10 June 2016
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. You’ll find quite a bit of flatulence in my plays. Lear out on the heath, taunting the storm: Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Or here’s an entire fart story, in Two Gentlemen of Verona, Act IV, Scene 4. Launce and his farting dog Crab.
Bacil Kirtley’s short piece from the Journal of American Folklore is bang on in its primary point, but don’t take anything it says about me as gospel. It’s more slander, like all the rest where this noisome canard is concerned. What is it with these editors of Aubrey, don’t any of them do their own work? It seems that Oliver Lawson Dick couldn’t be bothered to find out any more about the facts of 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 rely on 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