(1) I’m not a big stickler for reading Shakespeare the right way, but I acknowledge (as I think you have to) that there is a right way. Or at least that there are wrong ways. It was a performance of Julius Caesar that first brought this home to me, during the opening harangue by Marullus when he launches into the mob celebrating Caesar’s homecoming: “O you hard hearts, you cruel men of Rome.”

As I read it, the only way to deliver these lines is to emphasize “hard hearts” close to equally, giving both words the same weight so as to draw out the near rhyme and emphasize the admonitory tone. I can see Marullus shaking his head at the crowd. “O you hard hearts.”

I may be wrong in this, but I know they’re not meant to be rushed together, as they were in the production that I saw, where they were almost elided as in “hard-hats.” Perhaps that was the intention (the rude mechanicals of Rome are proto hard-hats), but I doubt it. And it sounded awful!

(2) The tag “et cetera” (“and other things”) is designed to make your eye and mind wander, sort of like “yadda, yadda, yadda.” That’s my excuse for never really being aware of the fact, until this most recent re-reading, that when Brutus is considering the letters that have been thrown in his window “et cetera” isn’t his own gloss on what Cassius has written but actually part of the letter itself. I know this should have always been clear to me from the punctuation and the rest of the line — “‘Shall Rome, et cetera.’ Thus must I piece it out . . .” — but it never really twigged. I always read it as Brutus just skimming over the rest of the letter’s contents.

I think part of the reason why I read it like this is that it’s hard to figure out why Cassius would have written the letter in such a way. Just saying “Shall Rome, et cetera . . .” doesn’t make a very persuasive case. I guess the point is that Cassius wants Brutus to do all the work of persuasion, making him imagine the worst that could happen. This isn’t a bad approach, but just writing “Shall Rome, et cetera” seems a remarkable way of going about it.

(3) So true:

There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.

The last two lines aren’t always included by people quoting this, but they strike me as the most meaningful, the ones that really seal the deal. That said, how ironic is it that Brutus’s advice in this instance is wrong? He should have skipped this particular tide and avoided Philippi. Or maybe his reasoning was correct and the larger point is that even if you do catch the right tide, it’s not always enough. Such an irony underlines something I’ve often observed during meetings when canvassing for opinions on the best way to move forward. Invariably the argument that wins the day is the one that is best expressed, not the one that is the most reasonable or most likely to succeed. Good rhetoric is meant to be seductive — that’s its whole purpose, really — which is something to keep in mind whenever you can feel it working.

If you skim through some of the reader reviews on sites like Amazon and GoodReads you might notice a recurring complaint. It’s not a majority opinion (I don’t think), but it is significant. People don’t like finding words that they don’t understand.

I can see where some of this might be coming from. Perhaps the readers are objecting to an author putting on airs or four-flushing it. Or, in some cases, they may be upset at academic obscurantism, the layering of simple ideas in neologisms and opaque pseudo-technical prose. And such complaints, in individual cases, may have merit.

In general, however, I think authors are just drawing from their own vocabulary. And, speaking for myself, I enjoy turning up words that I’m unfamiliar with and adding to my own word bank. I suspect a lot of readers secretly enjoy this too, but they don’t like to admit to any ignorance in the fear that they will expose themselves as unlettered.

I have no such shame, so I’ll give a couple of examples I recently drew from Alan Schom’s Napoleon Bonaparte.

The first toe stub came during a description of the “seemingly infinite catena of errors” that led up to the destruction of the French fleet at Trafalgar. I didn’t recognize the word “catena.” It’s meaning was pretty obvious given the context, and so it would have been easy to skim over without missing anything, but I felt the need to look it up. It comes from medieval Latin (“chain”) and refers to a connected series of related things (Merriam-Webster). Apparently it had the original meaning of a series of scriptural commentaries by early Christian theologians, and has more recently taken on subsidiary meanings in the fields of linguistics and soil science.

My research continued. On the very next page I read of a British admiral’s “pulvinated ego.” “Pulvinate” sounded familiar, but I had no idea what it meant, even in context. Apparently it means shaped like a cushion (again from the Latin), but this didn’t help me much as I wasn’t quite sure what that meant either. What sort of a cushion? The dictionaries say it refers to being “moderately convex” and is usually used in a botanical or architectural context. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “pulvinated” as “swelling, bulging.” So I guess Schom was just saying that the admiral was full of himself. Did it bother me that he used a word I didn’t know to make such a simple point? Not at all. Live and learn!

