The 10 most-cited articles in Notes and Queries, 2023

Among the lesser-known achievements of Sir Thomas Fairfax (1612–71) is his poetical output: Lord General of the New Model Army during the English Civil Wars, Fairfax also wrote verse—largely lyric translation of biblical books but also some original compositions. Fairfax’s biblical translations include the entirety of the Song of Solomon and the book of Psalms, as well as parts of eight other biblical books. He also translated secular poems by Petrarch and Saint-Amant, and composed nearly forty original poems, with both sacred and secular subject matter. This body of work is not currently listed in the Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts 1450–1700 (CELM), and Ian Gentles’ entry for Fairfax in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB) dismisses it as having ‘no literary merit’—although it does, he writes, show ‘a sensuous appreciation of natural beauty’ and ‘provide insight into [Fairfax’s] deeply religious nature’.1 The status accorded Fairfax’s literary output continues, in fact, to echo Edward Bliss Reed’s comments in the introduction to his edition of Fairfax’s…

Scribes copying alliterative verse, particularly when it was laid out in prose format, had constantly to decide where each line ended. Without the regular recurrence of end rhyme, and without the visual perspicuity of verse format, lineation becomes a potentially arduous mental task. In the event, most lines of alliterative verse posed no problems for most scribes, who were conversant with alliterative metre and could rapidly distinguish the two, rhythmically divergent halves of the alliterative long line.1 On some occasions, however, the text presented latent ambiguities that the scribes resolved variously, often through extensive deletion, rewriting, and padding. Although only one of the dozens of surviving copies of William Langland’s Piers Plowman, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 104 (sigil Y of C), is presented in the space-saving prose format, abundant evidence exists that lost copies of Langland’s poem were laid out as prose. The present essay restricts its focus to the A-text, the first of three authorial versions of Piers Plowman. Evidence for lost prose-format exemplars…

Reporting the earliest written instance of a word is an important office of the historical lexicographer. For the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), documentation of earliest use has been a claim to fame, filtering into the broader culture as part of the dictionary’s mythos of authority. Not surprisingly, therefore, the full-scale OED revision project undertaken since 2000 (OED3), and updated at quarterly intervals at OED.com, has cared to re-research usage evidence for every entry, supplying new instances of earliest use wherever possible. Such finds are sometimes celebrated in accompanying public statements and commentaries, such as those by OED Deputy Chief Editor Philip Durkin discussing ‘a splendid antedating of “white lie’’ or ‘a startling antedating for partner meaning “spouse’’’.1 One-upping the OED in this arena has for a long time been something of a sport for recreational and semiprofessional lexicologists—not infrequently carried out in these pages, most prolifically in the 1960s and ’70s, and up to the recentest issues.2 Today antedatings are also solicited officially…

Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher’s The Maid’s Tragedy (1610) turns on a conceit linking the King of Rhodes’s abuse of the nation to his sexual exploitation of his mistress, Evadne. The King forces a loyal courtier, Amintor, to marry Evadne, leaving Amintor’s beloved Aspatia jilted and Evadne’s brother Melantius furious. Melantius convinces Evadne to avenge her ‘long-lost honour’ by assassinating the tyrant, an act the new king validates as a ‘fair example’ at the play’s conclusion (4.1.40; 5.3.292).1 Critics have long attended to the plot’s economy of gender roles and sexual morality, from the divergent identifications of the ‘maid’ of the title to more recent queer readings.2 In this article, I provide further support for reading Evadne as the ‘maid’ by unfolding an intensely symbolic moment representative of the play’s rhetoric of sex and gender. My focus is a few obscure lines in the play’s inset wedding masque for Evadne and Amintor. In it, Night solicits the moon goddess Cynthia’s help to delay the Sun’s rising. With the help of Neptune (the sea god), Aeolus (god of the…

Appreciation of ‘Lampoone by ye Earle of Rochester’ (‘Too longe the Wise Commons have been in debate’) has been impeded, firstly, by an inaccurate dating and, secondly, by an absence of curiosity about its format. The copy-text favoured by Harold Love in his edition reproduces the undivided transcription of the eighteen lines by the courtier Sir William Haward that is preserved in Bodleian MS Don. b. 8. It conceals three six-line anapaestic tetrameter stanzas: David Vieth dated the poem to ‘immediately before’ 20 March 1673 on the basis of the date of a letter to the Earl of Huntingdon enclosing a copy of the poem; he thus deduced that the opening lines referred to the fractious parliamentary session between 4 February and 29 March 1673.2 That interpretation was not questioned until Love, drawing on a finding by the historian Ronald Hutton, concluded that the parliamentary allusion was as pertinent to the session ended by the prorogation on 22 April 1671, adding that the reference to the Countess of Clanbrassil was more suggestive of the earlier date.3 Convincing support for this…

