The 10 most-cited articles in Notes and Queries, 2024

The ‘Hecate passages’ are lines in Macbeth that most scholars believe are not by Shakespeare. They comprise all of 3.v and two short speeches in 4.i.1 They appear to have been added to the play to introduce three musical numbers from the King’s Men’s production of Thomas Middleton’s tragicomedy The Witch, a play that had been performed at the Blackfriars but whose run was apparently cut short. Since Anne Lancashire’s 1983 article, most scholars have agreed that the play’s short run had something to do with its apparent allusions to the most notorious Jacobean scandal.2 Frances Howard first obtained an annulment of her marriage to the Earl of Essex, then shortly afterwards married Robert Carr, the King’s favourite, and then three years later both Carr and Howard were convicted of murdering Carr’s former friend, Sir Thomas Overbury. The consensus among most commentators is that the play must have been presented in 1616 after the trial. I suggest that a more likely scenario is that the play was on the stage when the divorce proceedings occurred. In May 1613, Howard appeared via her…

Eric Weiskott has recently argued that ‘abundant evidence’, consisting ‘of lines transmitted in all or some manuscripts [of Piers Plowman] with the linebreak apparently misplaced’, ‘exists that lost copies of Langland’s poem were laid out in prose’.1 ‘Uncertainty about the end of the line’, he writes, ‘throws into doubt all other textual and literary discriminations’, case studies of which ‘illustrate a larger swath of interpretive problems in this recalcitrant medieval text’. In light of his theory, ‘readers and textual critics are thrown back onto consideration of the form and style of particular lines of poetry’.2 This rhetoric is bracing, but Weiskott also describes the proposal as ‘tentative’ (20), and for very good reason. It relies on his belief that ‘the incidence of mislineation far exceeds what might have been expected if the transmission of Piers Plowman A had occurred wholly through the medium of verse-format copies’ (20). But the absence of an ‘expected amount of mislineation’ renders any diagnosis of ‘excess’ nonsensical. In any case, no justification for ‘verse-format…

In a letter to Mary Russell Mitford written in 1850, Elizabeth Barrett Browning reports hearing ‘from a friend of Mrs Thomson’s’ that Elizabeth Gaskell’s first novel ‘“Mary Barton” was shown in MS. to Mrs Thomson & failed to please her; and in deference to her judgement certain alterations were made’.1 Gaskell was related to the novelist and historical writer Katharine Thomson by marriage, since Thomson was the second wife of Dr Anthony Todd Thomson, whose sister had become the second wife of Gaskell’s father in 1814. The families were undoubtedly well-known to each other over a long period of time: Dr Thomson had been the physician who superintended Gaskell’s birth, and Thomson’s brother William John Thomson was a miniaturist who painted Gaskell’s portrait in 1832. However, new light may be placed on the relationship between the works of the two writers through an assessment of the similarities between the character of Mrs Hyacinth Kirkpatrick/Gibson in Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters (1864–6) and that of Miss Louisa Williams/Mrs Meadows/Jones in Thomson’s Widows and Widowers: A…

The National Library of Scotland holds a handwritten Corelli poem, submitted under her family name of Minnie Mackay in 1883, and named ‘The Song of a Ship’.1 A failed submission to the House of Blackwood, it was eventually reproduced in Poems (1925), where the founder of Corelli studies, Richard Kowalczyk, was seemingly inspired by the opening line, naming his 1974 article on Corelli’s oeuvre, ‘In Vanished Summertime’.2 Kowalczyk was unnervingly perceptive in his selection, as research within British Library Newspapers has uncovered that ‘The Song of a Ship’ was published in April 1873, over fifty years before its appearance in Poems and ten years prior to its Blackwood’s submission date. The poet ‘Rosalind’ is acknowledged with its authorship in The Cosmopolitan.3 Further research uncovers ‘Rosalind’ writing ‘To Godwin’ for the publication in July of the same year; this verse also being reprinted in Poems but renamed as ‘A Farewell.’4 With Corelli’s pseudonymous identity confirmed, a further five poems by ‘Rosalind’, published by The Cosmopolitan between October 1872 and March…

In the entry for ‘Robert Langelande’ in his Bibliographia Poetica (1802), in and amid chestnuts and factoids repeated in innumerable postmedieval notices of Langland, Joseph Ritson says something original and slightly mysterious about metre: The mode of versification adopted by this writer (an alliterative metre of 9 and 11 syllables without rime) is originally Gothick, and, from the many other instances which occur in MS. is conjectured to have been a favourite poetick stile with the common people (as they are called) down to late period.1 The proposed connection between fourteenth-century English alliterative verse and Old Germanic (‘Gothick’) metre, the moniker ‘alliterative metre’ itself, the knowledge that manuscripts held ‘other instances’ of the form, and the view that this was a popular and durable poetic tradition, all derive from a single source, Thomas Percy’s influential ‘Essay on the Metre of Pierce Plowman’s Visions’ in his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), which Ritson cites here.2 But why did Ritson think Piers Plowman, which we now recognize to be composed…

