Subject
Last will and testament?
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Date
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>Will was standard Elizabethan slang not only for penis but also for
vagina,
and both senses are played on in the sonnet.
You're surely right. I never attached that meaning to it, and am odd.
Charles
-------------------
Finally resolving not to rely on memory alone, I managed to find my 1991
Penguin copy of PF, and out fell a grangerized cutting from the Daily
Telegraph, 31/1/98. This was an item featuring William Boyd's choice for
his Novel of the Century. No doubt I was again in error in citing
Auberon Waugh, although I am quite certain that Waugh did remark on PF
as a send-up of literary scholarship.
Anyway, William Boyd (any relation?) comments on Kinbote, "who has
decided to interpret Shade's beautiful poem, on his own life (and the
poem is a wonderful achievement in its own right), as an encoded
biography ...." etc.
The appeal to authority is always persuasive, but never final.
I also noticed that Peter Dale's authorities for Will as penis include
Helen Vendler, but also that all four of them are post-1977, post-Rowse
and post-Freud, and reflected that the last of these has taught us to
find sexual innuendo in almost anything, including Johnson. My edition
of the OED has a bewilderingly large entry for Will, but the closest I
could find for the sense implied by Peter's authorities was "carnal
desire or appetite"; and "pleasure, delight, joy. Obs." Perhaps this
authority is too innocent to be appealed to these days. It doesn't even
seem to have a salacious reading for "willie" or "willy". Partridge's
Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (1951) has "Willie: a
(child's) penis: Cumberland and Westmorland s. (--- 1905), not dial."
Unfortunately I still can't find his Shakespeare's Bawdy (1960).
Well, in my opinion the Elizabethan's understanding of the word "will"
remains open to question, but that's just, like, my ... etc.
I am a good deal more confident that John Shade's appeal: "Help me,
Will! Pale Fire" (line 962) does not imply that he in any way was
addressing his own or anyone else's penis.
Charles
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vagina,
and both senses are played on in the sonnet.
You're surely right. I never attached that meaning to it, and am odd.
Charles
-------------------
Finally resolving not to rely on memory alone, I managed to find my 1991
Penguin copy of PF, and out fell a grangerized cutting from the Daily
Telegraph, 31/1/98. This was an item featuring William Boyd's choice for
his Novel of the Century. No doubt I was again in error in citing
Auberon Waugh, although I am quite certain that Waugh did remark on PF
as a send-up of literary scholarship.
Anyway, William Boyd (any relation?) comments on Kinbote, "who has
decided to interpret Shade's beautiful poem, on his own life (and the
poem is a wonderful achievement in its own right), as an encoded
biography ...." etc.
The appeal to authority is always persuasive, but never final.
I also noticed that Peter Dale's authorities for Will as penis include
Helen Vendler, but also that all four of them are post-1977, post-Rowse
and post-Freud, and reflected that the last of these has taught us to
find sexual innuendo in almost anything, including Johnson. My edition
of the OED has a bewilderingly large entry for Will, but the closest I
could find for the sense implied by Peter's authorities was "carnal
desire or appetite"; and "pleasure, delight, joy. Obs." Perhaps this
authority is too innocent to be appealed to these days. It doesn't even
seem to have a salacious reading for "willie" or "willy". Partridge's
Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (1951) has "Willie: a
(child's) penis: Cumberland and Westmorland s. (--- 1905), not dial."
Unfortunately I still can't find his Shakespeare's Bawdy (1960).
Well, in my opinion the Elizabethan's understanding of the word "will"
remains open to question, but that's just, like, my ... etc.
I am a good deal more confident that John Shade's appeal: "Help me,
Will! Pale Fire" (line 962) does not imply that he in any way was
addressing his own or anyone else's penis.
Charles
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm