Colin Burrow has a magnificent review essay on William Empson in the latest LRB that I can’t resist quoting chunks of; I only wish AJP (who just last year said “Colin Burrow is God”) were still here to enjoy it:
Empson was famously chucked out of Magdalene College, Cambridge, when condoms were found in his room. He spent the early part of his academic career teaching in Japan and China. He was a staggering drinker and a wild eccentric in his social manner, as well as in his disorderly mandarin-style beard (Geoffrey Hill was apparently reminded of Empson when he saw a prize-winning Yorkshire terrier). At Richards’s funeral he read a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins. The organiser of the event, Richard Luckett, described him as speaking ‘inaudibly and inexactly against his own brilliantly simulated atmospherics of squeaks and high-pitched whistles modulated through a slightly damp moustache’. Empson later explained that in order to be sure he was audible he had removed his teeth before reading.
That rudimentary error about how best to get people to attend to what you are saying was not untypical of Empson. But he was – bear with me here – very good at metaphorically taking out his false teeth in order to make himself understood. His critical writing combines forensic analysis of alternative senses (in which his critical teeth grind a text into fine particles) with deliberately wide and vague gestures to the beyond (teeth out, evocative mumbling through a slightly damp moustache). Empson would quite often (and ‘quite’ is one of the function words about which he writes particularly well) grind through a list of alternative interpretations, set out with pseudo-mathematical precision, and then gesture off into the void of the unknowable with a ‘sort of’ to suggest that none of his carefully listed alternative interpretations could quite capture the overall effect of a given phrase. He does this in the passage which poor Madge had to read out to her blind professor when he interrupts his list of all the things Donne might mean in order to talk of ‘a different sort of feeling’. As he said in Some Versions of Pastoral, ‘probably a half-magical idea is the quickest way to the truth.’ […]
It’s hard to say that there is a typical Empson essay, since he wrote about so many things. His posthumous publications include books on images of the Buddha and on the role of the censor in shaping Marlowe’s Dr Faustus – a wildly entertaining account ruined by Empson’s conviction that the haphazard processes of Elizabethan censorship resembled those of 20th-century totalitarianism, which they did not. He also wrote about Alice in Wonderland, Marvell’s relationship with his housekeeper, Wordsworth, and Shakespeare, and made parenthetical references to more or less everything else. Reading an Empson essay is like being taken for a drive by an eccentric uncle in a terrifyingly powerful old banger. There are disturbing stains on the upholstery and an alarming whiff of whisky in the air, but when he takes another swig from his hipflask and guns the accelerator, your head gets thrown back so far that you just have to make yourself enjoy the ride – even if you’re not quite sure you’re going where you want to go.
[…] Empson’s own mind was complex and ill-connected, and contained many different voices: the poet, the patrician mathematician, the joker, the shocker, the drinker, the social critic, as well as the seraph of vagueness. At one point in his essay on Donne he offers a kind of parody mathematical definition of how Donne treats a single person or thing as an embodiment of a wider whole: ‘This member of the class is the whole class, or its defining property: this man has a magical importance to all men.’ He goes on to relate this use of the representative figure to his own concept of pastoral: ‘If you choose an important member the result is heroic; if you choose an unimportant one it is pastoral.’ That’s the Empson of Some Versions of Pastoral in a nutshell. You have the terrifying vrooom as his foot goes to the floor and your mind can’t quite keep up with where it’s being pulled, and then, perhaps, a slight sense that some kind of magic (or is it trickery?) has happened. And it probably has: the master of ambiguity uses ‘class’ here in a mathematical sense (of a particular category of entities) but with overtones of the social sense (of distinct social groups).
