Some of us enjoy footnotes and other annotations. Thoughtful, non-Kinbotean notes accompanying older texts can identify historical figures and help us decipher obsolete words. As Joyce advised in Finnegans Wake: “Wipe your glosses with what you know.” My preference with Shakespeare is the non-modernized text with good notes. But some scholarly apparatus can be more confusing and irrelevant than the original work. Robert Benchley has some fun with this phenomenon in “Shakespeare Explained” (Of All Things, 1921). He starts with a fictitious stage direction and line of dialogue from Pericles:
“Enter first
Lady-in-Waiting (Flourish, [1] Hautboys [2] and[3] torches[4]).
“First
Lady-in-Waiting—What [5] ho![6] Where[7] is [8] the[9] music?[10]”
The numbers
are the giveaway. Every word is footnoted, even "and," "is," "the" -- and “Hautboys.” Benchley's phony gloss on the latter:
“Hautboys,
from the French haut, meaning ‘high’
and the Eng. boys, meaning ‘boys.’
The word here is doubtless used in the sense of ‘high boys,’ indicating either
that Shakespeare intended to convey the idea of spiritual distress on the part
of the First Lady-in-Waiting or that he did not. Of this Rolfe says: ‘Here we
have one of the chief indications of Shakespeare’s knowledge of human nature,
his remarkable insight into the petty foibles of this work-a-day world.’ Cf.
T.N. 4:6, ‘Mine eye hath play’d the painter, and hath stell’d thy beautys form
in table of my heart.’”
A nice
parody of scholarly drivel with Benchley reveling in the muddle. The OED defines hautboy: “a wooden double-reed wind instrument of high pitch,
having a compass of about 2½ octaves, forming a treble to the bassoon.” The
linguistic precursor to the English oboe
was the French hautboy, meaning “high
wood.” Shakespeare has Falstaff say in King
Henry IV, Part II:
“I saw it,
and told John a Gaunt he beat his own name; for you might have thrust him and
all his apparel into an eel-skin; the case of a treble hautboy was a mansion
for him, a court, and now has he land and beefs.”
I’m reminded
of Wallace Stevens’ “Asides on the Oboe”: “If you say on the hautboy man is not
enough . . .”
4 comments:
Terry Teachout encouraged footnote reading and rewarded diligent footnote readers by putting extra factual information and other tidbits in his footnotes. I believe that, like every civilized person, he was an enemy of endnotes.
Will Cuppy, a very entertaining American writer from the first half of the 20th Century, made delightful use of footnotes in books such as The Decine and Fall of Practically Everything and How to Become Extinct. Then there is Enrique Vila-Matas's book Bartleby & Co., in which the title character is writing footnotes for a book that does not exist.
So Shakespeare. I highly recommend the audiobook version of Judy Dench’s The Man Who Pays The Rent. No notes, footwise, but plenty of high notes.
But on reflection, maybe the whole book is footnotes. An actresses’ ”Footnotes from the Footlights.” And who better to footnote Shakespeare?
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