The impact of the Psalms on Old English poetry is increasingly appreciated, especially when it comes to the vernacular laments and wisdom poems historically described as the ‘elegies’.1 From one perspective, the influence of the Psalms is unsurprising: the Psalter was the most culturally omnipresent text in early medieval England, both inside and outside of religious houses.2 Within these houses, it was memorized as a first step towards Latin literacy and recited continually in the form of the Divine Office.3 In the light of the monastic context within which Old English poetry was copied and much of it quite possibly composed, the major impact of the Psalms makes sense. But because texts like The Wanderer have historically been viewed as allowing insight into a pagan worldview, uncovering their connections with any part of scripture is still transformative for our overall understanding of the poems.4 I argue here for a close verbal link between The Wanderer and one of the Psalms, building on the work of Elisa Mangina and M. J. Toswell.5 Both scholars see The Wanderer as indebted to…

ARCHBISHOP Wulfstan’s Institutes of Polity remains a misunderstood work. Karl Jost considers that the text exists in two allegedly complete and distinct versions: I Polity, which he claims is the earlier of the two, was copied in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 201, pp. 40–43, 57–61, 77–93; II Polity, the final version of the text, according to Jost, is found in Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius MS 121, fols 9-13v, 15r-v, 17r-19v, 20v-23v, 32v-34r, 57v-59r. Jost explains that a third variant, found in London, British Library, Cotton Nero MS A.i, fols 102r-9v and 120r, represents a transition phase1 (hereafter, I shall refer to these as Corpus, Junius, and Nero). Additional fragments can be found in Cambridge, University Library, Additional MS 3206 (fragment), and London, British Library, Cotton MS Tiberius A.iii, fol. 93.2 Jost’s theory about the chronological order of the variants has been challenged only recently.3 I believe, however, that the main issue is not when but why each version was written. Wulfstan and the compilers of his work were keenly aware of the manuscript…

In 1958, Beryl Rowland wrote a meticulous refutation of the then-current assertion that Chaucer could not have understood Sir Gawain and the Green Knight because of its strange dialect. She examined all the words found in the poem but not in Chaucer’s writings, categorized them according to language of origin and semantic field, and searched them out in other Middle English texts and in dictionaries of Middle English and Medieval French. Her aim was to determine their comprehensibility to a Londoner with Chaucer’s background and experience. As for enker, she thought its meaning was unknowable, and that ‘Chaucer’s translation.. would have been as good as anyone else’s.’1 Derek Brewer in 1997 confidently declared his admiration for ‘the poet’s literally brilliant invention of enker grene for the colour of the complexion of Gawain’s challenger. The power of the greenness lies partly in the unusual adjective, of Norse derivation, enker, “vivid.” There is nothing sickly or undernourished about the greenness of the Green Knight’.2 There had been no new lexicographical discoveries to…

Attempts to identify a legendary narrative context for the enigmatic Old English poem known as The Wife’s Lament have been made throughout the poem’s critical history. A hundred years ago, the poem had already been interpreted as a dramatic monologue detached from legends pertaining to Constance, Crescentia, and Genoveva, three women who were falsely accused and banished in folkloric narratives preserved in late medieval sources.1 Over the past century, scholars have used Old Norse sources, especially Eddic poems, in efforts to clarify the narrative of The Wife’s Lament and understand the nature of its speaker. P. R. Orton and Robert Luyster use Skírnismál, among other sources, to interpret the speaker as a fertility goddess longing for the return of a departed fertility god.2 A. C. Bouman, alternatively, uses the Eddic poems pertaining to Sigurðr and Guðrún to mount an elaborate case for the identification of the speaker of The Wife’s Lament with Guðrún.3 Heather O’Donoghue, in a similar vein, explores connections between The Wife’s Lament and Helreið Brynhildar.4 Though she…

In his critical commentary on the Elizabethan poet George Gascoigne’s ‘A Devise of a Maske for the Right Honourable Viscount Mountacute’ (performed 1572, published 1573)—a fictive English eyewitness’ account of both the Siege of Famagusta and the Battle of Lepanto (both 1571)—George Pigman III observes that the poet ‘must have had a source for the battle [of Lepanto] because some of the details he gives are close to those in contemporary accounts’ but, he has ‘not been able to identify it’.1 The first significant critical exploration of the battle’s role in the masque can be found in David Bergeron’s 2010 ‘“Are We Turned Turks?”: English Pageants and the Stuart Court’, but the article does not consider Gascoigne’s sources.2 Since then, the masque has been analysed by several critics, but none has identified the source for the parts of the work concerned with Lepanto. This may be in part, as Vassiliki Markidou has observed, because the majority of the scholars who have written about the masque ‘have focused solely on the siege of Famagusta’.3 Gascoigne’s primary source for the battle…