This simultaneous creation and blurring of conceptual boundaries more or less licenses his description of the phenomenon as ‘magical’: one person in a poem can stand for lots of people, and by virtue of the pun on ‘class’ all classes can be represented through a single figure. So if you use a high-class person to represent a wider ‘class’ of entities, it creates the heroic; doing so through a low-class person creates the pastoral. And then you think: cor, he’s right. Literary representation necessarily includes a range of entities beyond the particular, and top-down and bottom-up views of the world are structurally as well as generically distinct, and maybe pastoral actually doesn’t need to contain sheep or shepherds, but is indeed just a bottom-up view of human society depicted through a representative socially low figure. Then you may think: aw, come off it. Read what it says on the label and stop being so darned clever: you can’t take the pastor out of pastoral without collapsing it into all things. […]
Being too clever was Empson’s main problem. It made him sometimes write sentences which coil the obvious around with pirouettes. It could also make him impatient of vulgar fact. His critical writings contain a high number of misquotations. These are usually corrected in the commentary of the Oxford editions, though when Empson cites Charmian as saying that Shakespeare’s Cleopatra was ‘Descended from so many mighty kings’ the notes only record the lesser error in the misquotation (‘from’ is wrong) and not the greater: the actual line includes the magnificent pleonasm of ‘Descended of so many royal kings’. Underlying Some Versions of Pastoral is also what might kindly be called an extremely vague social history, which sees ‘the Augustans’ as doing terrible things to society and the language, while the rise of Puritanism (ascribed in a throwaway aside in The Structure of Complex Words to the spread of syphilis) is supposed to have done whatever else is bad. The idea that children were innocent, Empson declares in the essay on Alice, ‘strengthened as the aristocracy became more puritan. It depends on a feeling, whatever may have caused that in its turn, that no way of building up character, no intellectual system, can bring out all that is inherent in the human spirit.’ Like an undergraduate who grins amiably while spouting what you both know to be crap, Empson could use a tone of aristocratic unconcern to get away with some terminally vague statements about ‘feelings’ and ‘whatevers’: ‘A feeling gradually got about that anyone below the upper middles was making himself ridiculous, being above himself, if he showed any signs of keeping a sense of beauty at all, and this feeling was common to all classes.’
The Structure of Complex Words was Empson’s next book. […] The precise definitions of the ‘equations’ Empson found in complex words thankfully matter a lot less than his general purpose, which was twofold. His first aim was in the nicest possible way to set the dogs on Richards for insisting that language was either denotative or emotive and that poetry only made ‘pseudo-statements’. The second was to provide a more socially inflected view of how words function than was apparent from the lists of definitions in the OED, which was Empson’s vade-mecum but often also his adversary in understanding the inner intricacies of the language. ‘Language is essentially a social product, and much concerned with social relations, but we tend to hide this in our forms of speech so as to appear to utter impersonal truths.’ That social aspect of language is not something a non-native speaker could learn from the lists of senses in even the best of dictionaries.
If the theoretical bread around the sandwich that is The Structure of Complex Words is indigestible, the filling more than makes up for it. The chapters on ‘honest’ in Othello and ‘fool’ in King Lear are exemplary studies of how words can express and generate social turmoil, and remain among the best essays ever written on Shakespeare. The reason they’re so good is that they show how each word could be used not just with a range of senses, but with inflections of class and interpersonal attitudes which their users can only partially control. The depth and the complexity of Shakespeare’s plays are, for Empson, a consequence of Shakespeare’s ability to hear and to use these inner dramas within the ‘key words’ in particular plays. Othello repeatedly calls Iago ‘honest’ not just because he thinks Iago tells the truth, but because the word ‘honest’ carries with it a suggestion of social inferiority. A mere ‘honest’ fellow doesn’t have the gumption to set out to destroy his boss, and since you don’t respect an honest little fellow or bother to think too hard about his moral nature you don’t imagine him capable of plotting or lying. The tragedy, Empson suggests, grows from the cracks around and within ‘honest’. The word ‘fool’ in Lear operates in a similar way, both to trivialise the person thought of as a ‘fool’ and to enable him to advance under cover of folly into areas of social interaction that are potentially destructive, and which make fools of the lot of us. The exploration of these verbal dramas was an attempt to extend the social dialectic that ran through Some Versions of Pastoral into both the theory and practice of language: the ‘fool’ or ‘honest’ man can be the key to the whole show, the apparently simple which is actually complex, the lowly person in whom the world of the lordly is both included and inverted and potentially overturned.
