Shakespeare's geography mistakes
Scott Harris
weeks ago about geographic references in Shakespeare's works that are
incorrect, such as mentioning a port in a city that is actually landlocked,
for instance. Can anyone direct me to this thread on Deja News or recap
please?
Thanks,
Scott
--
sharris...@hiwaay.net
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Robert Stonehouse
>I usually avoid the authorship debates but I recall reading a post several
>weeks ago about geographic references in Shakespeare's works that are
>incorrect, such as mentioning a port in a city that is actually landlocked,
>for instance. Can anyone direct me to this thread on Deja News or recap
>please?
There was a thread on 'The Ubiquity of Geographical Errors' in
December 1998/January 1999.
ew...@bcs.org.uk
John W Kennedy
>
> I usually avoid the authorship debates but I recall reading a post several
> weeks ago about geographic references in Shakespeare's works that are
> incorrect, such as mentioning a port in a city that is actually landlocked,
> for instance. Can anyone direct me to this thread on Deja News or recap
> please?
Essentially, Shakespeare seems to think that all cities in Italy are
ports, when, in fact, almost none of the cities he mentions are. If
there's a reference to travel by water in Italy in a Shakespeare play,
and the city isn't Venice, it's usually wrong.
He also mentions a seacoast of Bohemia. I tend to agree with Asimov on
this one -- the source novel has Sicily and Bohemia the other way
around; Shakespeare probably reversed the countries on the basis that
Leontes _felt_ Sicilian and the other characters _felt_ Bohemian, and
ignored the issue of an actual seacoast altogether, as he usually did.
--
-John W. Kennedy
-rri...@ibm.net
Compact is becoming contract
Man only earns and pays. -- Charles Williams
Dave Kathman
>
> See pp. 306-308 in Ogburn's The Mysterious William Shakespeare. If you
> don't have a copy, get one.
You have absolutely got to be kidding. This passage of Ogburn's
book contains some of the most hilarious special pleading in the
entire volume, and that's saying an awful lot. The section is
called "Shakespeare's 'Blunders'", and in it Ogburn discusses
some of the famous mistakes Shakespeare made in his plays --
the Bohemian seacoast, the ship from inland Verona to inland
Milan, etc. Ogburn starts out well when he writes (p.306):
"Those who make an issue of such discrepancies seem unaware
that in Shakespeare's day historical accuracy in details like
these was still a fetish of the future. No one would have seen
anything wrong in Malory's furnishing King Arthur's post-Roman
Britain with the modes, manners, and trappings of eight centuries
later; we do it today in treating the Arthurian cycle. In
Henry Peacham's illustration of Titus Andronicus, reproduced
by E. K. Chambers, while Titus is shown in an approximation
of Roman garb, the soldiers are in thoroughly Elizabethan dress
and wear halberds. That would have bothered an Elizabethan
audience as little as Rembrandt's contemporaries of the next
century were bothered by his depiction of Aristotle contemplating
the bust of Homer dressed as a 17th-century Dutch burgher or
the goddess Diana as a matron of Amsterdam. When Titus
Andronicus says "With horn and hound we'll give your grace
bon jour," it is not to be imagined that Shakespeare or those
he wrote for imagined that the Romans knew French or that the
language existed then. But if you were going to practice the
supreme anachronism of having the Romans speak English instead
of Latin, why not have them toss off French expressions and
garb the soldiery in Elizabethan dress?"
Sounds pretty reasonable to me. But later, discussing the
inland sea voyage from Verona to Milan, he suddenly says,
completely arbitrarily: "The outrageous, easily avoidable
howler is just the kind that a studied Ben Jonson or a playwright
from a Warwickshire village, sensitive about the poverty of
his cultural background, would have been at pains not to
fall into. It took that "princely mind" not to give a hang."
But Ogburn has just told us that nobody cared about such
discrepancies in those days! Not only is he asserting,
completely arbitrarily, what "a playwright from a Warwickshire
village" would have done and thought, but this behavior
directly contradicts what Ogburn has just taken pains to
argue about Elizabethan playwrights and audiences in general!
