WERE MIRANDA AND PROSPERO AMONG THE FIRST SETTLERS IN THE NEW WORLD? By William Shakespeare
Four hundred years ago this spring, Capt. Bartholomew Gosnold sailed the Concord west from England, intending to start a settlement in the New World. After stopping in Maine, Cape Cod, and Martha’s Vineyard, the passengers and crew landed on the island now known as Cuttyhunk in late May. 9 Facing food shortages and hostile Indians, Gosnold and his crew quickly abandoned the idea of a permanent colony. They loaded the ship with sassafras root and cedar logs and sailed back to England on June 17.
Area historians and local residents have long asserted that Gosnold’s expedition was the basis for William Shakespeare’s The Tempest and that Prospero’s island in that play is based on Cuttyhunk. This view conflicts with the much more widely accepted belief that the play, though set in the Mediterranean, was inspired by a 1609 shipwreck in Bermuda. As with other debates surrounding Shakespeare, all the evidence is circumstantial, but to true believers it is compelling.
A member of the Gosnold expedition, John Brierton, published an account of the journey shortly after returning to England. The book contains one of the first known English descriptions of the New England coast. Shakespeare may well have seen a copy of Brierton’s book, for he and Gosnold shared a patron, the Earl of Southampton. In any case, the book and the play describe similar landscapes.
In Brierton’s journals, Cuttyhunk is described as having “lakes of fresh water … Meadows very large and full of green grass.” Elsewhere he says it is “full of oaks” and “hazel-nut trees.” The journals also list the types of food found on Cuttyhunk: “Herbs and roots and ground-nuts … mussel-shells,” as well as “strawberries, red and white raspberries, gooseberries, whortleberries,” and “fowls … on low trees … whose young ones … we ate at our pleasure.”
In The Tempest, Caliban gives the reader an idea of what Prospère’s island has to offer while trying to persuade the sailors to give him more liquor: “I’ll show thee the best springs; I’ll pluck thee berries; with my long nails I’ll dig thee pig-nuts; show thee a jay’s nest, and instruct thee how to snare the nimble marmoset. I’ll bring thee to clustering filberts; I’ll get thee young sea-mews from the rock.”
These and other similarities were first pointed out in 1902 by the Reverend Edward Everett Hale, who four decades earlier had written “The Man Without a Country.” They have been revived periodically ever since by scholars who conclude that Shakespeare must have cribbed from Brierton. This explanation is a great help to those who believe that Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, who died in 1604, wrote Shakespeare’s works, including The Tempest, which was not produced until 1611.
There is no way to be certain whether or not Shakespeare read the journals from Gosnold’s trip. However, it is possible to visit the island with a copy of the play and decide for oneself if Cuttyhunk could have inspired the work. Visitors will find that not much has changed in the 400 years since Gosnold and his crew sailed away: The island is still remote and is still covered with meadows and beaches as well as pine, oak, and cedar trees. Boats leave daily from New Bedford, Massachusetts, in the summertime. Check the Web site of Cuttyhunk Boat Lines (www.cuttyhunk.com) for the schedule.
WHY DO WE SAY THAT?
INTRODUCING A NEW COLUMN ON THE ORIGINS OF AMERICAN WORDS AND PHRASES
“O.K.”
A good case can be made for O.K. as the great American word. It is understood nearly everywhere, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. It also is a wonderfully mutable term. Variants include okay, okey-dokey, okley-dokley (popularized on “The Simpsons”), and the astronautical A-O.K. (introduced to the world by Alan B. Shepard when his Mercury capsule splashed down in the Atlantic in 1961). Yet its origin was for many years a matter of wild speculation, with guesses reflecting different episodes in American history.
Among the once-popular explanations of O.K.’s origins was that it came from the name of a person. Candidates for the honor included Obadiah Kelly, a railroad freight agent, whose initials were disseminated widely on bills of lading; Orrin Kendall, whose initials appeared on tins of crackers supplied to Union troops during the Civil War; and Old Keokek, a Fox chief said to have signified his assent to treaties with his initials. Other suggested
sources included the Choctaw oke or okeh, meaning “it is so” (Woodrow Wilson believed this theory and registered his approval of memos by writing “Okeh”); the Scottish och, aye, meaning “oh, yes”; the Mandingo O ke, “certainly”; and—most provocatively—the French aux quais, “at the quays,” supposedly the usual reply by French sailors at the time of the American Revolution when asked by colonial dames where they wished to meet for assignations.
The leading story for many years, and one still repeated frequently, is that O.K. comes from “Old Kinderhook,” the nickname of President Martin Van Buren. This is not entirely misguided. Van Buren’s supporters in the election of 1840 popularized the expression by forming a Democratic O.K. Club in New York and making O.K. their rallying cry. It turns out, however, that they were picking up on the earlier use of O.K. as an abbreviation for “oil [or “orl”] korrect,” a facetious alteration of “all correct.” The Columbia professor Alien Walker Reed showed in articles in American Speech in 1963 and 1964 that this use of O.K. was part of a vogue for humorous misspellings and abbreviations in newspapers at the end of the 1830s. The earliest O.K. that he found in the “oil korrect” sense appeared in the Boston Morning Post of March 23, 1839. Similar abbreviations of the period included G.T.D.H.D. (give the devil his due); N.S.M.J. (’nough said ’mong jintlemen); O.K.K.B.W.P. (one kind kiss before we part); and—two that are still occasionally encountered—N.G. (no good) and P.D.Q. (pretty damn quick).
P.S. Van Buren lost the election to William Henry Harrison, whereupon the winning Whigs claimed that O.K. actually stood for an Arabic phrase that, when read backward, meant “kicked out.”
—Hugh Rawson
ON EXHIBIT
Visitors to the new home of the American Folk Art Museum, in midtown Manhattan, often remark on its resemblance to a motor home, with exhibit space, a cafeteria, a shop, and everything else artfully shoehorned into a 40-foot-wide plot. But in Shelburne, Vermont, at the vastly more spacious Shelburne Museum (www.shelburnemuseum.org), the connection between folk art and recreational vehicles has been made even more explicit with American Wanderlust: Taking to the Road in the 20th Century, on view from June 1 through October 27. Vehicles on display range from the first commercially built auto camper (1909) through “a psychedelic 1960s hippie bus,” from which most of the smoke should have cleared by now, to a 1970s pickup truck with slide-on camper, and beyond. And when visitors encounter the rest of the sprawling museum’s collection—including circus posters, carriages, quilts, Impressionist paintings, duck decoys, and many other widely assorted objects, not to mention a superb side-wheel steamer forever at anchor on a green hillside—they may wish they had brought an RV of their own, so they could stay an extra week or two.
Amid all the high-tech wizardry of the Afghan war, today’s Special Forces soldiers still use horses to traverse the region’s rugged hills. To recognize the equine contribution to an earlier conflict, Kentucky Horse Park—magnificently unfolding over a thousand bluegrass acres behind its presiding deity, a bronze statue of the great Man o’ War—will until September 10 be paying tribute to the immense role played by horses in the Civil War. Soldiers rode perhaps 100,000 of them, while a million and a half were recruited as draft animals. Their average lifespan, once they joined up, was six months. With artifacts, paintings, and photographs, Horses of the Civil War tells the whole story, from Robert E. Lee’s beloved Traveller to the brave and disciplined cavalry mounts to the staggering logistics involved in having their workaday colleagues haul an army’s worth of supplies up to the firing line. For information about Kentucky Horse Park, which is just north of Lexington, call 859233-4303 or visit www.kyhorsepark.com.
SCREENINGS
RING MASTER
In 1962 a rising young heavyweight contender named Cassius Clay made his movie debut knocking out Anthony Quinn’s “Mountain” Rivera in the film version of Requiem for a Heavyweight. It was the first meeting in what would become a rocky relationship between film and the most famous athlete in history. Forty years later the films with and about Muhammad Ali practically rival the literature (and this doesn’t even include such Ali-inspired characters as Apollo Creed, of Rocky fame).
As Muhammad Ali in Michael Mann’s 2001 film Ali, now available on DVD, Will Smith gives off an infectious rhythm. Pumped up for the role—there’s at least 20 pounds of new muscle in that upper body, and all the muscles are long and smooth, like Ali’s when he was in his prime—Smith is given a new set of cheekbones and does a more than passable imitation of Ali’s unorthodox boxing techniques. He doesn’t really look like Ali, but who possibly could? Even Ali himself seemed to shrink in the role when he played himself in the 1977 film version of his ghostwritten autobiography, The Greatest. But like Anthony Hopkins playing Nixon, Smith is able to suggest a creature of Ali’s stature without coming off as an impressionist, and that’s the important thing. His performance is respectful and never really showoffy, which is actually a shame, because the person he is playing was perhaps the greatest natural showoff of our time. The only thing he lacks in the part, and this is equally true for the movie as a whole, is a sense of the surprise and spontaneity that hung around nearly everything Muhammad Ali ever did or said.