The result is a kind of criticism that explores the social agency of words. Empson shows that the multiple senses and usages of individual words can create and imply social relationships between people, and that changes in their sense and usage can generate confusion or even tragedy for those who use them. The problem was, as always, the over-fertility of Empson’s mind, and the frantic pseudo-discipline he applied in the hope of controlling that fertility. Complex words are complex because of the range of social attitudes they can imply, and because of the range of senses they have, and because of their distinctive histories, and because of the particular circumstances in which they are used in any given text. All those statements are true, and to understand any complex piece of writing you have to some degree to engage with them all; but an attempt to provide a general theory of language will necessarily founder in the eddies of overcomplexity if it seeks to explain all of them at the same time. Our minds are always doing too much with words for us ever fully to understand them. That is actually a reassuring truth. It is why robots will never talk like humans (though humans of course may and do sometimes talk like robots), and is the main reason critical analysis of a particular piece of writing is so much more difficult than painstakingly setting out the inner logic of the word ‘ought’. But it can make literary criticism a great big mess of a muddle. Criticism is an attempt to do multifactorial analysis of things so complex that probably in the end all one can do is guide a reader’s intuitions in the right direction, and trying to do more is probably vain. But one can say of Empson that he understood more of the muddle and tried harder to unpick it than almost anyone else. […]
In 1963 Christopher Ricks developed from Empson’s essay on Milton the dazzling explosion of verbal energy that is Milton’s Grand Style. Ricks, a grammar school boy, came from a background far removed from Empson’s family pile at Yokefleet Hall, and it might be said – though it may be a little unkind to do so – that middle-class aspirants to supremacy in literary criticism in the Britain of the 1950s and 1960s adopted Empsonian techniques of close verbal analysis as though they were tools and tokens of cultural mastery, so tended to downplay or neglect Empson’s interest in the social foundations of language use and linguistic change. It was a railway worker’s son, Raymond Williams, who ran with the idea that words had social histories embedded in them. His Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976) was a book which Empson reviewed with an admiration qualified by the lordly but feline observation, like a lion casually cuffing a cub and knocking it out of the den, about Williams’s entry on ‘education’ that ‘it is totalitarian; quite unconsciously of course.’ Keywords is one manifestation of the ‘Empsonian’, since it responds to the historical and political aspects of The Structure of Complex Words. Its limitation is that Williams so wanted words to have impersonal cultural histories that he wasn’t very interested in usages that made difficulties for his larger historical narratives – and good poems typically do make such difficulties.
I love that writing: “like a lion casually cuffing a cub and knocking it out of the den” is great. “Our minds are always doing too much with words for us ever fully to understand them” is a truth that should be stamped prominently on every book about language. And Burrow makes me want to read Empson and Williams (both of whom I’ve heard good things about for decades).
Both the reviewer and Empson sound drippingly English and upper class. So effortless, so assured of their own mastery. I don’t think I’d like to meet either of them.
How much of the piece did you leave out? Is it worth bothering to read it in its entirety?
I left out a lot; it’s a long review essay. But if you don’t like what I quoted, you won’t like the rest. Sorry it’s not more demotic.
His quasimathematical mode of thinking bumps interestingly in his `Child as Swain’ into Lewis Carroll’s. He wrote a wonderful account of de Quincey’s `English Mail Coach’ but unfortunately that was in an adjacent timeline that I no longer have access to…
Make no mistake, it’s interesting. But this reviewer is far too class conscious. He belongs to a closed world. You can read his stuff but don’t imagine you’d gain admission to his circle if you actually met him. Betray the slightest sign of the wrong social origins and you would be consigned to the limbo of non-existence without so much as a raised eyebrow.
It’s the effortlessness that counts. Too much naïve enthusiasm would mark you as a rank outsider.
@ Bathrobe: You never know. You might remind Colin Burrow of his late mother, who wrote that “Yale, like Oxford, was full of people who thought far too well of themselves, lived very formally and regarded the wives of academics as second class citizens.”
You can read his stuff but don’t imagine you’d gain admission to his circle if you actually met him.
But I have not the faintest interest in gaining admission to his circle, and it baffles me that anyone would think that way. When I read something, all I care about is the words I’m reading. If I like them enough, I might be curious about the author, but admission to his circle? No. I’m a reader, not a circler.
…what makes royal kings “magnificent” as opposed to an embarrassing attempt to fill out the line?
the rise of Puritanism (ascribed in a throwaway aside in The Structure of Complex Words to the spread of syphilis)
Seems reasonable.
When I read something, all I care about is the words I’m reading
It seems that Empson would have disapproved of this attitude. Creeping Derridaism!
‘Pleonasm’ always looks like a word that has got accidentally spoonerised.
…what makes royal kings “magnificent” as opposed to an embarrassing attempt to fill out the line?
Shakespeare didn’t make embarrassing attempts to fill out the line. Not all language use is about efficient communication, you know.
