Thursday, August 29, 2024

Shakespeare Reference in Wine Atlas Of Australia

Here is another book that I was not expecting to have a Shakespeare reference. But it does. It’s a reference to a line from Romeo And Juliet, but to the Q1 edition. James Halliday includes this heading in the book’s introduction: “Geographic Indications: Appellation by Any Other Name” (p. 6). The lines in Shakespeare’s play in both the Q2 and Folio editions are “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose/By any other word would smell as sweet.” But people more often quote the problematic Q1, which repeats the word “name,” thus eliminating the equation Shakespeare is making between a name and a word. Wine Atlas Of Australia was first published in 2006 by Hardie Grant Books. My copy is the hardcover edition published by the University Of California Press in 2007.

Tuesday, August 27, 2024

Shakespeare Reference in The Silmarillion

Even though Shakespeare references pop up in nearly every book I read, I am still sometimes surprised. Such was the case with J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion. I was not expecting any references to Shakespeare to be included in this fantasy realm. But there is one reference, and it makes some sense that it is to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. J.R.R. Tolkien writes, “And those that sailed furthest set but a girdle about the Earth and returned weary at last to the place of their beginning” (p. 348). In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Puck tells Oberon, “I’ll put a girdle round about the Earth/In forty minutes.” The Silmarillion was published in 1977. The first Ballantine Books Edition was published in March 1979.