“At Nashville, where she was exceedingly popular, [Adah Isaacs Menken] convinced the theatre manager that Shakespeare was her most appropriate fare, and the part of Lady Macbeth one of her shining triumphs. James Murdoch has rewarded posterity with an inimitable pen-portrait of Menken seeking to portray the imperious consort of Macbeth, without knowledge of the words, or even of the appropriate gestures. The day of the performance she came to Murdoch and, with disarming naïveté and frankness, confessed that she knew nothing of the part of Lady Macbeth, nay had a dread of it, but having told the manager she was equal to any of the leading Shakespearean characters, she felt that she must live up to her word.

“Reminded after a preliminary test that not only was she ignorant of the words, but altogether lacking in any preconceived idea of the character, Menken brushed aside Murdoch’s objections with the assurance that all she needed to be shown was where the lines had to be emphasised. The embarrassed tragedian did his best to oblige. A few hours later the curtain went up, and not only did the intrepid actress emerge from the first part of her ordeal without mishap, but scored heavily. True she did not give the audience Shakespeare or, for that matter, any known playwright, but what she did give them, which was pure unadulterated Menken, sufficed. The audience thought her magnificent and elegant. Her exhibition of emotional frenzy and regal scorn sent pit and stalls into paroxysms of applause and, although Murdoch does not say so, we may take it that the fine dark head stretched in queenly command, and those lovely eyes darting contemptuous fire, and that lissom body shaken with exaggerated passion, all helped to thrill the audience. Then Menken’s memory ran out.

“‘From that moment,’ says Murdoch, ‘Macbeth ceased to be the guilty thane and became a mere prompter in Scotch kilt and tartans. For the rest of the scene I gave the lady the words! Clinging to my side, in  a manner very different from her former scornful bearing, she took them line by line, before she uttered them, still, however, receiving vociferous applause… until at length poor Macbeth, who was but playing a ‘second fiddle’ to his imperious consort, was glad to make his exit from a scene where the ‘honours’ were certainly not ‘even’ ‘.

Refreshing her memory continuously between the acts, the unbeatable Menken managed to finish the part, and the curtain descended upon what must have been the most remarkable performance of Lady Macbeth within the memory of any member of the company. With singular lack of courage, the management withdrew the play from the bills, forcing Menken back into more accustomed rôles.”

Bernard Falk, The Naked Lady, or Storm Over Adah : A Biography Of Adah Isaacs Menken (1934)

The stuff of nightmares… or at least of a gleefully low-budget horror film. One would think so from the exciting headline ‘Radioactive boars’ on loose in Germany (pity about those quotation marks) which suggests packs of demented glow-in-the-dark beasts rampaging through the Teutonic forests, attacking woodcutters and orphans roaming lost in the woods. Alas, the boars feed on mushrooms, truffles and wild berries rather than human flesh.

Wild boar (non-radioactive version)

How many ducks died under the ungainly boot of the infant Samuel Johnson? According to Boswell, “It is told, that, when a child of three years old, he chanced to tread upon a duckling, the eleventh of a brood, and killed it; upon which, it is said, he dictated to his mother the following epitaph: ‘Here lies good Master Duck, / Whom Samuel Johnson trod on; / If it had lived, it had been good luck, / For then we’d had an odd one.’.”

Boswell tells the story only to deny that it ever happened. “The anecdote of the duck,” he writes, has been “disproved by internal and external evidence” and “the truth of which I am to refute upon [Dr Johnson’s] own authority”. But is he denying that his hero trod on a duck, or only that, having done so, the precocious tiny extemporised a verse about the deed?

Be that as it may, Boswell seems to have misunderstood the original story. His source was Anna Seward, who heard it – repeatedly, it seems – from Johnson’s stepdaughter Lucy Porter, who in turn got it from Johnson’s mother. In this version, the three-year-old Johnson “made some verses on having killed, by treading on it, his eleventh duck”. We can construe this as suggesting that the future lexicographer had already stamped upon ten ducks before memorialising the eleventh in verse.

Do we believe Boswell or Anna Seward? In Extraordinary People (1965), Hesketh Pearson notes that Boswell “has given the impression, studiously adopted by other Johnsonians, that Anna is not to be trusted. But she is quite as reliable as Boswell sober, and more reliable than Boswell drunk”.