Surprised by the attitudinal antipathy expressed here (to Burrow and/or Empson), especially since the review stays very close to the intellectual context (there is plenty of Oxford social gossip to go around, but little to be found in the review). Also notable is that most of the figures who appear in this review are not in fact upper class or even middle class (in the UK sense) but scholarship students with ordinary backgrounds and extraordinary minds.
I’m surprised too, but I’ve learned never to anticipate reader reaction to what I post. Thanks for the corrective view!
To explain, there were certain triggers that I found distasteful. The constant reference to ‘social class’ was offputting:
‘inflections of class and interpersonal attitudes which their users can only partially control’
‘‘honest’ carries with it a suggestion of social inferiority’
‘a railway worker’s son’
‘a more socially inflected view of how words function’
‘middle-class aspirants to supremacy in literary criticism in the Britain of the 1950s and 1960s adopted Empsonian techniques of close verbal analysis as though they were tools and tokens of cultural mastery, so tended to downplay or neglect Empson’s interest in the social foundations of language use and linguistic change’
‘being taken for a drive by an eccentric uncle in a terrifyingly powerful old banger’…
These all show a sensitivity to social class that seems typical of England. It seemed to me to be parochially, suffocatingly English, and somewhat snobbish to boot. As for the social import of language, I felt that some of what was said would apply more to class-conscious Englishmen and less to other varieties of English.
However, reading it again, I have to admit that the reviewer only appears to be depicting reality as it is, so I will take back my earlier comments. The writer does have an easy, conversational style. It wasn’t so much his style that bothered me as his subject matter and the way he seemed to delight in it.
Thanks! I appreciate people who can reevaluate their views.
I narrowly missed having Empson as an instructor in the IU School of Letters. Thank you for making me, the son of a welder, less regretful of this fact.
And at least C. S. Lewis never wore a Mao jacket.
And at least C. S. Lewis never wore a Mao jacket.
Now I need to revise my mental picture of him …
Freeman Dyson (a real sweetheart AFAIK) shared a stairwell with Wittgenstein for a while, thought him a bully and avoided him… Diffrint strokes 4 diffrint folks…
Here’s a Yale Alumni Magazine reminiscence by Richard Brodhead that makes an interesting American counterpart to Burrow on Empson:
Can’t remember if I’ve pushed this here or not before, but anyway.
Charles Flandrau’s “Harvard Episodes” is an amused look at Harvard ca. 1895 by a well-born author who grew up on the American frontier and met Teddy Roosevelt in Dakota before it was a state. (He was a neighbor and mentor of F S Fitzgerald). Most of the familiar themes are there: the rich student who fake sit through, the impoverished grind, the party boys who flunked out, the affected, precious Boston relatives, college as netowrking the the developing of proper class attitudes, and so on. At Harvard in 1895 you really should be from a Boston family, and really from one of the BETTER Boston families.
The author did pretty well at Harvard and there’s no bitterness, but rather an amused detachment.
I have read a number of the later college kid novels (Frank Merriwell at Yale, Stover at Yale, This Side of Paradise) and most of them have something uneasy and ambiguous to say about democracy, equality, etc. America had and has plenty of stratification but was and is not proud of it.
https://archive.org/details/harvardepisodes01flangoog
You mentioned it in February but had different things to say about it.
*eyeroll* I didn’t say that. I’m genuinely shocked that royal and kings aren’t apparently considered too overlapping in meaning for this to work. I know Shakespeare used pleonasms elsewhere; a rich jewel, for example, seems to me to work much better, because rich isn’t just the adjective to jewel. That he wrote royal kings is evidence that this, too, works, but this conclusion is still surprising enough that I figured I better ask.
After all, given the sheer amount of what Shakespeare wrote, and under what conditions he wrote it, I’m not going to jump to the conclusion that every one of his lines is great because it’s by Shakespeare. Dormitatne bonus Homerus?
No, of course not, but it’s a good working assumption in one of the great plays like A&C.
You can have a poor jewel, surely. Some are richer than others, at least.
I quite like ‘royal kings’ – it gives me a purple-and-gold kind of image that just ‘kings’ doesn’t.
Yes, exactly. He was following Shklovsky’s advice “to make the stone stony.”
I assume that in hat’s extended quote from Brodhead’s recollections it is Bloom who is supposed to be the Empsonian character (because eccentric), but Lewis, who had transformed young Brodhead’s vision of what an English prof could be a year earlier, would be more Empson-like with respect to all of those social-class vibes that were (making necessary adjustments for the US context rather than the UK one) rubbing bathrobe the wrong way upthread.