I would be hard pressed to find a better illustration
of the complete ad hockery and scholarly worthlessness of
Oxfordian "methods".
Well, actually, that same section contains a couple of
prime examples of Ogburn's pulling an ad hoc "explanation"
out of his ass which negates the argument he's trying to
make. About the TGV blunder, immediately before the passage
quoted above, he writes: "My hunch is that Valentine's
being shipped from Verona harks back to the dramatist's own
embarkation from one Italian port to another, perhaps to
an original conception of the play, before Verona was decided
on." Huh? Elsewhere Ogburn argues at length that
Shakespeare must have had firsthand knowledge of Italy, yet
here he has Shakespeare unaware that Milan and Verona are
inland cities, and apparently confusing them with other
cities that he did visit. This is supposed to be an argument?
Then Ogburn notes that in The Winter's Tale, Shakespeare has
a 16th-century Italian artist, Giulio Romano, talked about
in pre-Christian Bohemia. He says: "The explanation, I suppose,
is that the play was written in two stages, in an earlier
version and then added to in a later, which the author could
not be bothered to reconcile." All right, that could be the
case. But what does it have to do with who the author was?
Why on earth couldn't William Shakespeare have revised his
plays and left discrepancies there just as well as Oxford
could have? Why couldn't such an explanation be invoked for
many or most such discrepancies we find in Shakespeare's works?
This section of Ogburn's book is a true embarrassment, and
it's entirely typical of the whole. When, in a review of
Ogburn's book in *The Elizabethan Review*, I pointed out
some of the more blatant leaps of logic, double standards,
and outright falsehoods in the book, Ogburn responded by
ignoring what I wrote and merely repeating his assertions
more forcefully. I was left feeling only pity for the man,
because he was clearly in his own little world, unbothered
by facts or logic. It's just a pity that he was such a
persuasive writer that the passion of his words served to
blind so many people to the complete and utter bankruptness
of the ideas behind them.
Dave Kathman
dj...@ix.netcom.com
Dave Kathman
>
> In article <373A4A...@ix.netcom.com>, Dave Kathman <dj...@ix.netcom.com>
> writes:
>
> >Well, actually, that same section contains a couple of
> >prime examples of Ogburn's pulling an ad hoc "explanation"
> >out of his ass which negates the argument he's trying to
> >make
>
Ah, Harvard. "The University of Chicago of the East".
Dave Kathman
dj...@ix.netcom.com
phil howerton
don't have a copy, get one.
Phil Howerton
Scott Harris wrote in message ...
>I usually avoid the authorship debates but I recall reading a post several
>weeks ago about geographic references in Shakespeare's works that are
>incorrect, such as mentioning a port in a city that is actually landlocked,
>for instance. Can anyone direct me to this thread on Deja News or recap
>please?
>
KQKnave
>Well, actually, that same section contains a couple of
>prime examples of Ogburn's pulling an ad hoc "explanation"
>out of his ass which negates the argument he's trying to
>make
What do you expect from a Harvard grad?
Jim
Paul Crowley
<dj...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
The 'scholarly worthlessness' here, Dave, is entirely yours. You
fail to see a perfectly ordinary distinction between necessay
conventions and 'mistakes' that are on the face of it, arbitrary,
aggravating, pointless and wholly dispensable.
The performance of a play constitutes an understanding between
the producers (the playwright/actors) and the audience under
which it agrees to suspend disbelief and accept that the 'vasty
fields of France' are in that cockpit. So the playwright is not
going to have Anthony and Cleopatra speaking Latin. And when the
director wants a few soldiers, he's is going to use standard-
issue halberds. All that is perfectly acceptable.
But the inclusion of manifest errors (such as, say, putting
Denver on the coast) is not normally acceptable. It is a breach
of the understanding between the writer and his audience. It
immediately jars and risks losing them. Having a boat sail, on
the tide, from Milan to Verona, or putting Padua or Bergamo on
the coast (when nothing in the plot or elsewhere calls for such a
translation) is a similar breach of that understanding.
As we established in the debate here a few months ago, the
interesting question that arises from this issue is _not_ 'How
did Shakespeare make those mistakes?'. (Anyone can have typos on
a first draft.) It's 'How were they allowed to survive through a
very large number of performances, so that they eventually got
into the printed verisons of the plays?'.
Once this question is seriously addressed, we can see that their
existence undermines the whole of the Stratfordian concept of the
writing, performance, and printing of the plays.
Under that scenario, these plays were supposedly seen by numerous
individuals --- many of whom would have immediately spotted such
'mistakes'. Most of the 'mistakes' are so egregious that it's
reasonable to assume that they would have been noticed by most of
the actors on their first reading of their parts (such as tides
in the Mediterranean). Yet the theatre management was apparently
content to leave them stand.
This pattern is _of_course_ unique in the history of the theatre.
No other playwright has such 'errors', let alone the same ones --
and the same kinds of ones -- repeated again and again throughout
his career.
So how could the Lord Chamberlain's Men (later the King's Men)
have continued to mount productions of those plays with those
errors, week after week, year after year? They must have got
sick of people pointing them out. They may well have modified
their performances, but changes were not made in the text. The
'errors' were repeated in play after play -- so there can be no
doubt that they were put in deliberately.
This suggestion, as we saw last time around, completely befuddles
many Stratfordians. The notion of 'deliberate mistakes' is held
to be something close to an oxymoron. Partly, I believe, this is
due to a failure to understand certain aspects of British (and,
more specifically, English) humour. This could have been part of
Ogburn's uncertainty as well. I don't think that devotees of
'Private Eye' magazine or the TV program 'Have I got news for
you?' or the Goon Show or Monty Python, would find the concept of
'deliberate mistakes' strange.
And, of course, not all British or English people appreciate that
kind of humour. Shakespeare constantly makes fun of the such
types in the Canon -- the Holofernes, Slenders, Pinches, Doctor
Caius's, etc. Regretably (and ironically) it's such pedants
that become the Shakespearean 'scholars'.
Shakespeare is here making fun of the intensity of their desire
for pedantic accuracy. And your argument, Dave, that scarcely a
soul at that time cared for such matters is scholarly worthless.
You will be unable to provide a scrap of evidence for this.
Certainly Ben Jonson cared -- and he is not usually thought of as
being unusually pedantic.
> "The outrageous, easily avoidable
>howler is just the kind that a studied Ben Jonson or a playwright
>from a Warwickshire village, sensitive about the poverty of
>his cultural background, would have been at pains not to
>fall into. It took that "princely mind" not to give a hang."
>But Ogburn has just told us that nobody cared about such
>discrepancies in those days! Not only is he asserting,
>completely arbitrarily, what "a playwright from a Warwickshire
>village" would have done and thought,
There is nothing the least 'arbitrary' about this. It is a fact
of life, especially in a class-ridden society that those at the
top of the pyramid laugh at, and make fun of, apparent ignorance
of those lower down the scale. (I've no doubt that Harvard MBA's
laugh at those with lesser qualifications. They could lose a few
millions without their reputations suffering, whereas a graduate
from the University of Ploughkeepsie couldn't.) So the Ben
Jonson's and the Warwickshire playwrights (if there were any)
cannot afford public errors. The notion that they might leave in
(or even put in) errors like putting Denver on the coast, simply
would not occur to a them.
> About the TGV blunder, immediately before the passage
>quoted above, he writes: "My hunch is that Valentine's
>being shipped from Verona harks back to the dramatist's own
>embarkation from one Italian port to another, perhaps to
>an original conception of the play, before Verona was decided
>on." Huh?
I don't say Ogburn got it entirely right. He may have missed out
on the 'British humour'. He may just not have given the matter
enough thought. It is hard to shake off all the Stratfordian
foolishness in which we have all been indoctrinated.