Duncan Salkeld has recently proposed that the early modern expressions, ‘Come’, ‘What’, ‘Zounds’, ‘How now’, and ‘I pray thee’, are used so extensively in Arden of Faversham that they point towards single authorship. The primary authorship contenders for the play have long been Shakespeare and Thomas Kyd. Salkeld concludes that ‘Kyd has evidence in his favour’ but he is ‘unpersuaded that it establishes his authorship’ and plumps for Shakespeare on the basis of these expressions.1 Of the numerous statistical studies conducted on this play by researchers on various sides of interpretative battlelines, there is not a single one that supports the idea of Shakespeare’s sole authorship of the play. Indeed, it has been deemed ‘wildly improbable as a solo Shakespeare work’.2 The absence of the domestic tragedy from the 1623 First Folio (in fact, any subsequent Folio) and Francis Meres’s 1598 compilation Palladis Tamia also tells against the idea.3 While I agree that the play is stylistically and dramaturgically homogeneous and points towards a single author’s hand, my aim in this note is to…

Archival discoveries reported in Notes and Queries in the past two years have identified the ‘M Streamer’ who narrates most of William Baldwin’s prose satire Beware the Cat (1561) with the real historical figure of Gregory Stremer, contradicting a long-held belief that Baldwin’s narrator was a fiction.1 Born around 1510 in Devon, Stremer was a fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, from 1528 until April 1539, when he vanished from Oxford records after being examined for eating flesh at Lent. Here the trail went cold. Despite the many parallels recently established by Marie Hause between Baldwin’s narrator and the historical Stremer, no evidence was available to place Stremer in London in the 1550s. It was thus unclear when he may have had the opportunity to meet Baldwin and also George Ferrers, who (according to Beware the Cat) elected Stremer to serve as the Lord of Misrule’s divine in the Christmas revels at Edward VI’s court in 1552–1553, which provide the setting for the novel. This made it ‘difficult to draw a direct line between’ the two, since ‘the Oxford context in which…

Although Cormac McCarthy’s admiration for John Steinbeck has been documented, scholarship has made small progress in exploring his influence upon McCarthy’s works. In a recent keynote address, the portrait photographer Beowulf Sheehan recollected that, while photographing the then eighty-one-year-old McCarthy at the Santa Fe Institute and his home on 12th August 2014, McCarthy shared three principal sources of his happiness in three words, ‘Science. Shakespeare. Steinbeck.’1 Of the works in his oeuvre, scholars have associated McCarthy’s fourth published novel Suttree (1979) with Steinbeck. Scott Yarbrough has suggested Steinbeck’s Cannery Row (1945) as an intertextual reference and Michael Lynn Crews has found, among McCarthy’s notes for Suttree in the McCarthy Papers of the Wittliff Collection, a quotation from Steinbeck’s less-known work, The Log from the Sea of Cortez (1951).2 No less influential for McCarthy’s great Knoxville novel is the central idea of Steinbeck’s epic novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939), the third volume in his Dustbowl Trilogy.

In this short essay, I intend to demonstrate that extant editorial glosses of Shakespeare’s use of the term Cathayan in Twelfth Night have incorrectly attributed a moralizing valence to the term that reflects a misunderstanding of how Ming dynasty China’s policies regarding international maritime exchange would have been understood by European traders in the sixteenth century. Shakespeare uses the term Cathayan only twice in his oeuvre—once in in The Merry Wives of Windsor and once in Twelfth Night. In Twelfth Night, Shakespeare references the Cathayans in an exchange between the serving woman Maria and the buffoonish Sir Toby Belch—uncle to the lady Olivia, who has repeatedly rejected her suitors’ advances as she mourns her brother’s recent death. At Olivia’s request, Maria chastises Toby for his drunken brawling; her reprimand elicits a puzzling retort from Toby about his niece: MARIA What a caterwauling do you keep here! If my lady have not called up her steward Malvolio and bid him turn you out of doors, never trust me. SIR TOBY My lady’s a Cathayan, we are politicians.1

Man and Superman, Bernard Shaw’s ‘Don Juan play’, is one of the most widely studied works in Shaw’s canon.1 Throughout its long history of critical reception, the connections between this play and the myth of Don Juan in European literature—particularly Spanish—have been well established. Shaw himself placed Tirso de Molina’s El Burlador de Sevilla (the Ur-Don Juan, so to speak, in the Spanish literary tradition) among his favourite plays.2 This link is corroborated in the Epistle Dedicatory to Man and Superman, where Shaw expresses his indebtedness to—and discusses his reservations about—the figure of Don Juan in Tirso, Molière, Mozart, Byron, and a long literary tradition (II: 498–502).3 Recent scholarly studies have provided a comprehensive analysis of Shaw’s sources for his Don Juan play and his ‘knowledge of Tirso’s text’.4 All Shaw scholars would agree that the most conspicuously Donjuanesque character in Man and Superman is its protagonist, John Tanner.5 Indeed, numerous critics have traced his name to a modification of Juan Tenorio, the hero of Tirso’s El Burlador de Sevilla…