Bocage

I had a wonderful word in mind for my June 6 post: bocage. This year we marked the 70th anniversary of D-Day on that day, when the Allied armies mounted the greatest invasion in our history to take back the European continent from the Nazis.

According to the Wikipedia entry, bocage is a Norman French and English word typically meaning fields broken up by woodland thickets, which act as both windbreak and boundary. In American English, the word bocage came to mean hedgerow. The soldiers who stormed the beaches and pushed into Normandy encountered heavy resistance both from the enemy and from the very dense bocage.

The day I started working on this post was Hallowe'en, a good day to post about words like Samhain, hallow, or soul cake.

But I could not make myself write about a word or phrase with a Hallowe'en theme. If this is what you are looking for, please let me refer you to the Writer's Almanac, by Garrison Keillor, where you will find an appropriate Hallowe'en entry, as well as other interesting notes about the date, October 31.

I do not know if Garrison Keillor is a dreamer or not, although I imagine that as a writer he must have some characteristics of the dreamer. But the man also has a staff to help write seasonally appropriate entries, even out of season. (Note to self: what would it take for me to do this? More than I have, or not?)

Of course, having a staff also makes the possibility for mistakes even greater. In the Hallowe'en post, he (or, as I imagine, one of his staff) says, "Martin Luther was a monk who disagreed with the Catholic Church's practice of selling indulgences, which forgave the punishment for sins." In fact, the indulgence--that is, the payment you had to make for forgiveness--is the punishment, and, in return for the payment, you got forgiveness. So this should read: ". . . selling indulgences, by which you could have your sins forgiven."

To Be, Or Not To Be

William Shakespeare (1564-1616), English playwright and poet, gave us an immortal body of work. He was born in Stratford-on-Avon to a Catholic family (an outlawed affiliation at the time), married Anne Hathaway in 1582 and had three children, and wrote 38 plays, 124 sonnets, and some odd bits between 1589 and 1613. We don't know much more about him, and of some of what I have said we are not certain.

Historical criticism, a movement with its beginnings in the Protestant Reformation, gave us the tools to study the Bible not so much as if it were the literal truth, but as if it were the truest document human beings could write, edit, and collect. The idea of studying texts this way was eventually applied to secular works. So, by the mid-1800s, the question arose: did Shakespeare write these plays and poems? Or did somebody else?

Instead of assuming that Shakespeare, among the most creative geniuses the world has ever known, revised his manuscripts on the fly and did not necessarily keep track of all of his emendations as well as he might, Joseph C. Hart, in the Romance of Yachting, 1848, put forth the notion that several authors had worked on the manuscripts we have. I am belittling his case by my language, but the idea gained ground and a group of scholars still believes we should look at Shakespeare's authorship this way.

We have even had a movie about this lately, Anonymous (directed by Roland Emmerich, performed by Rhys Ifans, Vanessa Redgrave, Joely Richardson, and others, Columbia Pictures, 2011, Film), in which Edward De Vere, one of the top contenders for Shakespeare's slot in the alternate-Shakespeare view, is proposed.

What do I think about all this? Well, of course, I have already given you a hint, but my idea is that we have no real evidence to support this theory. For introducing this problem, the alternate-Shakespeare scholars should be locked up in their offices all day with nothing to read but gossip magazines.

As far as I am concerned, Shakespeare wrote Hamlet (The Oxford Shakespeare: Hamlet, William Shakespeare, edited by G. R. Hibbard [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008]), and this and his other works will continue to delight us from opening night to the present day to the "Conscience of the King" (Season 1, Episode 13, Star Trek, Desilu Productions, December 8, 1966, Television), star date 2817.6, and beyond.