Annotations and comments

Terry Foreman has posted 16,447 annotations/comments since 28 June 2005.

Comments

First Reading

About Thursday 7 May 1663

TerryF  •  Link

"lest I...should be brought in, being employed in the Exchequer;"

Can a memorious soul help clarify the last phrase? Was it as a clerk there that Mr. Pepys made an indiscrete remark? or...?

About Thursday 7 May 1663

TerryF  •  Link

Let stand L&M's removal of the "this day" par. to the end of the entry.

Let not my all-too-hasty merger of the Crews vitiate that. Thanks, Paul Chapin for the correction.

Sometimes Sam leaves his wife at Lord Crew's; but today she's not mentioned between the New Exchange and the coach from Tom's; can she have spent the day shopping and socializing in that area with a companion as unmentioned as Sam's boy?

About Thursday 7 May 1663

TerryF  •  Link

Something is out of order here

First the news Sir Thomas Crew tells him, then he goes to meet him. L&M say the paragraph "Sir Thomas Crew this day tells me...and I believe is true." is in the margin of the MS, looks added, and compositionally "this day" puts it at the end of the entry.

About The Humorous Lieutenant (John Fletcher)

TerryF  •  Link

John Fletcher (1619).
Tragicomedy in which comic relief is provided by the actions of the humorous Lieutenant, a secondary character who becomes entangled with the main plot, which concerns the love of Celia, a captive of uncertain origins, and Prince Demetrius of Antioch. Demetrius, returning from the wars, is told that Celia has been executed as a witch. In fact, she is alive, rebuffing the advances of King Antigonus, Demetrius's father, who finally plans to conquer her with a love potion. This magic liquid is inadvertently swallowed by the Lieutenant, who then appears to be in love with the King. Celia's steadfast virtue finally impresses the King, and he allows the lovers to be reunited. Celia then discovers she is really a princess, the daughter of Antigonus's former enemy, and all ends happily. http://www.4-wall.com/authors/aut…

Demetrius and Enanthe. [Prepared by Margaret McLaren Cook and F.P. Wilson. by John Fletcher. Publisher: London, Malone Society, 1951] OCLC: 3333312
http://www.worldcatlibraries.org/…

About The Journal of "My Lord" Sandwich

TerryF  •  Link

Jeannine, a gem of a different kind! Thank you so much for providing us access to another, more measured level of life, observation and experience coetaneous with SP's most busy days.

Thank you also for the sage commentary and literary sensitivity expressed in the whole.

The whole read at the more stately tempo of the awesome ceremonies captured by the Journal entries you so judiciously selected for us -- enactments that both revealed and concealed the life-and-death realities of persons and peoples in those times.

About Wednesday 6 May 1663

TerryF  •  Link

Rulers

"Sir J. Minnes coming...from Westminster...tells us, in great heat, that, by God, the Parliament...will render all men incapable of any military or civil employment that have borne arms in the late troubles against the King...; which, if it be so, as I hope it is not, will give great cause of discontent, and I doubt will have but bad effects."

There is no record of that occurring today in the HC, but yesterday was set in motion a Bill concerning

"Offices.

"Ordered, That a Bill be brought in for disposing all Offices, military and civil, into the Hands of such Persons as have been loyal Subjects, and conformable to the Church of England: And that it be referred to the Lord Bruce, Mr. Solicitor General, Serjeant Charlton, Sir Allen Apsley, Lord Newburgh, Sir Tho. Tomkins, Lord Fanshaw, Mr. Milward, Sir Robert Atkyns, Serjeant Keeling, Mr. Coventry, Mr. Vaughan, Mr. Thurland, Sir Courtney Poole, to prepare and bring in the Bill."

From: 'House of Commons Journal Volume 8: 5 May 1663', Journal of the House of Commons: volume 8: 1660-1667 (1802), pp. 475-76. URL: http://www.british-history.ac.uk/…. Date accessed: 06 May 2006.

About Wednesday 6 May 1663

TerryF  •  Link

"they have had eleven hogsheads of oyle out of the tongue of a whale."

Lost in Translation: The original source, who shipped on a whaler, surely said eleven hogsheads of oyle were taken out of the *tun* of a whale. (Not a scanning error, L&M leave this as it is, with no note.) Cf. Moby Dick, Ch. 77, The Great Heidelburgh Tun http://worldwideschool.org/librar…

About Tuesday 5 May 1663

TerryF  •  Link

Poor Mennes lacks companionship and a theatre of action.

A man of action and ready sociability, the stories the older Mennes tells are about his expoits at sea two decades prior and not his days of drink, doggerel and fraternity.

I have added two huge posts in the Background notes on his literary side to render his life and persona more comprehensible. http://www.pepysdiary.com/encyclo…

About Sir John Mennes (Comptroller of the Navy)

TerryF  •  Link

Has the bibliophile, songster Pepys not come across Mennes/Smith publications at Playford's?

