In another online venue, I
received two clever satirical responses from Shakespeare scholars to my recent
claim re the above:
One wrote: “It occurs to
me that since Brooke, Shakespeare, and Milton published their SATAN acrostics
in 1562, 1597 and 1667 that there must have been one published in 1632, so that
they would all appear a uniform 35 years apart. Maybe the 1632 Second Folio of
Shakespeare counts, though that hardly seems fair. Perhaps Lyly’s ‘Six
Court Comedies’? And what was published in 1527 and 1702? We have some SATAN
scouting to do.”
I responded as follows:
Your tongue is clearly at
the edge of your cheek, but I’ll indulge in wagging mine back at you a bit ---let
me point out that I attributed NO significance whatsoever to the specific year
of publication of Romeo & Juliet.
I merely mentioned 1597 as the year of its publication, in passing, and I
assumed that most reading it here in this Shakespeare-savvy venue would know
that this was merely shorthand on my part.
From what I understand,
the First “Bad” Quarto of Romeo & Juliet was published in 1597, but the
Second “Good” Quarto was published in 1599. The 1599 Good Quarto, by the way,
actually is the first to have the SATAN acrostic-- as does the much later 1623 First
Folio---whereas the 1597 First Quarto, revealingly, does NOT. This suggests to
me that the SATAN acrostic was unknown to or unrecognized by the 1597 non-Shakespearean
author, and/or that the SATAN acrostic was actually first added to the play
text by Shakespeare himself after 1597.
But back to your clever
straw man of cicada-like 35-year rhythmic cycles. As I just explained, there is
not even a real superficial pattern to cleverly manipulate. Your straw man
merely illustrates the danger of claiming the existence of an intentional
pattern of parallels based on too few and too thin points of correspondence. It
begs the question of whether a specific case with some meat on the bones is
real or Memorex. And when you wrote ….
“Need I point out that the
35-year gaps are not without significance? 35 is 5 x 7; and 5 + 7 =12. So there
you have the 12 tribes of Israel, the Seven Deadly Sinnes and the Five, uh....
hmmm I’ll have to get back to you on that...”
…your tongue disappeared so DEEP into your
cheek, that all I can do is applaud your wit and move on.
As for the other reply to
me (extracting 6-6-6 from my hyperbolic guess of the mathematical improbability
of coincidence of the three SATAN acrostics), that was also very clever, but it
evades the central question, which (if I may use an apt cliché) is that the
devil (or should I say, the SATAN) is in the details.
And if you look at all the
specific details that converge among Brooke, Shakespeare, and Milton, focused
on the SATAN acrostics in each, they collectively present a dense, large and
coordinated web of parallelism that I claim really is astronomically unlikely
to have occurred randomly. If you disagree, I’d love to hear some substantive
argument in support of your disagreement, in which you address the actual
points I made, and give some other explanation for how those specific points, connected
as I showed they are, could have appeared randomly.
And the beauty and
strength of my central claim is that it really does rest on the impregnable
foundation of three texts which each have very clear SATAN acrostics at congruent
points in their respective chronologies. All the rest of my argument are “ornaments”
I have hung on that very firmly planted rhetorical ANTIChristmas tree (i.e., the
one Satan decorates). ;)
If I understand the second
satirist’s point, in taking my hyperbolic claim of the mammoth size of the
improbability of coincidence, and pulling out of it a Satanic numerological pattern--- it is that it demonstrates that patterns can
be ingeniously generated post hoc which have a superficial veneer of prior intentionality.
But, again, that should merely function as a reminder not to jump too quickly
at superficial patterns. I believe that what I presented is qualitatively
different from your example—and exponentially less probable to be a figment of
my overheated imagination.
And one last thing---when
and if anyone responds to this post, you will now have to contend with an
additional major point of textual congruence, which was pointed out to me
privately by a very sharp and precise scholar, a mathematician from Norway
named Frode Larsen, who wrote the following response to me the other day:
“Arnie, you mention a link
to the King James Bible given by the occurrence of the number 42 in both the
quotation from R & J and in Revelation 13.5. When you specifically
refer to the KJV, I guess the reason is that both in R & J and in
the KJV, “two and forty”/“forty and two” are preceded by the word “continue”,
which I don’t find in the versions of the Bishop’s Bible or the Geneva
Bible I have looked at.”
And my immediate answer to
Frode was,
“No, as carefully as I
looked at those two lines, I did NOT consciously notice that both the
Revelations verse with “two-and’forty” and the R&J verse with “two and
forty’ both used the word “continue”, too! I used the KJV as my Biblical source
only because it was the one that was published not long after R&J, and it
is the one that has historically exerted the greatest influence over the past 4
centuries. I.e., the KJV is THE English language version of the Bible. So, Frode,
I thank you very much, because you have just made my original claim that much
stronger, by showing yet another hidden connection in the matrix among the KJV,
Romeus & Juliet, Romeo & Juliet,
and Paradise Lost. And I will honor
your insight by leveraging still further, to draw more tightly into this matrix
one other famous and great literary work, Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park.”
I.e., the skeptics must
also explain why the word “continue” is there in BOTH the KJV and in Friar
Laurence’s speech, in both cases modifying “two-and-forty”. I’d say, just add a
few more zeroes to the string of them comprising the cosmically large improbability
of coincidence.
I will write up the post I
promised Frode sometime in the next week, in which I will draw Jane Austen into
my web of literary SATANism. For now, I will merely add the following tantalizing
additional hypothesis for you all to chew on:
The 1597 Q1 of Romeo & Juliet lacks BOTH the SATAN
acrostic AND the word “continue” (which, as a classical scholar friend of mine
whom I will mention in my next post, has told me, is something of a reach in
translating the verb in the original Biblical Greek), but the 1599 Q2 of
R&J was published BEFORE the KJV was even authorized in 1604, let alone was
published in 1611.
So, how to explain this
apparent allusion between Romeo &
Juliet and the KJV Book of Revelation? The simplest and most likely explanation,
it seems to me, is that the translator(s) of the Book of Revelation in the KJV
were aware of Friar Laurence’s SATAN acrostic and its veiled allusion to the
Book of Revelation! I will address that in more detail in my next post as well.
And I’ll stop there before
I get hyperbolic again, and provide more fodder for clever satire.
Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter
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