Unimpressed

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Taming_of_the_Shrew.jpg

Samuel Pepys’ opinions of Shakespeare’s plays, from his diary:

  • A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “I had never seen [it] before, nor shall ever again, for it is the most insipid, ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life.”
  • The Taming of the Shrew: “It hath some very good pieces in it, but generally is but a mean play.”
  • Romeo and Juliet: “It is a play of itself the worst that ever I heard.”
  • The Merry Wives of Windsor: “The humours of the country gentleman and the French doctor very well done, but the rest but very poorly, and Sir J. Falstaffe as bad as any.”
  • Henry IV, Part 1: “It did not please me.”
  • The Two Noble Kinsmen: “No excellent piece.”
  • Twelfth Night: “One of the weakest plays that ever I saw on the stage.”

“August 20th, 1666. To Deptford by water, reading Othello, Moor of Venice, which I ever heretofore esteemed a mighty good play; but … it seems a mean thing.”

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Duck Soup

T.S. Eliot was a fan of Groucho Marx. The two maintained a correspondence through the early 1960s, when Groucho accepted a long-offered dinner with the poet.

Eliot wrote: “The picture of you in the newspapers saying that, amongst other reasons, you have come to London to see me has greatly enhanced my credit in the neighborhood, and particularly with the greengrocer across the street. Obviously I am now someone of importance.”

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Oh

Dylan Thomas’ 1954 play Under Milk Wood is set in the town of Llareggub.

Is that a real Welsh village? Or is it a stand-in for Laugharne, where Thomas lived in the 1930s?

Neither — read it backward.

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Strange Eyes

G.K. Chesterton used the term moor eeffocish to describe the queerness sometimes glimpsed in familiar things. He borrowed the phrase from Charles Dickens, who as an unhappy child would sometimes sit in a coffee shop in St. Martin’s Lane:

In the door there was an oval glass plate with ‘COFFEE ROOM’ painted on it, addressed towards the street. If I ever find myself in a very different kind of coffee-room now, but where there is such an inscription on glass, and read it backwards on the wrong side, MOOR EEFFOC (as I often used to do then in a dismal reverie), a shock goes through my blood.

J.R.R. Tolkien later wrote: “The word Mooreeffoc may cause you to realise that England is an utterly alien land, lost either in some remote past age glimpsed by history, or in some strange dim future reached only by a time-machine; to see the amazing oddity and interest of its inhabitants and their customs and feeding-habits.”

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“Learned Ass”

Singular circumstance — A lady resident in Devonshire, going into one of her parlours, discovered a young ass, who had found its way into the room, and carefully closed the door upon himself. He had evidently not been long in this situation before he had nibbled a part of Cicero’s Orations, and eaten nearly all the index of a folio edition of Seneca in Latin, a large part of a volume of La Bruyere’s maxims in French, and several pages of Cecilia. He had done no other mischief whatever, and not a vestige remained of the leaves that he had devoured. Will it be fair henceforward to dignify a dunce with the name of this literary animal?

— Pierce Egan, Sporting Anecdotes, Original and Selected, 1822

| Literature

The Two Cultures

Tennyson’s poem “The Vision of Sin” contains this couplet:

Every moment dies a man,
Every moment one is born.

When he published it in 1842, Charles Babbage sent him a note:

I need hardly point out to you that this calculation would tend to keep the sum total of the world’s population in a state of perpetual equipoise, whereas it is a well-known fact that the said sum total is constantly on the increase. I would therefore take the liberty of suggesting that, in the next edition of your excellent poem, the erroneous calculation to which I refer should be corrected as follows:–

Every moment dies a man,
And one and a sixteenth is born.

“I may add that the exact figures are 1.167,” he added, “but something must, of course, be conceded to the laws of metre.”

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