The Order of the Fancy ballad "'The Blacksmith'" to be sung to a version of "Greensleeves," "proved enormously popular, and — variously entitled "The Blacksmith" or "Which Nobody Can Deny" — all but supplanted the older version of "Greensleeves" through the latter part of the seventeenth-century....The version of the tune....[was] printed in John Playford's Second Book of the Pleasant Musical Companion (1686). http://ett.arts.uwo.ca/rump/site/…
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Musarum Deliciae (1655),
Conteining severall select Pieces of Poetique Wit.[but NOT "He that fights and runs away, &c"] By Sr J. M[ennes] and Ja[mes] S[mith] The Second Edition, LONDON Printed by J.G.for Henry Herringman, and are to be sold at his Shop, at the Signe of the Anchor in the New Exchange, 1656. [online text] http://www.immortalia.com/html/bo…
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550. Wit and drollery joviall poems / corrected and much amended, with new additions, by Sir J.M[ennes]. ... Sir W.D. ... and the most refined wits of the age. is available in digital form via institutional subscribers to Early English Books Online
http://www.lib.umich.edu/tcp/eebo…
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WIT RESTOR'D In feverall Select POEMS Not formerly publifli't
LONDON, Printed for R. Pollard, N. Brooks, and T. Dring, and are to be sold at the Old Exchange, and in Fleetstreet. 1658. [online text] http://www.archive.org/stream/cu3… WIT RESTOR'D http://www.horntip.com/html/books…

[Final link changed to Archive.org version, 5 Jan 2012. P.G.]

About Sir John Mennes (Comptroller of the Navy)

TerryF  •  Link

The literary Mennes more carefully characterized

L&M's claim that by the Restoration Mennes had "won a reputation as....a writer of amusing, if usually coarse, verse" was not universally shared. His Cavalier poetry published in the Interregnum was burlesque, no coarser than the satire of Ben Jonson's "On the Famous Voyage" (Epigrammes, c. 1612), which uses the popular scatological imagery of the London waterworks to tell the tale of two Londoners who hire an open boat to row them up the sewage-clogged Fleet Ditch. http://www.findarticles.com/p/art…

The most recent appreciation of Mennes's literary life and work is *Cavaliers, Clubs, and Literary Culture: Sir John Mennes, James Smith, and the Order of the Fancy* (Hardcover) by Timothy Raylor University of Delaware Press (September 1994)
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/…

Abstracting from a review of it: In the [1620s and 1630s] Mennes was the main catalytic figure of a kind of fraternity or a literary drinking club,"The Order of the Fancy," that exemplified a "a commitment to traditional concepts of order and an espousal of classicism, good-fellowship, and wit," using burlesque and satire as subversive tools to advance the Stuart cause.

"A 'drollery' during the Interregnum came to mean 'an anthology built around the verse of Mennes, Smith, and their circle' (114). Several of the more famous titles are Musarum Deliciae (1655), Wit and Drollery (1656), and Wit Restor'd (1658)....[W]hile they were not exactly the parents of the octosyllabic doggerel style, they were perhaps its midwives: they gave it its distinctive tone, and they popularized it" (215). Some of the writers Raylor identifies as having inherited this legacy were Samuel Butler, George Etherege, John Dryden, Alexander Pope, and Jonathan Swift."

Patrick, K.E. "Review of Cavaliers, Clubs, and Literary Culture: Sir John Mennes, James Smith, and the Order of the Fancy." Early Modern Literary Studies 1.3 (1995): 13.1-11 <URL: http://purl.oclc.org/emls/01-3/re…>.
http://www.shu.ac.uk/emls/01-3/re…

About Tuesday 5 May 1663

TerryF  •  Link

“the advice"

Given their subsequent history seems to me to be a division of labor -- that Pepys be content to remain Mr. Inside, picking up what he can from ventures that others with the experience like Warren has, be Mr. Outside.

language hat, I had the same first question, but the LSE traces its first beginnings to 1698 when "John Castaing begins to issue 'at this Office in Jonathan’s Coffee-house' a list of stock and commodity prices called 'The Course of the Exchange and other things'."
http://www.londonstockexchange.co…

On a related note: "Lloyd's earliest home was Edward Lloyd's coffee house, firmly established by 1688 in Tower Street in the City of London. This small club of marine underwriters moved to Lombard Street, closer to the heart of the City, in 1691." http://www.lloyds.com/About_Us/Th…

The coffee-house, not the tavern is where the future financial action is.

About Tuesday 5 May 1663

TerryF  •  Link

“wherein he failed most fatally to the King’s ruin”

Good question, Todd! (I know it's a good Q because I scratched my head about it too.) L&M say that the King (Charles I) "tried to win over the fleet" (whatever that means) from Warwick, the latter dismissed five pro-royalists who were commanders, including Mennes, but there is no evidence he was an actor in any plot.

Mennes certainly did not have "the whole management of the fleet" in his hand; Warwick did. Sounds like Mennes is exaggerating his role again, but if so, the effect is bathetic: why did he fail?!

About Monday 4 May 1663

TerryF  •  Link

More on the Diary text's format

L&M say in their edition "The paragraphing is that of the MS." The same cannot be said of Wheatley's, which has none.

About Monday 4 May 1663

TerryF  •  Link

Punctuation in Diary editions

Yea, Todd Bernhardt, so it stands in L&M's text and so the implication would seem to be, and it makes sense of the text to me; but each volume of their edition of the Diary says what also applies to Wheatley's:

"Punctuation is almost all editorial, except for certain full-stops, colons, dashes and parentheses. Punctuation is almost non-existent in the original since the marks could be confused with shorthand."

About Monday 4 May 1663

TerryF  •  Link

Masters of Dancing and not...

Following daniel's sage lead, there are several dances of different kinds observed, reported and conjectured throughout this day's entry, from the time SP arose, until he "to bed to [his] wife, with whom [he has] not lain since [he] used to lie with [his] father till to-night."

About Monday 4 May 1663

TerryF  •  Link

"--but this my Lord did not tell me, but is my guess only."

So L&M close a sentence that begins and ends with the same declaration.