Another minor windfall (and not all of them come from horse racing) has made me think about buying a few dictionaries of foreign languages, like German, Italian and perhaps Russian, to look nice on the shelves next to French, Latin and Japanese. But before that, I found an Oxford Latin Grammar for virtually nothing and it looked like a lot of fun.One can't leave many subjects alone for 40 years without them changing but you might have thought Latin would be one of them. But, oh dear, no. I was only slightly put out that the first conjugation verb used as an example is paro, to prepare. I wondered what was wrong with amo, amas, amat, that served so well for so long, but it was when I saw the perfect tense, paraui, that I began to get suspicious. Surely it's paravi, pronounced pah-rah-wee. But not for James Morwood, once of Wadham College, it isn't.
I looked in vain throughout the book and its indices and found no v's at all, they were all u's, even to the extent of the incongruous uoluisse, the perfect infinitive of the verb to wish.
The reason is- and some of you will be ahead of me here- that Morwood was,
delighted to have compiled the first Latin Grammar in English to have banished the letter 'v' from the Latin alphabet. It was never there.
We will have to skirt round the non-sequitur of banishing things that were never there in order to concentrate on the idea that it is not only words and sense that are translated from one language to another but sound also. There are variant spellings of Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich in the English alphabet and the use of a 'v' in English transliterations of Latin is useful and gave us such words as verify, village and verbal.
One can take his point, as we do with the lack of a 'j' in Latin because an 'i' does just the same thing but it makes for an unsettling return to these well-trodden paths of conjugations, declensions and idioms when it could have been such a happy occasion. I hope this 'u' business didn't catch on.
Otherwise, the book is well-organized, a whole language explained as clearly as possible in such a short space although there will be those who can't see why Kennedy's Primer ever needed updating. But the idea that Latin worked like a sleek, clockwork machine is undermined by a number of things that I'd either forgotten or were too advanced for 'O' level in 1976.
Of course, every language will mutate its most commonly used verbs into irregularity and idioms like the ablative absolute or gerunds and gerundives were deliberately introduced by the Romans to make life miserable for C20th English schoolchildren but 'mixed conjugation' verbs, 'deponent' verbs or 'quin and quominus'. I don't remember those. My Latin was always a fragile and insubstantial thing that I'm careful to flaunt only if confident that I'm in company that knows less of it than me. I had hoped to be offering an hour on Latin for Beginners as part of a Learning Day this autumn but the day has been withdrawn. I thought I could talk for an hour without getting out of my depth but it's one opportunity to show off on the basis that 'in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king' that I've been robbed of.
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Meanwhile, after a poor excuse for a double issue, the TLS was worth its price this week, returning from an undeserved hoilday. A few pages on Hamlet were avidly taken up here, including the idea that there are scholars who have devoted their lives to it. I extended the vanity that we all surely suffer from on occasions by imagining a future professor spending a life on The Cathedrals of Liverpool or The Perfect Murder.
However, the question of How Old is Hamlet raises the question not only whether Hamlet knew but whether Shakespeare knew either.
I've never had much reason to doubt that Hamlet, like princes nowadays, hasn't got anything in particular to do and so has remained a student rather than fly helicopters or take all his clothes off at a party. There is reason to believe from the text that he's 30 but I've had him at about 27 or 25. He's certainly an odd number. It fits with his dilletante behaviour that he would linger over his studies or, more likely, not really devote himself to them very diligently. I can tell you from personal experience what that is like.
But Rhodri Lewis points out that students went to university much younger in Shakespeare's time than they would now which suggests he might still be in his teens.
I don't buy that and neither do I accept that his conversation with the gravedigger shows that Hamlet doesn't know how old he is either.
Returned from his trip to England, and having dispatched Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Hamlet comes across the gravedigger and engages him in conversation to find out what is being said about him. His memories of Yorick, the late court jester, are poignant but provide ample evidence that he remembers the time and place of his childhood.
Neither can I see that the advanced stage of his relationship with Ophelia supports any view of Hamlet as an adolescent. We may no longer be prepared to accept dear old Johnny Gielgud enunciating the part like a patrician uncle but you couldn't give the part to a 17 year old either.
It is more plausible that Hamlet's transition to maturity has been delayed by his circumstances and contemplative character so that he retains aspects of the personality of a teenager- teenagers not having been invented in 1600- well into his twenties.
It was a question worth asking but it hasn't done much to change my mind. It is out of the question that Shakespeare didn't know. He knew everything and once we doubt that then we will have surely deconstructed ourselves to a standstill.
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But the reward for using one's time off sparingly throughout the rest of the year is that one arrives at God's own season, September, in a position to take two weeks off. And I'm glad it started to rain to mark the occasion.
My own planning is as awry as that of any shambling management team in that I've chosen to go to London when there is a lunchtime concert in Chichester on the same day. One alternative to the fantasy project of attending every racecourse in the UK in a calendar year would be to find every cathedral that holds weekday lunchtime concerts and go to them. But the postman is used to pushing books through the front door and I won't be short of something to do while I wait for Idaho to convert the penalty kick of the St. Leger and Minding to prove herself outside of strictly age and gender races next Saturday which will all be going forward to Postponed in the Arc, all of which seems such a tempting treble that I feel like I've collected already, which is exactly how the bookmakers like to draw the mug punter in.
I hope George Gissing's The Nether World doesn't labour the point quite to the extent that New Grub Street does. There are 600 pages of story that could have been done in 250 and Radio 4 are just doing in two hours. I can see why George Orwell liked it because it could have been where Keep the Aspidistra Flying came from and I imagine that Patrick Hamilton would have been an admirer, too, for its compulsive inevitabilty. Emile Zola wrote similar books more than once or twice.
All these things are reason to be perturbed. We would be nothing without a healthy dose of anxiety- some dissatisfaction- because it would be very dull if we backed four winners every time we went to the races or every pop record we listened to was better than the last.
I am perturbed but I'm grateful for it. It is not yet time to rest, perturbed spirit.