Subject: Oops, take two.

From: "Robert B. Waltz" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 12 May 1997 07:48:34 -0500 (CDT)

Well, I guess I have thoroughly proved I am not expert in everything.
Or, at least, that my typing is not always controlled by my brain....

Although no one seems to have spotted it yet, the person who said
that Shakespeare had "small Latin and less Greek" was Ben Jonson,
not Johnson.
      ^

Guess I've been living in Minnesota a little too long....

-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-

                        Robert B. Waltz
                     [email-masked]

Want more loudmouthed opinions about textual criticism?
Try my web page: http://www.skypoint.com/~waltzmn
(A site inspired by the Encyclopedia of NT Textual Criticism)

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From: Nichael Cramer <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 12 May 1997 09:14:44 -0400 (EDT)

>    ...  the person who said

A bit off the topic...

Unfortunately virtually all of my books are sitting around my office,
packed in boxes waiting for the mover, so I'm doing all of this by
memory.  But in one of those books, someone (I think it was Gary
Taylor in the Oxford Shakespear) writes about this quote.  He makes
two points:

1] Jonson was a man of enourmous learning.  He was also an overbearing
snob.  "Small latin and less Greek" meant "compared to Jonson", which
still leaves plenty of room for the rest of us mortals.

2] In any case, Shaxspeer's education in these matters was probably
handled by the local "public" school, which probably meant that his
paltry Greek and Latin would likely have been roughly the equivalent
of "merely" a modern masters degree in Classics.

N