Ali is well written (by Erik Roth, Mann’s screenwriter for The Insider) and covers most of the major events between Ali’s—that is, Cassius Clay’s—spectacular upset over Sonny Liston in 1964 and his equally spectacular upset over George Foreman in Zaire in 1974, with his joining the Black Muslims and his opposition to the war in Vietnam in between. There’s also a great deal of dramatic fillin that goes a long way toward suggesting, if not wholly illuminating, the inner man and his motives. What’s missing from Mann’s careful re-creation of these events is the true sense of amazement and outrage that Ali caused in the sixties and seventies. Are we too close to him in time, or too far away, to fully appreciate his impact?
For all its star power, Ali never succeeds at conveying the essence of Ali with the authority of Leon Gast’s Academy
Award-winning 1996 documentary, When We Were Kings (also available on DVD). The “Rumble in the Jungle” between Ali and George Foreman was more than a boxing spectacular. It was a turning point in black pride, as two American champions with very different styles returned to the land of their ancestors and trained a worldwide spotlight on it. When We Were Kings documents this extraordinary event and puts Ali’s legend in perspective for a new generation.
The documentary started out as a film of a cross-cultural concert featuring prominent African groups as well as James Brown and B.B. King that was to precede the fight. But a six-week delay in the bout (to heal a cut Foreman got while sparring) opened up new opportunities for Gast, who came away with about 450 hours of footage of the fighters and the hype. He knew he had great material, but he didn’t realize what a treasure it was until the knockout.
Gast then waged a 20-year fight of his own to get the backing to finish the movie. In 1989 the music manager and film producer David Sonenberg came on board, and then the producer-editor Taylor Hackford, who shot new interviews with Spike Lee and the writers George Plimpton and Norman Mailer and helped shape the final edit. The result is a thrilling piece of work with appeal far beyond fight fans. “People have said to me,” Gast relates, “that they’ve never seen anything quite like When We Were Kings. I tell them, of course not, and because it’s about Muhammad Ali, you’ll never see anything like it again.
—Allen Barra
Shalom, Y’all
A PAIR OF MUSEUMS EXAMINE JEWISH LIFE IN THE SOUTH AND WEST
The crime novelist Kinky Friedman, in his parallel career as a musician, sometimes performs with an act called the Texas Jewboys. Friedman plays it for laughs, but a pair of current museum exhibits take a more serious look at the subject of Jews across America. Jewish Life in the American West: Generation to Generation will be at the Autry Museum of Western Heritage, in Los Angeles (www.autry-museum.org), from June 21 through January 30, 2003, before traveling to other parts of the country. The exhibit traces the role of Jews in exploring, settling, and developing the West from the earliest Spanish expeditions to the end of unrestricted immigration in the 1920s. ”… A Portion of the People”: Three Hundred Years of Jewish Life in South Carolina includes such notables as Francis Salvador, the first Jew to die in the Revolution, and the financier/statesman/philanthropist Bernard Baruch, along with many other aspects of the journey from ghetto to Palmetto. After finishing its run at the McKissick Museum in Columbia, South Carolina, in May, it will open at the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, South Carolina, in September and then travel to New York City and Charlotte, North Carolina. For information see www.cla.sc.edu/mcks.
Art for War’s Sake
A GENERATION OF TOP ILLUSTRATORS HELPED WIN WORLD WAR I WITH THEIR PAINTBRUSHES
To follow americans’ changing views of war, one need only look at their posters. World War II posters were blunt, direct, and powerfully patriotic, while it goes without saying that a “Vietnam poster” will be antiwar, most likely decorated with flowers, dripping letters, and peace signs. In World War I, however, Americans still held romantic notions about war, and without radio, television, or sound movies, most propaganda had to be disseminated in print. The country’s greatest illustrators—Christy, Flagg, Gibson, Leyendecker—considered it a privilege to donate their services, even as modernism was starting to make inroads on the great age of illustration they embodied. The resulting display of poster art at its zenith can be seen in World War I Posters, by Gary A. Borkan (Schiffer Publishing, 240 pp., $49.95). Approximate prices are included for collectors.
