the character, personal relationships, political relationships, and gift-giving practices performed by Margaret Tudor at the Scottish Renaissance court. Substantially more is known of the provenance of the Book of Hours commissioned by James IV (also known as the ‘Hours of James IV of Scotland’),1 and presented to Margaret as an opulent marriage gift in 1503. In folio 188 of the text, an inscription made in Margaret’s own hand helps us to trace later ownership of the text: ‘Madame I pray your grace / Remember on me when…

The motif of the walking forest present in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, as well as in Holinshed’s and Boece’s chronicles, has a pedigree that can be traced back to ancient times. Not only is it literally a case of a walking forest, which in itself is indicative of myth, but it is also accompanied by a suggestion of military activity. An investigation of the traces of an ancient Celtic culture in the works of William Shakespeare reveals some interesting details that relate to the origins of the walking forest motif. For example, in his book Les Druides,1 the late French specialist in Celtic Studies Christian-J. Guyonvarc’h describes what he calls the ‘vegetal war’.2 He cites three occurrences of the vegetal motif within the corpora of Irish and Welsh texts, and he offers a continental example that appears in Livy’s History of Rome. Another instance of this motif, though not mentioned in Guyonvarc’h, appears in the Welsh Mabinogion. According to Pierre Le Roux,3 the fact that the motif can be found on the continent in Gaul and in Germany, as well as in Wales and Ireland, confirms that it…

In 1998 I employed neural networks using letter frequencies to explore the authorship of the Shakespeare First Folio. The patterns that emerged presented sections which showed a significant difference from the writing of Shakespeare. These included, for example, the first acts of Henry V, Edward III, 1 Henry VI, and Titus Andronicus—the last three now widely accepted as containing text not by Shakespeare. Then I found that the stylistic patterns of the verse parts throughout Henry V also differed from Shakespeare's and resembled those of Marlowe more than those of Shakespeare. The prose parts were clearly and incontrovertibly by Shakespeare.1 This division in Henry V is reinforced by Norman Rabkin’s observation, in Henry V Shakespeare creates a work whose ultimate power is precisely the fact that it points in two opposite directions, virtually daring us to choose one of the two opposed interpretations it requires of us.2 The critical tradition on H5 is notoriously divided between the celebratory view of heroic kingship, patriotism, and nationalism versus the skeptical perspective…