Words, words, words

If you’re interested in such things, my review of Anthologizing Canadian Literature: Theoretical and Cultural Perspectives (ed. Robert Lecker) is up at the Canadian Notes & Queries website.

The gates of horn and ivory always gave me trouble as a student. In part this was because of my own mental laziness. True dreams passed through one, false dreams the other, but which was which? And what, I wondered, was the difference between horn and ivory anyway? Of course ivory comes from elephant tusks, and tusks are teeth, while horns are bones with a layer of keratin, but if you saw a gate of horn set beside a gate of ivory would you be able to tell them apart? And what’s the connection between the material the gate is made of and whether the dreams that pass through them are true or false?

The myth goes back to Book 19 of Homer’s Odyssey, where (in the Robert Fagles translation) Penelope explains the difference:

Two gates there are for our evanescent dreams,
One is made of ivory, the other made of horn.
Those that pass through the ivory cleanly carved
Are will-o’-the wisps, their message bears no fruit.
The dreams that pass through the gates of polished horn
Are fraught with truth, for the dreamer who can see them.

In the notes to the Fagles translation provided by Bernard Knox we get this: “Why the ivory gate should be the exit for false dreams and the gate of horn for true has never been satisfactorily explained.”

Later epic poets would pick up on the twin gates, including Virgil in the Aeneid (where their use has been much debated, specifically why Aeneas has to leave the underworld by way of the ivory gate). What gave me trouble, however, as a student, was their appearance in Edmund Spender’s The Faerie Queene, where they are described in Canto One as guarding the House of Morpheus:

Whose double gates he findeth locked fast,
The one faire fram’d of burnisht Yuory,
The other all with siluer overcast

Silver? That’s not part of the original pairing. Where did it come from? Why does Spenser cast the gate of horn, the gate of true dreams, in silver? The notes to the Penguin edition offer no assistance. The notes to the Variorum Spenser are downright misleading:

The gates of horn may be imagined to send forth true dreams, from its transparency and simplicity; the gates of ivory, silver, etc. from its gaudy appearance, to send fallacious dreams.

But the gate of silver is the gate of horn. The estimable Longman edition of The Faerie Queene does the same thing, not mentioning Homer at all but saying that the use of silver “may be suggested by Virgil’s description of the ivory gate.”

I haven’t had much occasion to think about these matters since leaving school, but recently I came across a note in the introduction to the Arden edition of Much Ado About Nothing that sheds a different light on the subject. Claire McEachern points the reader to Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel, where the gate of ivory is described as misshapen and impenetrable “exactly the way you can’t see through ivory,” while the gate of horn is transparent: “so diaphanous, so shining . . . you can see them [the true dreams] perfectly.” This ties in to a point McEachern is making about the lucid nature of a cuckold’s horns, with horn being used at the time as material for windows and lanterns as well as hornbooks.

I found all of this very interesting, and wondered if it helped explain where the distinction originally came from. I was quite surprised, then, to find on Wikipedia that the difference was first explained in 1919 by Arthur T. Murray in his translation of the Odyssey for the Loeb Classical Library. In a note, he writes:

The play upon the words κέρας, “horn”, and κραίνω, “fulfil”, and upon ἐλέφας, “ivory”, and ἐλεφαίρομαι, “deceive”, cannot be preserved in English.

Recourse to etymology would seem to settle the matter. But if so, why have so many other distinguished editors made such a hash of it, and/or made no mention of this basic point? It’s easy to make fun of students relying on Wikipedia as the source of all knowledge in the age of the Internet, but the editors seem to have done a pretty good job on this one. Good enough to make me wish we’d had Wikipedia when I was a kid.

From Predator Nation (2012) by Charles H. Ferguson:

Many books have already been written about the financial crisis, but there are two reasons why I decided that it was still important to write this one.

The first reason is that the bad guys got away with it, and there has been stunningly little public debate about this fact. When I received the Oscar for best documentary in 2011, I said: “Three years aftera horrific financial crisis caused by massive fraud, not a single financial executive has gone to jail. And that’s wrong.” When asked afterward about the absence of prosecution, senior Obama administration officials gave evasive nonanswers, suggesting that nothing illegal occurred, or that investigations were continuing. None of the major Republican presidential candidates have raised the issue at all.

