Glimpses of the Moone
Yogi Buchon
English and American Literature in 18 Volumes* (published from
1907-1921). [Note: Words enclosed in asterisks are italicized.]
In Volume VII, Cavalier and Puritan, there is a chapter entitled
"Writers of the Couplet" which has a section devoted to George Sandys.
Here are some excerpts from this section on George Sandys:
"In August 1621, he went to America... There can be no doubt that,
before he went, the first five books of his translation of *Ovid's
Metamorphoses* had appeared in print."
"Sandys endeavoured to translate as literally as possible. In the end,
his translation exceeded the original by only some eleven hundred
lines. He is sometimes excessively literal."
"Wilful embroidery on the text is sometimes admitted, where a few
additional words give a picturesque or dramatic touch to the context.
Thus, in these lines from the tale of Pyramus and Thisbe,
When Pyramus, who came not forth so soone,
Perceived *by the glimpses of the Moone*
The footing of wild Beasts;
... the italicised words are not even implied by Ovid."
Here is a link to the source of the above quotes:
http://www.bartleby.com/217/0303.html
So, what's the point here? The point is that the phrase "glimpses of
the moon" comes from Shakespeare, in particular, Hamlet 1.4.53 where
the words are as follows: "Revisits thus the glimpses of the moon".
And we have George Sandys, who is doing an extremely tight and literal
translation of Ovid, willfully choosing to vary from Ovid's Latin to
insert the Shakespearean "glimpses of the Moone" in the tale of
Pyramus and Thisbe (Book 4 of the Metamorphoses). It's very odd; odd
enough to be noticed by the writer above. Also, Sandys used the phrase
before the First Folio was published. Was he reading a Quarto copy of
Hamlet? Did he see a recent staging of Hamlet around 1620? Or, was
Marlowe actually writing verse for Sandys?
So, how rare is the phrase "glimpses of the moon"? According to my
research, Shakespeare is the first to use it in Hamlet about 1603,
then Sandys used it in his translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses about
1621. Then, no one else uses it until 1726. After 1726, it starts to
appear more and more frequently, coinciding, it seems, with the
increasing popularity of Shakespeare--especially Hamlet--after the
mid-1700s.
So, not only are Shakespeare and Sandys the only two authors who use
all three of the phrase "as infinte as", "how infinite", and "so
infinte", but we now have an example of Sandys mimicking Shakespeare
in a translation when it's uncalled for.
And coincidence piles onto coincidence piles onto coincidence. But, of
course, it proves absolutely nothing.
Truly,
Yogi Buchon
Art Neuendorffer
----------------------------------------------------
Interesting that it is not even close in Golding:
THE FOURTH BOOKE of Ovids Metamorphosis.
http://www.elizabethanauthors.com/ovid04.htm
With water of the foresaid spring. Whome Thisbe spying furst,
Afarre by moonelight, thereupon with fearfull steppes gan flie,
----------------------------------------------------
http://www.textlibrary.com/TITLE/glimp-mo/
The Glimpses of the Moon (1922) by Edith Wharton
http://guweb2.gonzaga.edu/faculty/campbell/wharton/disc/id33_m.htm
http://www.pagebypagebooks.com/Edith_Wharton/The_Glimpses_of_the_Moon/
----------------------------------------------------------
The Glimpses of the Moon (1977) [the 1st (& last) Crispin novel in 26
years] When the first victim's head is sent floating down the river, the
village's rural calm is shattered. Soon the corpses are multiplying and the
entire community is involved in the murder hunt. While the rector, the
major and a journalist desperate for the scoop of the century-not to mention
the police-chase false trails, it is left to Gervase Fen, Oxford don and
amateur criminologist, to uncover the sordid truth.
----------------------------------------------------------
V. SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET from _Representative Men_ (1850)
http://www.emersoncentral.com/shak.htm Ralph Waldo Emerson
<<But whatever scraps of information concerning his condition these
researches may have rescued, they can shed no light upon that infinite
invention which is the concealed magnet of his attraction for us. We are
very clumsy writers of history. We tell the chronicle of parentage,
birth, birth-place, schooling, school-mates, earning of money, marriage,
publication of books, celebrity, death; and when we have come to an end
of this gossip, no ray of relation appears between it and the
goddess-born; and it seems as if, had we dipped at random into the
"Modern Plutarch," and read any other life there, it would have fitted
the poems as well. It is the essence of poetry to spring, like the
rainbow daughter of Wonder, from the invisible, to abolish the past and
refuse all history. Malone, Warburton, Dyce and Collier have wasted
their oil. The famed theatres, Covent Garden, Drury Lane, the Park and
Tremont have vainly assisted. Betterton, Garrick, Kemble, Kean and
Macready dedicate their lives to this genius; him they crown, elucidate,
obey and express. The genius knows them not. The recitation begins; one
golden word leaps out immortal from all this painted pedantry and
sweetly torments us with invitations to its own inaccessible homes. I
remember I went once to see the Hamlet of a famed performer, the pride
of the English stage; and all I then heard and all I now remember of the
tragedian was that in which the tragedian had no part; simply Hamlet's
question to the ghost:-
"What may this mean,
That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel
Revisit'st thus the glimpses of the moon?"
That imagination which dilates the closet he writes in to the world's
dimension, crowds it with agents in rank and order, as quickly reduces
the big reality to be the glimpses of the moon. These tricks of his
magic spoil for us the illusions of the greenroom. Can any biography
shed light on the localities into which the Midsummer Night's Dream
admits me? Did Shakespeare confide to any notary or parish recorder,
sacristan, or surrogate in Stratford, the genesis of that delicate
creation? The forest of Arden, the nimble air of Scone Castle, the
moonlight of Portia's villa, "the antres vast and desarts idle" of
Othello's captivity,- where is the third cousin, or grand-nephew, the
chancellor's file of accounts, or private letter, that has kept one word
of those transcendent secrets? In fine, in this drama, as in all great
works of art,- in the Cyclopean architecture of Egypt and India, in the
Phidian sculpture, the Gothic minsters, the Italian painting, the
Ballads of Spain and Scotland,- the Genius draws up the ladder after
him, when the creative age goes up to heaven, and gives way to a new
age, which sees the works and asks in vain for a history.>>
----------------------------------------------------------
Art Neuendorffer