From kopff@spot.colorado.edu Sat Jun 30 13:28:23 2001 Received: from mxu2.u.washington.edu (mxu2.u.washington.edu [140.142.32.9]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.11.2+UW01.01/8.11.2+UW01.04) with ESMTP id f5UKSM0121796 for ; Sat, 30 Jun 2001 13:28:22 -0700 Received: from spot.colorado.edu (kopff@spot.Colorado.EDU [128.138.129.2]) by mxu2.u.washington.edu (8.11.2+UW01.01/8.11.2+UW01.04) with ESMTP id f5UKSMK30150 for ; Sat, 30 Jun 2001 13:28:22 -0700 Received: from localhost (kopff@localhost) by spot.colorado.edu (8.11.2/8.11.2/ITS-5.0/standard) with ESMTP id f5UKSLK14450 for ; Sat, 30 Jun 2001 14:28:21 -0600 (MDT) Date: Sat, 30 Jun 2001 14:28:21 -0600 (MDT) From: KOPFF E CHRISTIAN To: Subject: Re: Jolie's Latin tattoo In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII On Sat, 30 Jun 2001, David Lupher wrote: > By the way, the reference to Highet is apparently to an opinion > of his cited in a book I don't have access to: Calvin Hoffman's > "The Murder of the Man Who Was Shakespeare" (Grosset & Dunlap, > 1960), 242-44. I'm curious about the phrasing above. Did > Highet perhaps locate the passage in some ancient source > to which Marlowe did *not* have ready access? Calvin Hoffman, "The Murder of the Man Who Was Shakespeare" (1960) 244: "In the winter of 1954 I visited Professor Gilbert Highet of Columbia University, for the purpose of ascertaining whether the Latin motto in the Corpus Christi portrait was ever used by either a Greek or Latin writer of antiquity, since it might have been possible that the motto was well-known to Elizabethan Latin specialists, who might, in turn, have acquainted Marlowe with it in some of their writings. Gilbert Highet is one of America's best known classical scholars, whose speciality is Greek and Latin. I showed the motto to him and asked whether he might ascertain the origin of it in antiquity. He asked me to wait. Then for almost two hours he pored over Greek and Latin lexicons, reference books, and concordances of every nature and description. After exhausting both himself and his reference books, he had this to say: "No Greek or Latin writer ever used the motto, or any near- approximation of it. I must conclude that its creation is unique, highly individual -- peculiarly unique and individual." The inference, irresistible, is that (since all points of identification of the portrait lead to Marlowe and since the motto re-appears in a play of "Shakespeare's" (Pericles) ("the motto is unique and individual") and since my thesis is that Marlowe wrote the Works of "Shakespeare"), another link has been forged to prove the fact of Marlowe's authorship, (coupled with the incredible resemblance between the Corpus protrait and the Folio ingraving, of the author -- the real author -- of the Plays)." The publisher's plug for the book begins with the words: "This is the book which proves almost beyond the shadow of a doubt that Christopher Marlowe is the author of the plays and poems attributed to the actor-businessman named William Shakespeare." Christian Kopff University of Colorado, Boulder kopff@spot.colorado.edu .