As of early 2012 there has still not been a single criminal prosecution of a senior financial executive related to the financial crisis. Nor has there been any serious attempt by the federal government to use civil suits, asset seizures, or restraining orders to extract fines or restitution from the people responsible for plunging the world economy into recession. This is not because we have no evidence of criminal behavior. Since the release of my film, a large amount of new material has emerged, especially from private lawsuits, that reveals, through e-mail trails and other evidence, that many bankers, including senior management, knew exactly what was going on, and that it was highly fraudulent.

From America’s War for the Greater Middle East (2016) by Andrew J. Bacevich:

In the performance of their most fundamental mission — defending the homeland — the Bush administration and the world’s largest and ostensibly most sophisticated national security apparatus failed utterly. Yet curiously, in the wake of that failure, not one U.S. official of any rank lost his or her job. No one was reprimanded or demoted. Rallying around the flag and getting on with the business at hand too precedence over fixing accountability.

Was it fair after December 1941 to single out Admiral Husband Kimmel and Lieutenant General Walter Short as personally responsible for the disaster at Pearl Harbor? Probably not. Yet firing these two senior officers and reducing them in rank served at least to acknowledge that an unacceptable failure of leadership had occurred. From the outset of America’s War for the Greater Middle East, the cabinet secretaries and four-star military officers charged with formulating and implementing national security policy had remained largely exempt from accountability — the arbitrary firing of defense secretary Aspin after Mogadishu being the exception that proved the rule. Remarkably, that practice survived the events of 9/11. So those who failed to anticipate or prevent the worst ever direct attack on American soil stayed on the job, if anything accruing even greater authority as the officials to whom the public now turned to “keep America safe.”

See here for Unaccountable, Part two, and here for Unaccountable, Part three.

I’ve started up a new blog that will host my capsule reviews of SF titles (that’s science or speculative fiction). It’s called Alex on SF. Drop by any time!

(1) Shakespeare’s invisible women and men. In the Quarto Leonato is followed on stage by “Innogen his wife.” Innogen has no lines and doesn’t do anything, but is mentioned in other stage directions. This could make her what is called a “ghost character,” though usually she is cut from productions entirely. We also hear right away of Claudio having “an uncle here in Messina,” but there is no further mention of this figure. Then, at the beginning of the next scene, Leonato asks Antonio about Antonio’s son. If such a person exists, we never see or hear from him. In Act V Leonato tells Claudio that Antonio has a fictitious daughter and that “she alone is heir to both of us.” I don’t think any of this means anything other than that we don’t often, if ever, have a polished, finished Shakespeare text.

(2) I wonder what the significance is of Don Pedro wooing Hero for Claudio. Of course it seems awkward and inappropriate to a modern audience, but maybe it was expected that as the Prince he was the one to arrange such matters. That would fit with the unflattering view of marriage as a business transaction that Claudio and Benedict share. The first question Claudio asks Don Pedro about Hero is whether Leonato has any son. Don Pedro knows exactly what Claudio is really asking about and replies that “she’s his only heir.” Later, as Benedict entertains the notion of marrying, his first consideration is that any prospective bride be rich. These guys have their eyes on the prize, but such mercenary views were conventional.

(3) After Benedict has shaved off his beard Claudio remarks that “the old ornament of his cheek hath already stuffed tennis balls.” Apparently this was the custom (they even found some tennis balls from the period when restoring Westminster Hall that were stuffed with putty and human hair). If you’re wondering how they worked, you have to keep in mind that the game of tennis being played was “real tennis,” which was a different game from today’s “lawn tennis.” Real tennis is a bit more like squash, and didn’t require as bouncy a ball. Which is good, because I don’t see how a ball stuffed with hair would bounce at all.

(4) When Conrade asks Don John why he is “thus out of measure sad,” the melancholy bastard replies “There is no measure in the occasion that breeds, therefore the sadness is without limit.” This is one of those pregnant lines that I get something a little different out of every time I read it. I guess at its most literal it means that since the cause of Don John’s sadness is without limit (or measure) then so is his sadness. But that raises other questions. He might be referring to his bastardy, but that’s something that he doesn’t go on about in the rest of the play (and is indeed only mentioned near the end by Benedict). He’s not an Edmund. But what the line has always seemed to mean, at least to me, is that since there is no precise cause to his misery it is something conditional, which makes it worse than if it did have a specific source. This is like the distinction between clinical and situational depression. Perhaps he just needed a good therapist.