-------- Original Message --------
Mike M responds to himself:
I ought to have quoted the lines in their entirety:
....... and from the local Star
A curio: Red Sox beat Yanks 5-4
On Chapman's Homer, thumbtacked to the door.
It's recognized that Chapman's comedies borrowed from, and imitated
Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. Millar MacLure (George Chapman: A Critical
Study, 1966), discussing Sir Gyles Goosecappe writes that "[Clarence's]
first appearance (I, iv) may be some sort of recollection of Orsino's
love-melancholy in Twelfth Night, for he enters to music...". Writing
of another Chapman comedy, 'Monsieur D'Olive', the same critic says
"Chapman borrows the letter-trick from Twelfth Night (the cloistered
Olivia must have been in his mind anyway)". In D'Olive a distressed
widower, the Earl of St. Anne, refuses to release his late wife's
enbalmed body for burial. Chapman's best editor, Thomas Parrott, in his
introduction to 'The Gentleman Usher' states that "the success of
Malvolio upon the stage should have given Chapman the idea of
introducing a ridiculous major-domo as the chief comic character...".
Chapman called his equivalent of Twelfth Night's Malvolio 'Basiolo'.
The point of this digression is that Twelfth Night begins to music,
Duke Orsino speaks his famous lines "If music be the food of love, play
on, Give me excess of it ...." and his first respondent is Curio, a
gentleman attending on the Duke. He has a few desultory lines, but
Nabokov recalled the name when he wrote "a curio". Maybe his lines
aren't so negligible; his reply to Orsino is "Will you go hunt, my
Lord?"
MM