Constancy: The Star to Every Wand'ring Bark

Julius Caesar, 3.1.64-71:

CAESAR (after CASSIUS joins his plea to that of METELLUS and BRUTUS):

I could be well moved, if I were as you:
If I could pray to move, prayers would move me:
But I am constant as the northern star,
Of whose true-fix'd and resting quality
There is no fellow in the firmament.
The skies are painted with unnumber'd sparks,
They are all fire and every one doth shine,
But there's but one in all doth hold his place:

Sonnet 116, ll. 2-8:

... Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark 
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken. 

Naming: Romeo and Juliet vs Julius Caesar

Romeo and Juliet 2.2:

Tis but thy name that is my enemy;
Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
What's Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!
What's in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call'd,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name,
And for that name which is no part of thee
Take all myself.

Julius Caesar 1.2:

Brutus and Caesar: what should be in that 'Caesar'?
Why should that name be sounded more than yours?
Write them together, yours is as fair a name;
Sound them, it doth become the mouth as well;
Weigh them, it is as heavy; conjure with 'em,
Brutus will start a spirit as soon as Caesar.

And of course, Mercutio tries to conjure Romeo with his beloved's name in Act II, Scene 1.  Of course, he's using the wrong name since he doesn't know Juliet has supplanted Rosaline in Romeo's affections.

P.S. The problem with posting these things as I encounter them in the text...  Another naming passage has cropped up in Julius Caesar 3.3.27-36:

THIRD PLEBEIAN: Your name, sir, truly.
CINNA: Truly, my name is Cinna.
FIRST PLEBEIAN: Tear him to pieces! He’s a conspirator.
CINNA: I am Cinna the poet, I am Cinna the poet!
FOURTH PLEBEIAN: Tear him for his bad verses, tear him for his bad verses!
CINNA: I am not Cinna the conspirator.
FOURTH PLEBEIAN: It is no matter. His name’s Cinna. Pluck but his name out of his heart, and turn him going.

(Text in first two quotes from MIT digital Shakespeare.  Text and line numbers in the third from Folger Digital Texts.)

Variations on a Theme: Bid me ... Farewell

There's a sort of symmetry in these scenes.

From Richard III 1.2.213-219:

GLOUCESTER: Then bid me kill myself, and I will do it. 

LADY ANNE: I have already. 

GLOUCESTER: Tush, that was in thy rage:
Speak it again, and, even with the word,
That hand, which, for thy love, did kill thy love,
Shall, for thy love, kill a far truer love;
To both their deaths thou shalt be accessary.

From Richard III 1.2.251-253:

GLOUCESTER: Bid me farewell.  

LADY ANNE:  'Tis more than you deserve;
 But since you teach me how to flatter you,
 Imagine I have said farewell already. 

From Much Ado About Nothing 2.3:

BEATRICE:  Against my will I am sent to bid you come in to dinner.   

BENEDICK:  Fair Beatrice, I thank you for your pains.  

BEATRICE:  I took no more pains for those thanks than you take pains to thank me: if it had been painful, I would not have come.  

BENEDICK: You take pleasure then in the message? 

BEATRICE:  Yea, just so much as you may take upon a knife's point and choke a daw withal. You have no stomach, signior: fare you well. 

From Much Ado About Nothing 4.2:

BENEDICK:   Come, bid me do any thing for thee.  

BEATRICE:   Kill Claudio.  

BENEDICK:   Ha! not for the wide world.   

BEATRICE:   You kill me to deny it. Farewell.

Hamlet: Lost in Translation and Citation

I recently re-read Madeleine L'Engle's Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art (Wheaton, Illinois: Harold Shaw Publishers, 1980).  On page 29, she explains why she provides no more than the author (if known) for her quotations:

most of the writers I want to quote in this book are writers whose words I've copied down in [...] a commonplace book.  I copy down words and thoughts on which I want to meditate, and footnoting is not my purpose; this is a devotional, not a scholarly notebook. [...] I am only now beginning to see the usefulness of noting book title and page, rather than simply jotting down [the author's name].

On page 41, L'Engle refers to "a French translation of Hamlet, in which the famous words Hamlet utters when he first sees the ghost of his father, 'Angels and ministers of grace defend us,' are rendered, 'Tiens, qu'est[-ce] que c'est que ça?'" 

I found this intriguing, but she did not name the translator or her source.

