10 June 2016
· Folklorist Bacil Kirtley ponders the apocryphal hot air story ·
This tangent is linked from:
· A Lot of Hot Air (10 June 2016)
You didn’t think I was going to say fart either, did you. I’m not repressed, I’m just polite. There’s plenty of flatulence in my plays. Lear out on the heath, taunting the storm: Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Dromeo of Ephesus makes a fart joke. And in The Two Gentlemen of Verona (A4 S4) Launce tells of defending his incorrigible dog Crab against being whipped for farting.
Bacil Kirtley’s note is spot on with its primary point, but don’t take as gospel anything it says about me. It’s more lazy libel, like all the rest where this noisome canard is concerned. Don’t any of these editors of Aubrey check their facts? Oliver Lawson Dick couldn’t be bothered to learn any more about my life than the Reverend Doctor Andrew Clark, decades before. Lawson Dick was only less hung up about his vocabulary.
It’s so much easier to accept without questioning the old legends and received wisdom. Just ask someone from Warwickshire.
- • John Aubrey upon the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford [jstor.org]
- · by Bacil F Kirtley
- · The Journal of American Folklore, Volume 78, No 307 (1965)
- · pages 64-65
- · DOI: 10.2307/538105
VERO NIHIL VERIUS