The 10 most-cited articles in Notes and Queries, 2022

It has been convincingly established by several scholars, notably Inga-Stina Ewbank and Robert S. Miola, that Shakespeare drew upon Seneca’s Medea both in the original Latin and in the English translation by John Studley when he was writing Macbeth.1 However, one small but significant echo appears to have been overlooked.2 At the end of Seneca’s play, Medea exclaims triumphantly: To which the distraught Jason replies: This surely influenced the lines in which Macbeth curses the Weird Sisters with the same striking idea...

Recent research, mainly based on unexplored evidence contained in continental notarial acts, has shed new light on the careers of Jacob Hall, the most famous of English seventeenth-century rope dancers, and his wife Susanna Roy. The new facts that have emerged relating to the couple’s whereabouts in the late 1670s and early 1680s may be briefly summarized as follows.1 In a contract signed at Antwerp on 17 February 1678, Roy enlisted the services of one Daniel van Schraven to travel with Hall’s company and ‘exercise their dancing and anything relating thereto’ in Brabant, Flanders, Germany and Holland as well as in Oxford, Bristol, and London. In the course of the same year, the troupe expanded the range of their travels to include Paris: a baptismal record in the parish of Saint-Sulpice, dated 26 February 1679, virtually proves that Hall and Susanna Roy had been giving performances in Paris in collaboration with the German-French performer and theatrical entrepreneur Maurice von der Beck (ca. 1649–1694). Shortly afterwards, the Halls settled down in the Northern Netherlands: on 15…

Scholars have known for many years that Titus Andronicus was jointly written by George Peele and Shakespeare. When I surveyed the history of the authorship debate in 2002, I found that a convincing case, backed with many kinds of evidence, had been made for Peele’s authorship of 1.1, 2.1, and 4.1.1 The single most telling piece of evidence was provided by Philip Timberlake’s pioneering 1931 study of the play’s use of ‘feminine endings’.2 This term, taken over from French prosody, differentiates a masculine ending, such as the standard English pentameter line: from one having an extra, eleventh syllable, such as Timberlake showed how the feminine ending was introduced into English drama by Thomas Kyd, whose Soliman and Perseda (performed c. 1588, printed 1592), averaged 10.2 per cent feminine endings, followed by...

The prologue to John Banks’ play The Rival Kings, or, the Loves of Oroondates and Statira (1677) begins with the following lines: ‘Forget how you were serv’d last time, and pray/Be kind this once/T’a modest Prologue and a modest Play./Dreading your anger poor deluded Tray/Has slip’d his Collar, and is run away./Jo. Haynes himself, that shew’d us this dog trick/Has left us all of your displeasure sick’.1 These lines are often remarked upon by scholars for its reference to an incident concerning Joseph Haines (d. 1701), the celebrated writer and comedian of the Restoration stage, who infamously left the King’s Company to temporarily join the Duke of Ormond’s Irish players sometime in the summer of 1677.2 While the reference to Haines’ defection is well-documented, critics have however thus far seemingly overlooked the reference to—and the significance of—Tray the dog. Tray made his first and only known appearance on stage in the King’s Company’s production of Peter Belon’s The Mock Duellist (1675). As the prologue to The Rival Kings suggests, Tray was apparently popular enough to be…

A range of medieval sources—in the first instance, a fair number of Íslendingasögur (Sagas of Icelanders)1—attest to the existence and procedures of the hólmganga, a specialized type of combat alleged to a have been current in the Viking Age North. Scholarly opinions on details differ, but it is a matter of consensus that the hólmganga was a culture-specific form of one-on-one fighting: ‘Hólmganga (“island-going”) was a duel or single combat governed by rules, in contrast to einvígi, single combat not governed by rules’, explains Jesse Byock; ‘[t]he basic meaning of both hólmganga and einvígi is a fight between two’, concurs Olav Bø.2 There is no dispute that a majority of hólmgǫngur we know of do indeed involve two combatants, one on each side, locking in (at least putatively) rule-governed battle with each other. As I argue below, however, translating hólmganga as ‘duel’ is a misnomer. Hólmgǫngur certainly could, and most often did, take the form of single combat, but dual confrontation was not a constitutive, defining feature.

Whitman’s admiration for Charles Dickens’s work is well documented. Dickens’s visit to the USA in 1842 prompted Whitman to write a defence of ‘Boz’ against the charge that his characters, and in particular his bad characters, were exaggerated and unrealistic; for Whitman, Dickens was guilty of nothing more than depicting vice ‘in all its glaring reality’ in order to teach his readers ‘how terrible a thing is iniquity’.1 Whitman saw in Dickens a writer committed, like the American poet himself, to celebrating the teeming life of the city, and recognising the value of even the most apparently insignificant lives; his ‘lines are imbued, from preface to finis, with that philosophy which teaches to pull down the high and bring up the low’.2 Whitman’s attentive reading of his great English contemporary can also be seen in his use of the title ‘What’s the Row?’ in one of his earliest pieces on American politics for the New York Aurora, echoing the words with which the Artful Dodger greets a bemused Oliver Twist on their first meeting in the novel.3 There is, however, one striking example…

Approaching Shakespeare’s plays, and especially Richard III, as a historian of medieval religious culture and intellectual life, one cannot help but notice how medieval Shakespeare is in his reflections on the matter of conscience. In Richard III, Queen Margaret lashes out at her enemies and at the future tyrant for their crimes, including the murder of her son, saying to Richard: ‘The worm of conscience still begnaw thy soul’ (I. iii. 221).1 The theme returns in Richard’s final moments: ‘O coward conscience, how dost thou afflict me!’(V. iii. 179); ‘My conscience hath a thousand several tongues / And every tongue brings in a several tale / And every tale condemns me for a villain’ (V. iii. 193–5). Richard ultimately rejects any sense of remorse in proto-Nietzschean fashion: ‘Let not our babbling dreams affright our souls / Conscience is but a word that cowards use, / Devised at first to keep the strong in awe’ (V. iii. 308–310). This is the counterpoint to the meek and pious façade he had assumed when first aspiring to the throne, when he was described by Buckingham as having…

In a recent issue of N&Q Marie Hause proposes that ‘M Streamer’, the narrator of William Baldwin’s remarkable prose satire Beware the Cat (printed 1561), might be identified with Gregory Stremer, a fellow of Corpus Christi, Oxford in the 1520s and 1530s.1 While the idea is not a new one—Oastler drew much the same link as far back as the mid-1970s—Hause’s account provides a welcome corrective to critical orthodoxy, which has tended to overlook the archival record and treat Streamer as a wholly ‘fictional persona’ or ‘invention conceived by Baldwin’, comparable to More’s Hythloday or Erasmus’ Folly.2 However, the evidence put forward by Hause is problematic in one respect. Although Hause finds a number of points at which Stremer’s biography aligns with that of his fictional namesake, such as their shared evangelism and commitment to ‘newe lernynge’, the sources she cites make it difficult to draw a direct line between them. After all, the Oxford context in which Stremer is documented is quite remote from Baldwin’s work in London some two decades later. The difficulty is compounded by…