In my initial google searches for French translations of Hamlet, I came up with:

• "Anges du ciel, à moi! le voilà! le voilà!" (1847 verse adaptation by Alexandre Dumas père and Paul Meurice) 
• "Anges, ministres de grâce, défendez-nous!" (1862 translation by Guizot and François-Victor Hugo) 
• "Anges du ciel, à moi dans cet instant suprême!" (1876 verse translation by Alcide Cayrou)

All perfectly defensible, but of course I was really looking for a far less satisfactory translation.  

So I re-instated the grammatical fault and searched for "Tiens, qu'est que c'est que ça" -- and hit pay dirt.  It appears in an unsigned review/article called "Mme. Sarah Bernhardt's Lady Macbeth," published in 1884:*

Here we come to a dead end, as the author does not further identify "the gentleman who undertook to transfer 'Hamlet' into French vernacular prose." (My google searches on Partridge did not suggest any noted Shakespearean scholar or translator by that name; instead, they led me to Tom Jones, in which Benjamin Partridge goes to see Hamlet and has all the wrong reactions.)  

Now, we might ask, why is L'Engle quoting and criticizing a non-standard translation of Hamlet into 19th century French vernacular prose, which (even assuming it exists) she probably never read for herself but only encountered in this article (given that she faithfully reproduced the article's ungrammatical French)?

Well, she's talking about what has been lost in updating or modernizing the 1928 Book of Common Prayer.  She acknowledges that the older book "needed changing," but fears "[w]hat has been gained in strength of structure has been lost in poverty of language" -- and also, in theological imprecisions that can encourage certain heresies.  

So I'm inclined to agree that even an apocryphal vernacular translation of Hamlet can be used as an illustration in this context.  But I'd actually still love to read the whole thing, as it sounds hilarious -- whether or not so intended.

FN* I found it on p 8  of The Critic: A Literary Weekly, Critical and Eclectic, Vol. II (New Series), July to December 1884, edited by Jeannette Leonard Gilder and Joseph Benson Gilder (New York: The Critic Company, 1884).  Volume II appears to be devoted to "The Critic and Good Literature." The review/article appears in the first section of the volume, denominated No. 27 (July 5, 1884).  It seems to have been published originally in The Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art, Vol. 57 (June 14, 1884) at 777.

An Echo of Lewis Carroll in Prince Caspian?

Just re-read this passage in Prince Caspian (ch 7):

The gloomiest of all was Giant Wimbleweather. He knew it was all his fault. He sat in silence shedding big tears which collected on the end of his nose and then fell off with a huge splash on the whole bivouac of the Mice, who had just been beginning to get warm and drowsy. They all jumped up, shaking the water out of their ears and wringing their little blankets, and asked the Giant in shrill but forcible voices whether he thought they weren’t wet enough without this sort of thing. And then other people woke up and told the Mice they had been enrolled as scouts and not as a concert party, and asked why they couldn’t keep quiet. And Wimbleweather tiptoed away to find some place where he could be miserable in peace and stepped on somebody’s tail and somebody (they said afterward it was a fox) bit him. And so everyone was out of temper.

In Alice's Adventures of Wonderland, a giant Alice weeps a pool of tears, which dampens a hapless mouse:

Poor Alice! It was as much as she could do, lying down on one side, to look through into the garden with one eye; but to get through was more hopeless than ever: she sat down and began to cry again. 'You ought to be ashamed of yourself,' said Alice, 'a great girl like you,' (she might well say this), 'to go on crying in this way! Stop this moment, I tell you!' But she went on all the same, shedding gallons of tears, until there was a large pool all round her, about four inches deep and reaching half down the hall.

She then shrinks down again (by means of a fan with which she has absent-mindedly been fanning herself) and suddenly slips and then --

splash! she was up to her chin in salt water. He first idea was that she had somehow fallen into the sea, 'and in that case I can go back by railway,' she said to herself. [...] However, she soon made out that she was in the pool of tears which she had wept when she was nine feet high. 

'I wish I hadn't cried so much!' said Alice, as she swam about, trying to find her way out. 'I shall be punished for it now, I suppose, by being drowned in my own tears! That will be a queer thing, to be sure! However, everything is queer to-day.' 

Just then she heard something splashing about in the pool a little way off, and she swam nearer to make out what it was: at first she thought it must be a walrus or hippopotamus, but then she remembered how small she was now, and she soon made out that it was only a mouse that had slipped in like herself.

Alice's efforts to befriend the Mouse are not well-received.  She addresses it in French with "the first sentence in her French lesson-book" (Ou est ma chatte?) and quickly apologizes for her faux pas (I quite forgot you didn't like cats).  The Mouse expresses his indignation in "a shrill, passionate voice."

Eventually a motley assortment of bedraggled animals exit the pool, "all dripping wet, cross, and uncomfortable."