My own hunch is that Oxford put these 'errors' into the plays
largely to annoy Burghley -- who was a stickler for geographical
accuracy. Although he may have been having a dig at certain
Italians, with whom he was friendly -- someone, perhaps, like
John Florio. Since they were written largely as court
entertainments, and since the audience wouldn't have had printed
copies, and since the 'mistakes' are passed over quickly, most of
them wouldn't have missed them in a live performance. It might
also have been something of a game he played with some of is
friends - 'spot the mistakes'.
However, these 'mistakes' are excellent evidence that the plays
were not written as commercial ventures for the public stage.
>I would be hard pressed to find a better illustration
>of the complete ad hockery and scholarly worthlessness of
>Oxfordian "methods".
We all know how bad Shakespearean 'scholarship' is. But this
post of yours, Dave, is beyond a joke -- and I'm fairly sure
you're not joking. Have you been feeling ok recently? This is
so bad that it does not sound like you.
Paul.
Feather Wate
Dave Kathman
going to butt in on this thread, because Ogburn's bizarre
ideas bear such a strong resemblance to Crowley's. I almost
said something in my post, but held my tongue. But I
was right --- heeeeeeeeere's Paulie!
[snip of hilarious Crowleyesque ranting in which he once
again asserts, with a straight face, that no other playwrights
have ever made the kinds of mistakes Shakespeare did,
and that "Shakespeare" (i.e. Oxford) put them in his
plays deliberately in order to annoy Burghley.]
> >I would be hard pressed to find a better illustration
> >of the complete ad hockery and scholarly worthlessness of
> >Oxfordian "methods".
>
> We all know how bad Shakespearean 'scholarship' is. But this
> post of yours, Dave, is beyond a joke -- and I'm fairly sure
> you're not joking. Have you been feeling ok recently? This is
> so bad that it does not sound like you.
I'm feeling just fine, Paul! In fact, this post of yours
produced an invigorating belly laugh that really brightened
my day. Don't ever change! (As if I have to say such a
thing to you!)
Dave Kathman
dj...@ix.netcom.com
Paul Crowley
<dj...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>This is too, too funny. I just *knew* that Crowley was
>going to butt in on this thread, because Ogburn's bizarre
>ideas bear such a strong resemblance to Crowley's. I almost
>said something in my post, but held my tongue. But I
>was right --- heeeeeeeeere's Paulie!
Thanks for your usual kind of reply -- the kind that one gets
from a skunk (or a 'scholar') in a corner with nowhere to run or
hide -- a large stink.
>> >directly contradicts what Ogburn has just taken pains to
>> >argue about Elizabethan playwrights and audiences in general!
>> >I would be hard pressed to find a better illustration
>> >of the complete ad hockery and scholarly worthlessness of
>> >Oxfordian "methods".
It's still hard to believe that you could make a bloomer like
that -- confusing a mistake with normal theatrical conventions.
But there it is!
You don't deny it, of course --- because there is nothing that
can be denied. Your prejudice against Ogburn blinded you to the
most ordinary of distinctions. It shows how dangerous a
prejudice can be. It gets people into all sorts of trouble.
And rarely can they admit it -- especially when they claim to be
'scholars'. A confession to the blunder, or an acknowledgement
that you could be affected by prejudice, would both require a
level of honesty that is quite beyond you.
Rob (and others) found disturbing my assertion that Shakepearean
'scholars' (and modern academics generally) lack honesty. Yet
here is a perfect illustration.
>[snip of hilarious Crowleyesque ranting in which he once
>again asserts, with a straight face, that no other playwrights
>have ever made the kinds of mistakes Shakespeare did,
What a shame that you 'forgot' to list a few. Of course you have
all the counter-examples at your fingerti . . . . well, you know
there are lots . . . it's just that you haven't got your
reference books to hand . . . .
>and that "Shakespeare" (i.e. Oxford) put them in his
>plays deliberately in order to annoy Burghley.]
As I stated, this is just my hunch -- for which there is only
circumstantial evidence. And I gave other possibilities.
I expect nothing in response from you other than the usual
animal noises -- the donkey bray or the hyena laugh.
But Dave, just who do you think you are fooling?
Paul.