If Lewis was a bit different from others, he could (rather like Empson) count on the fact that there was in those days a certain amount of intra-elite tolerance of eccentricity and originality, as long as the offbeat fellow was himself to the manner/manor born (as was Brodhead himself, who had been G.W. Bush’s boarding school classmate before they went to college together). Whereas by contrast Bloom was a genuine outsider/autodidact coming out of a poor immigrant neighborhood in the Bronx, which put his eccentricity and originality in a rather different light.
Quite.
possibly worth mentioning is that under brodhead’s deanship (i can testify from my own experience on that campus) yale’s humanities departments had fully re-introduced the “clubby approach to faculty hiring” he professes distaste for: as a matter of policy, they refused to even consider tenuring faculty from the ranks, instead holding national searches for any tenured position that came open. that essentially meant that tenured faculty not only had to be established academic ‘stars’ before arriving at yale (generally already holding tenure at another school) but also thoroughly clubbable (to win the post over the other stars competing for it).
brodhead was entirely comfortable presiding over senior faculty from a wider range of childhoods than his classmates had, but was equally comfortable making sure that all of them had spent their years of adulthood within just as narrow a social space as his classmates’ parents’ had occupied. no second harold bloom could have ascended from graduate student to tenured professor at yale under brodhead.
Russian
“царственный” (tsarstevennyj, meaning 2. in Wiktionary’s list of royal meanings: “Having the air or demeanour of a monarch; illustrious; magnanimous; of more than common size or excellence.”) can be combined with король (korol’) “king” pefectly.
Russian
“царский” (tsarskij, also “королевский”, “ханский” etc.) as in царский дворец, “royal palace”, would be a joke or word play in combination with “king”. Not necessary bad, but..
I wanted to say that only a poet could use such a combination, but Shakespeare is a poet. Let’s say, it would immediately attract a listener’s attention. Tsarskij tsar would sound funny, tsarskij korol’ would rather make you stumble (because of the inherent contradition between “tsar” and “king” and “khan”).
Both have a potential to drift towards the meaning five in Wiktionary’s list of royal meanings: “royal pain in the neck”
For a couple of days when I returned to this thread a melody played in my head. Finally, I’ve looked it up. Not a royal king, after all, but close
The children followed his old career–
(This statement can’t be parried)
Of a highly respectable gondolier:
Well, one of the two (who will soon be here)–
But which of the two is not quite clear–
Is the Royal Prince you married!
Search in and out and round about,
And you’ll discover never
A tale so free from every doubt–
All probable, possible shadow of doubt–
All possible doubt whatever!
Some countries do distinguish between princes of the royal family and princes of other families. I think.
And apparently Emmanuel Macron is one of the reigning princes of Andorra, but I’m not sure that makes him royal…
rozele: Thanks, that’s extremely valuable background information, and it doesn’t surprise me given the anodyne hail-fellow-well-met nature of the latter part of his reminiscences. I’m glad he was finally persuaded to go elsewhere.
FWIW, when I were a lad (or at least an undergrad) in the mid-Eighties and Brodhead had not yet ascended into The Administration, there were already several Yale humanities departments (I think including both history and philosophy, although my memory may be a bit unreliable/fuzzy, especially as it was not an issue I personally cared about very much at the time) with reputations for never, or at least virtually never, tenuring their own junior faculty but instead pushing them out of the nest after six or seven years and bringing in some already-established superstar from elsewhere. Perhaps that practice spread to other departments by the Nineties. While its proponents no doubt claimed that it gave the university access to a wider pool of talent than would be the case if there were a presumption in favor of promoting the home-grown, rozele’s point that a wider pool of candidates actually makes it easier to come up with a homogenous monoculture of actual hires, if such be your actual goal, is an astute and valuable one. That said, I do not think there has been a nationwide search, or any search at all, to fill the vacancy left by Harold’s death in the Bloom Chair of Bloomology (as he was known to call it).
The university this past spring settled a lawsuit brought against it by a disgruntled former assistant professor of Spanish regarding the legality of her tenure denial rather than risk an imminent trial with public airing of the details of exactly how the sausage was made.
A relative worked for 6 years as an adjunct and then was denied her PhD. It was a saleable field and she was able to get work with an MA, but the PhD meant a lot to her and it ruined her life.
