Have You Lost Your OED?

Posted By Roger Stritmatter on February 3, 2013

When you hang out on the internet you find stuff, and a recent trawl to see if I had made available anywhere online one of my 2000 Notes and Queries articles on Shakespeare and the Bible,  I found that Gabriel Egan, writing for the Year’s Work in English Studies 2000, had this to say about that my rather abbreviated article:

Finally from Notes & Queries this year, Roger Stritmatter argues that Shakespeare knew the Geneva Bible marginal notes to 1 Samuel 6:9 and 1 Samuel 14 (‘By Providence Divine: Shakespeare’s Awareness of Some Geneva Marginal Notes of 1 Samuel’, N&Q 245[2000] 97-100).

Several people have shown that Shakespeare was influenced by marginal notes in the Geneva Bible, which shows that his biblical knowledge was by reading not hearing since marginal notes are seldom spoken.

This bolsters the view that, since he was familiar with Ecclesiastes (despite it being not widely used in Anglican or Catholic practices), Shakespeare did private devotional reading. Stritmatter thinks that when Shakespeare used the marginal notes in the Geneva Bible, it was to have a character elaborate an argument, one of “the traditional techniques of Renaissance topology”.

Unless this is a misprint, Stritmatter would appear to think ‘topology’ is the art of using topoi, but topology means only three things: the botanical study of where plants grow, the study of a particular locality, and the branch of maths that deals with that which does not change when shapes are deformed.

Perhaps Stritmatter means ‘typology’, the study of symbolic representation. This illustrates the harm done by the misprints in this year’s Notes & Queries: one cannot properly criticize errors–here is another, ‘sortilege’ misspelled “sortilage”–since they might not be the writer’s fault’.

(Here is another, ‘synergistic’ misspelled “syngergistic”.) In All’s Well that Ends Well, Helen argues for free-will over predestination (“Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie, | Which we ascribe to heaven” 1.1.212-3) and then the other way around (“it is presumption in us when the help of heaven | We count the act of men” 2.1.151-2).

Now, in offering a response to this I should first of all like to thank Professor Egan for the attention he devoted to the argument made in the note. All too often these days what one gets on Shakespearean topics is the sort of unilateral brushoff that tells you that you must be on the right track — that, four hundred years go, you would probably be killed already, but at this point your chiefest risk is being called the “Don” of a “minor” African American University by Tom Reedy et al. and scolded for your bad spelling in an “academic” journal by an expert in Shakespeare.

Actually, Coppin State University has a very proud heritage of giving the descendants of the slaves whose labor enabled the industrial revolution in America the chance for an education, not to mention using words that Shakespeare professors can’t seem to find in their OED without extra magnification.

I mean, really, people. Get a life.

Marginal Notes of I Sam. Underlined in de Vere Geneva Bible

Here, for the record, in a 2023 supplement, is some of the evidence in question:

But to return to Professor Egan, given a debate that licenses the kind of dishonest personal attacks used by some internet partisans, it is always gratifying to see that someone of influence is at least trying to understand what you are saying in even one of your many publications.  

And, so far as the review goes it does accurately summarize some of the primary threads of my argument, albeit inter-leavened by the reviewer’s own opinions on topics such as “being familiar with Ecclesiastes,” a book of the Bible that the article does not discuss.

I am quite sure, also, that Ecclesiastes is approved of by both Roman Catholics and Anglicans, so this really is a grand slam of confusion in the midst of an otherwise fine review.

Unless this is a misprint, it would appear that Professor Egan is and his editors are confused over the difference between Ecclesiastes and Ecclesiasticus, a sign that does not bode well.

But to proceed to my primary beef with the good Professor from Years Work in English Studies, Professor Egan declares that “Stritmatter would appear to think that ‘topology’ is the art of using topoi, but topology means only three things…”

He then proceeds to prove that it can only mean one of three things by citing the OED, conveniently omitting from his list of possible definitions the only one that supports my usage:

“The art of assisting memory by associating the thing to be remembered with some place or building, the parts of which are still known” (Micro-OED 3354).

Given that Egan is careful to specify that the word “means only three things,” a doubt may arise as to his honesty.

In case Professor Egan is confused on this point I ought to explain that the word “topos” is synonymous with “place,” but in the medieval and renaissance theory of the commonplaces, commonplaces were the “locations” of thought occupied by such proverbial myth-memes as “it is better to treat a possible friend kindly than to kick a gift horse in the mouth.”

That’s just Ubuntu.  If Professor Egan were more acquainted with the secondary literature on this point he would even know that Aristotle’s chief contribution to the theory of the “commonplaces” was his Topica, or Places.

Here is how I summarized this question in my dissertation:

Originating in the Aristotelian theory of topoi set forth in the Topica, by the age of Shakespeare the theory of the loci communes had been promulgated in dozens of popular textbooks and instruction manuals such as Erasmus’ De Copia or Agricola’s De Inventione Dialectica Libri Tres (1515).

Things, argued Aristotle, possess attributes other than being: among them substance, quantity, relation, quality, place, time, situation, state, action, and passion. Such qualities became, with additions and substitutions, the places by means of which the matter (res) of things could be discovered and analyzed — and these became known as the “seats “of arguments. Such topical logic, argued Aristotle, was different, but by no means inferior to, the demonstrative logic of the syllogism.

As Trousdale shows in her book, however, after the enlightenment influence of Descartes, topical logic ceased to be a conscious mode of rationality. Demonstrative logic, the utility of which was shown over and over again by a scientific method which sought to reduce all reality to mathematical symbols, went on to colonize the epistemé of the commonplaces.

It is true, if I am not mistaken, that my use of the term topology in the article that has so exorcised the good Professor’s wrath as to think the correction worthy in a review and summary of an entire year’s publications by three thousand Renaissance and Shakespeare scholars, varies slightly from the correct definition of the OED on which it depends and which has curiously been omitted from the review.

The OED refers to topology as comprising the set of the practices described in such classic works of criticism as Marion Trousdale’s Shakespeare and the Rhetoricians.  To it, “topology” refers to the actual practices employed by early modern readers to reinforce memory by analogy with the physical world, referring to “places” as the “seats of learning” (thus, topos + logos).

I used it with a lemon twist of difference, to apply it to the process by which modern scholars might actually penetrate the obscurity of the English literary renaissance by paying some attention to the lost art of the use of “commonplaces” as a mode of early modern thinking or their circulation in the literature of the period as evidence for the influence of one text on another.

Apparently in my attempt to introduce this topic for common study I used an unauthorized word.

I deeply regret this, and promise to Dr. Egan that I will never to do it again. So let me end with the question I began with: “Have you Lost Your OED?”