Anna Seward (1742-1809) was a poet, admired by, among others, Sir Walter Scott, who, after her death, edited three volumes of her works, although he confided to a friend that “most of [it] is absolutely execrable”. Her journal and letters confirm her as one of the great purple prose writers there has ever been. If she wanted to tell you there were very few woodcocks to be seen, she would write “the transmigratory gentry of dusky pinion are great strangers here”. She also wrote, of the dying days of an acquaintance, “The intellectual torch wavered not, neither dimmed in its earthly socket”.

I sincerely hope my own earthly socket lasts for a good while yet, unlike the earthly socket of any poor Lichfield duck seeing the approach of terrible tiny Samuel Johnson!

“The Fatal Dowry has been cobbled, I see, by some purblind ultra-crepidarian -McCready’s friend, Walker, very likely; but nevertheless, I maintain ’tis a good play, and might have been rendered very effective by docking it of the whole fifth act, which is an excrescence, – re-creating Novall, and making Beaumelle a great deal more ghost-gaping and moonlightish. The cur-tailor has taken out the most purple piece in the whole web – the end of the fourth Act – and shouldered himself into toleration through the prejudices of the pit, when he should have built his admiration on their necks. Say what you will, I am convinced the man who is to awaken the drama must be a bold trampling fellow, no creeper into worm-holes, no reviver even, however good. These reanimations are vampire-cold. Such ghosts as Marloe, Webster &c. are better dramatists, better poets, I dare say, than any contemporary of ours, but they are ghosts; the worm is in their pages; and we want to see something that our great-grandsires did not know. With the greatest reverence for all the antiquities of the drama, I still think that we had better beget than revive; attempt to give the literature of this age an idiosyncrasy and spirit of its own, and only raise a ghost to gaze on, not to live with – just now the drama is a haunted ruin.”

Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803-1849), letter to Thomas Forbes Kelsall, 11 January 1825

“Ministers of religion have always been attached to their orchards. Ever since the Serpent induced Eve to eat of a particular apple and Eve tempted Adam to do the same, the livelihood of the clergy has depended upon a proper appreciation of fruit.”

Hesketh Pearson, in his potted biography of the Reverend Samuel Ogden, “Boswell’s Bedside Author”, in Extraordinary People (1965)

Here is a last extract (at least, for the time being) from Philomen Holland’s translation of Pliny’s Natural History, from The Seven And Thirtieth Booke, Chaps. 2, 3, Of Amber:

“But I wonder most at Sophocles the Tragicall Poet… that he should go beyond al others in fabulous reports, as touching Amber: for he sticketh not to avouch, That beyond India it proceedeth from the tears that fall from the eies of the birds Meleagrides, wailing and weeping for the death of Meleager. Who would not marvell, that either himselfe should be of that beliefe, or hope to persuade others to his opinion? For what child is there to be found so simple and ignorant, who will beleeve, that birds should keep their times to shed tears  every yere so duly, and especially so great drops and in such quantitie, sufficient to engender Amber in that abundance? Besides, what congruitie is there, that birds should depart as far as to the Indians and beyond, for to mourn and lament the death of Meleager when he died in Greece?

“What should a man say to this? Are there not many more as goodly tales as these, which Poets have sent abroad into the world? And their profession of Poetry, that is to say, of faining and devising fables, may in some sort excuse them. But that any man should seriously and by way of history deliver such stuffe, as touching a thing so rife and common, brought in every day in abundance by merchants which were ynough to convince such impudent lies, is a meere mockerie of the world in the highest degree; a contempt offered to all men, and argueth an habit of lying, and an impunitie of that vice intollerable.”

In the potsage a few days ago regarding the keeping of a list of books one has read, I completely forgot to mention one “voracious reader” whose list goes back over forty years to 1968 and is available for all to see online. Yes, ’tis Art Garfunkel, golden-voiced croonperson and thespian. When you are done checking to see which books you and “The G” (as he is called on one section of his site) have both read, you may wish to investigate his transcontinental walks (of both the USA and Europe). Oscar Wilde famously said that all Art is quite useless, but clearly he was not referring to Mr Garfunkel.