At many elite universities, there are departments which almost never (less than ten percent of the time, say) grant tenure to their junior faculty. The full professors are almost exclusively hired from outside. There are effectively two pools of faculty lines in such departments, for junior and senior positions. However, being denied tenure in a top department in these top places is not likely to doom an academic’s career; my own department includes two full professors who were assistant professors at Harvard and Princeton.
Different departments at top schools also frequently have different attitudes toward their junior faculty. The upper administration certainly can influence how many junior people get tenure, but it is mostly a matter if departmental culture. At MIT, when I was there, the math and physics departments were relatively generous with tenure, although they also hired senior people from outside. Chemistry, on the other hand, tenured a lot fewer people. The only assistant professor of chemistry that I recall getting tenure was somebody who had managed to get nitrogen gas to react at room temperature.
BTW it turns out that a bookshelf in our living room holds not only a copy of _Seven Types of Ambiguity_ but a copy of Empson’s sophomore LP _Some Versions of Pastoral_ as well. My beloved wife informs me that these were both assigned reading for some class she took in grad school rather than books she picked up just for the heck of it.
Robert Woodward was said to be the only assistant professor at Harvard who had ever got tenure in the chemistry department.
I can’t quite remember 34-38 years later all of my undergraduate teachers by name and in a few instances am not certain if I can accurately slot them into status-at-the-time (tenured v. junior tenure-track v. some third thing). That said I can remember four junior-tenure-track ones who did not become tenured there (although whether in each instance they only left after denial or in the face of inevitable denial I can’t say). Going the other direction, there’s one fellow who I supposed in memory was probably already tenured when I took his class but the web suggests he was few enough years past his Ph.D. at that point that that impression may have been inaccurate. He was in the Anthropology dep’t but I took sociolinguistics from him. I think the computer science professor with whom I took an “artificial intelligence for non-CS majors” class had at the time been tenured fairly recently (from within) but I could be wrong about that.
The ones that left New Haven and their fates were:
Ass’t Prof. of Classics – went off to a low-prestige university that at the time had very ambitious and well-funded growth plans and hired on as first dean of their new honors college that was supposed to help them attract more desirable students and thereby climb the prestige and prominence hierarchy. Not sure that it ultimately worked out that way, but doesn’t mean it wasn’t a gamble worth taking ex ante.
Ass’t Prof. of Linguistics – eventually got tenure at UC-Santa Cruz, which ended up having a very well-regarded Linguistics dep’t for a university with a mixed-to-flakey overall reputation (Geoff Pullum was probably in charge when she got there).
Ass’t Prof. of Philosophy 1 – left teaching/scholarship to go into university fundraising and ended up as the chief fundraiser for UC-Berkeley. (Maybe separating donors from their $ was easier than getting teenagers to care about Leibniz’s monads?)
Ass’t Prof. of Philosophy 2 – eventually got tenure at U of Chicago.
Well yes, he is. I think only two French co-princes have ever set foot in their principality, and those very recent ones — François Hollande and Emmanuel Macron. I imagine the other co-princes, the Bishops of Urgell, have been there more often, as Urgell is very close to Andorra. I’ve driven through Andorra twice, and found that it leaves Switzerland and Norway standing as the most mountainous country in Europe. Both times I was travelling from France to Spain, which is a good idea from the point of view of contraband — the French customs don’t care if you’re leaving France, and the Spanish customs more or less ignore cars arriving with foreign licence plates. Both times there were long queues of Spanish cars waiting to be checked, but I was just waved through. About the first place you come to is the great city of Urgell, with its 36000 inhabitants.
The German language does: Prinz “son of a king or emperor”, Fürst “any subject of Machiavelli’s book” (though especially the middle range of that, hardly ever the top ranks, and some nobles actually had that as their title, or as part of their title like… gefürsteter Graf “count raised in rank by some amount or other”).
…what do you mean? Denied the ability to start one?
Not bad… not bad at all.
…what do you mean? Denied the ability to start one?
I’m guessing her dissertation was rejected, but now I’m curious to hear more.
After all those years her dissertation was rejected without any further option of revising or rewriting it. She believed that she was strung along for several years just because they needed a TA. As I remember they also assigned her a sort of deadend topic which was unlikely to turn out well.
Marvell’s relationship with his housekeeper, Wordsworth, and Shakespeare
It’s not too clear whether Wordsworth was the name of his housekeeper, or Marvell’s (posthumous) relationship with Wordsworth and Shakespeare is meant.
parody mathematical
“Parody” indeed. It is mathematical, or mathematico-logical.
