Unintended Mistakes and Cartographers' Follies

I was just listening to The World at One. The main story was that Gordon Brown had made what he called an "unintended mistake". This gladdened me as it would have been odd if he had made an intended mistake. I'm not sure that a mistake can even theoretically be intended, unless it's a cartographer's folly.

My word! I was just googling for a link to explain what a cartographer's folly is and could find almost nothing. So here goes. Maps are very easy to plagiarise. Rather than going out with theodolyte and measuring rod you can just reprint the Ordinance Survey map and claim it as your own. If the OS try and sue, you just pretend that you really mapped the area and that your map is identical to theirs because it is of precisely the same place. To stop such skullduggery, in every map you see published there will always be one small, deliberate error. It will be so tiny that it could never harm an orienteer but it will be there like the slight assymetry in a Persian rug and it will be enough for the original cartographer to be able to identify his work and sue.

I have often wondered, spending as much time as I do sniffing dictionaries, whether there is such a thing as a lexicographer's folly.

Ever so subtle

Andrew Motion and Shakespeare

There's a story in The Times today about how a chap called Ben Shephard has accused Andrew Motion of plagiarism. Motion's defence is that other people have done it and he cites Shakespeare.


Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra borrowed whole passages from Sir Thomas North’s Life of Mark Antony he said, including the description of her barge: “The poop was beaten gold; purple the sails . . .”


The Times doesn't actually make clear whether this is Motion speaking in free indirect discourse or the journalist's interpolation, but it gave me a nasty turn. I dashed for my edition of Antony & Cleopatra (luckily I keep a copy of North's Plutarch strapped to my ankle for just such emergencies as these) and I compared passages. Here is the full sentence from North:


She disdained to set forward otherwise, but to take her barge in the river of Cydnus, the poope whereof was of gold, the sailes of purple, and the owers of silver, which kept stroke in rowing after the sounde of the musicke of flutes, howboyes, citherns, violls, and such other instruments as they played upon in the barge.


And here (if you need it) is Shakespeare:


The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne,
Burned on the water: the poop was beaten gold;
Purple the sails, and so perfumèd, that
The winds were lovesick with them; the oars were silver,
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made
The water which they beat to follow faster,
As amorous of their strokes.


Now correct me if I'm wrong (which I never am), but a few scattered words do not a "whole passage" make. It's not even a whole damned sentence. Moreover, those insidious dot dot dots suggest that there's more, whereas in fact Shakespeare now interpolates perfumes for the lovely alliteration of Ps.


My New Cambridge Shakespeare (I can't find my Arden) says that "the verbal parallels are remarkably close", but nothing of whole passages copied word for word.


Motion might just as well have cited Prospero's speech in The Tempest:

Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves

As against Golding's Metamorphoses (which flicks out from my left wrist like that gun in Taxi Driver):

Ye elves of hills, of brooks, of woods
Of standing lakes,


But neither of these comes close to T.S. Eliot's Journey of the Magi:

A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp

When compared to Lancelot Andrewes Christmas Day sermon of 1622:

A cold coming they had of it at this time of the year, just the worst time of the year to take a journey, and specially a long journey. The ways deep, the weather sharp


This is a trifle more important because not only is it a whole quatrain taken pretty much word for word, but "A cold coming we had of it" is one of Eliot's most famous lines. Not the most famous, perhaps, but it's a contender alongside lines like:

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

Which of course has nothing whatsoever to do with Jules Laforgue's
 
Dans la piece les femmes vont et viennent
En parlant des maîtres de Sienne.
 
[In the room the women come and go
Talking of the Siennese masters]

Going through the Motions