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It's time for a special Tudor Tuesday Trivia!!! Every item is from or about Shakespeare!!! |
- All-Shakespeare Edition #1.
- All-Shakespeare Edition #2.
1) In Richard II (V, v, 60.) the king cries out:
But my time Runs posting on in
Bolingbroke's proud joy,
While I stand fooling here, his
Jack o' the clock.
Jack o’ the Clock was the name of the little man who came
out of door of some clock towers and struck the time with his hammer. The image
was also commonly referred to simpleton beggars and busy bodies.
2) In 1 Henry IV, II.iv.284-88, Bardolph reveals a
battlefield trick he has utilized to pretend to have been in the middle of the
fight:
Yea, and to tickle our noses with spearegrasse, to make them
bleed, and then to beslubber our garments with it, and sweare it was the blood
of true men.
The same trick is mentioned by Derrick in the precursor to
Shakespeare’s Henry plays, The Famous Victories of Henry V:
Every day when I went into the field,
I would take a straw, and thrust it
into my nose,
And make my nose bleed, and then I
would go into the field
And when the Captaine saw me, he would
say,
Peace a bloudy souldier, and bid me stand aside,
See my Edward de Vere's Retainer Thomas Churchyard: the
Man Who Was Falstaff (2017) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B077LVLXY2/
for the evidence that Edward de Vere wrote the Famous Victories.
3) As Edmund Malone observed in his variorum edition of the works of Shakespeare, the image
Even as one heat another heat expels,
Or as one nail by strength drives out
another,
So the remembrance of my former love -
Is by a newer object quite
forgotten...
from The Two Gentlemen of Verona appeared much
earlier in The Tragicall Hystory of Romeus and Juliet, 1562 —
purportedly by Arthur Brooke.
And as out of a planke tayle a nayle
a nayle doth drive,
So novel love out of the minde
the auncient love doth rive.
Many of the images in Brooke’s tragedy appear with
surprising frequency in the works of
Shakespeare. The image was no doubt quite common in English mouths. A
variation on it also appears in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus:
One fire drives out one fire; one
nail one nail.
4) When the character Hastings, in Richard III
(I.iii.191), says
O, 'twas the foulest deed to slay
that Babe,
the reference comes not from history but from a mistaken
reading of Hall’s Chronicle written successively into the previous plays
The True Tragedie of Richard Duke of York (I.iii) and 3 Henry VI
(I.iii). [Source: Variorum Richard III, 95.]
5) The character of the Marquis of Dorset refers to a
“pue-fellow” in Richard III (IV.iii.61). In churches of the time, the
further toward the altar the pew the higher the rank one must have in order to
sit in it. Thus “pew-fellows” were
people who shared the same rank and/or situation.
6) The 1609 Sonnets
of Shakespeare does not include all of the sonnets attributed to him. The
play Romeo and Juliet contains three sonnets not collected, Love’s
Labour Lost contains another and All’s Well that Ends Well yet
another. Numerous others appeared in various miscellanies including those I’ve
presented in my Discovered: A New Shakespeare Sonnet (or three, actually)
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1514750406/
7) Thomas Lodge’s poem Glaucus and Scilla (1589) and
Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis (1593) share the same ababcc stanza and a
great many images. Some scholars see the later-published poem as somehow having
influenced the earlier. Lodge served as secretary for a time to Edward de Vere,
the 17th Earl of Oxford.
8) Thomas Lodge’s Rosalynde. Euphues golden legacie;
found after his death in his Cell at Silexedra (1590) is considered the
primary source for Shakespeare’s play As You Like It.
9) Portia’s speech before the Doge in The Merchant of
Venice was taken from Seneca’s Clementia. See my “Portia’s Quality
of Mercy” for more information: https://gilbertwesleypurdy.blogspot.com/2020/06/portias-quality-of-mercy.html
10) A vestigial stage direction in the First Quarto of 1
Henry IV refers to the appearance of a Sir John Rossill (Russell) and a Harvey.
In later corrected versions they are replaced by the characters Bardolphe and
Peto. Because King Henry IV refers to Bardolfe as “Lord Bardolfe” as they
converse familiarly in Act 1, Sc. 1. of 2 Henry IV, it is evident that in
an earlier version of the plays Bardolfe and Peto began as Russell and Harvey. Beyond the blunder
creating Lord Bardolfe for one scene, the subsequent Quarto and Folio editions
give most of the Lord’s speeches to the character Gadshill. This because the
original group of knights, chosen from the history of the time, led by Sir John
Oldcastle, had been replaced by common soldiers — Falstaff, Bardolfe and Peto —
and without Russell’s speeches in one of their mouths the text would be discontinuous.
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