A mere ‘honest’ fellow doesn’t have the gumption to set out to destroy his boss
Fine, except that by honest Shakespeare meant ‘honorable’ as well as ‘honest’, per ordinary EModE.
And now, last and longest:
royal king
Looking at it in context (V.ii), I think this is entirely right: in character for the speaker, in decorum for the play. The women have just been told that they have been captured by Octavius Caesar and will be led in triumph (for him, not for them) through the streets of Rome (and, at least traditionally, strangled by the captor’s own hand at the end). They decide to die by asp rather than endure the mockery of the Roman mob and its demand for their horrible death. First Iras applies the asp to her arm, then Cleopatra, and when both are dead Charmian lets herself be bitten. At that point the Roman guards burst in:
Enter the Guard, rushing in
First Guard: Where is the queen?
CHARMIAN: Speak softly, wake her not.
First Guard: Caesar hath sent—
CHARMIAN: Too slow a messenger.
Applies an asp
CHARMIAN: O, come apace, dispatch! I partly feel thee.
First Guard: Approach, ho! All’s not well: Caesar’s beguiled.
Second Guard: There’s Dolabella sent from Caesar; call him.
First Guard: What work is here! Charmian, is this well done?
CHARMIAN: It is well done, and fitting for a princess
Descended of so many royal kings.
Ah, soldier! Dies
Plutarch says “descendant of so many kings”, but royal is Shakespeare’s touch: it is emphatic, is a slap at Roman republicanism (“so many truly royal kings, whereas you Romans have no kings at all, royal or otherwise”), and gains all the more force by being the captive’s last words by which she continues to claim superiority over her captors (Charmian/Charmion was no slave, she was one of Antony’s trusted councilors even in war: like Cleopatra, she was Greek, not native Egyptian.)
A few later comments somehow got lost in the save, but were preserved in my clipboard, so here they are in case you think you need more:
an attempt to provide a general theory of language will necessarily founder in the eddies of overcomplexity if it seeks to explain all of them at the same time. Our minds are always doing too much with words for us ever fully to understand them. That is actually a reassuring truth. It is why robots will never talk like humans
As a good follower of Pyrrhon, my vibrissae start to twitch when people say things like necessarily and ever, never: they are what Arthur C. Clarke calls failures of nerve, the unwillingness to be bold enough when talking of the future. But I suppose our essayist neither grew up reading Clarke nor eavesdropping on conversations with Olivaw (and later Reventlov).
accidentally spoonerised
An over-verbose paper concerning cancer cells might indeed constitute pleonasm about neoplasm.
advanced from the mix of belles lettres and Germanic philology that had characterized it before World War II
Tolkien snarls at the essayist from heaven, not for promulgating new things, but for thinking it necessary to destroy the old in the process (how very Chomskian of him!), a thing that may indeed be necessary for new buildings in Manhattan, but scarcely for scholarship. But perhaps he just considers that a law of nature.
every one of his lines is great because it’s by Shakespeare
Indeed not. “Shakespeare never had six lines together without a fault. Perhaps you may find seven, but this does not refute my general assertion”, said a great critic of Shakespeare in his day, Samuel Johnson, who would hardly have spent so much time on the man if he did not think him admirable. (Of course then there is Shaw.)
autodidact coming out of a poor immigrant neighborhood in the Bronx
And a Jew who learned his English at age six to boot.
as a matter of policy, [Yale] refused to even consider tenuring faculty from the ranks
Which is as much as to proclaim that by teaching at Yale you learn nothing, whereas by teaching at some Lesser Institution you learn enough to get a job at Yale for life. (A “great center of knowledge” is one in which the freshmen bring so much in and the seniors take so little out.) I’m reminded of modern professional militaries with their “up or out” rules, and the Cravath system, used by white-shoe law firms who do promote people to partner from within but dismiss after a few years the 95% they don’t promote.
tsarskij korol’ would rather make you stumble (because of the inherent contradition between “tsar” and “king” and “khan”
Yes, the Eastern Slavs named their own kings after Julius Caesar and other people’s kings after Charlemagne, which is perhaps just.
have been there more often, as Urgell is very close to Andorra
Andorra is also within his bishopric, so if there are any priests to be made there, it is he who must make them.
I meant to say in the previous comment that Charmian, like the Norse gods, thinks defeat no refutation.