Did Shakespeare play tarot?

Amleth

Ross G Caldwell said:
He could surely read French though? ...

The answer is the same as for Italian: unknown.

There are some difficulties in assessing Shakespeare's foreign language skills. The major difficulty, is that he wrote almost entirely in English. His use of French is slight, and at the elementary level: a few nouns, the word "adieu," and similar.

His lack of use of French could be explained by the fact that he was writing for an English audience. Or, it could be that he didn't know French, beyond the tiny amount he did use. The lack of biographical detail about him makes it impossible to say which alternative is right.

Then, there hasn't been identification of any French-language writing that he had to know, in French, to write what he did. (At least, I don't know of anybody who's put forward that claim, in reference to a particular French source, and had it generally accepted.) Maybe Shakespeare knew French, maybe not.
 

Amleth

venicebard said:
... I have no doubt Shakespeare had Latin (more likely than Greek?), from his masterful use of all the minor figures from that age (chiasmus, etc.).

You'll run into trouble convincing people of Shakespeare's command of Latin, partly because of the unfortunate line that Ben Jonson included in his Folio poem, which appeared as part of the introductory material for the First Folio of Shakespeare plays. Jonson wrote: "And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek..."

That line has long been taken as reference to Shakespeare, himself, that he had little Latin. "Small Latin" is the conventional wisdom about Shakespeare today. Jonson's line has had an enduring influence that Jonson, I'm sure, could not have anticipated. The conventional wisdom is that Shakespeare would have attended the Stratford grammar school, where he would have been taught the usual "schoolboy" Latin, at that basic level, but scholars are reluctant to credit him with any further Latin.

Personally, tho, I'm with you. I'm no Latinist - my own Latin is painfully "small" - but I do have a couple good English dictionaries that give Latin roots. And, in my study of Hamlet, I've found many, many instances where Shakespeare apparently chose English words with knowledge of their Latin roots. To do that, he had to know Latin quite well, I think, significantly beyond the average grammar school level. That isn't the accepted view of the Shakespeare community at large, at this time, however.

But I could probably, without too much trouble, list a hundred or more words from Hamlet, and show how the Latin root meaning is somehow pertinent to the play, at the point where the English word is used. I can't see that as being accidental. It gives the strong impression he often chose English words with Latin roots in mind, more than would happen by chance. Either that Stratford grammar school was miraculously good, or he had more study of Latin elsewhere, I think.
 

Teheuti

"Shakespeare, Magic and Tarot"

Thought you might be interested that the next all-day event put on by Thalassa, promoter of the Bay Area Tarot Symposium (BATS), will be "Shakespeare, Magic and Tarot" - "exploring the magic and mystery of Tarot in connexion with the works of Mr William Shakespeare, interspersed with performances of Shakespearean snippets and demonstrations of Elizabethan swordplay and Renaissance dance." Since Thalassa and her partner have worked the San Francisco Renaissance Fairs for a long time, they have lots of highly skilled people to draw on.

I'll put the details up in the events promotion section but here's the website: http://www.daughtersofdivination.com

Mary
 

Cerulean

Gentle souls, perhaps the poetic landscape of triumphs...

...may be the best sources of inquiry.

People might have glanced at this note below to start, as well as read Brian Williams' book on his Renaissance Tarot and Stuart Kaplan's Volume II study of the Visconti Sforza's. The link below is to Robert O' Neill's generalized summary of common motifs for the Sun card in tarot:

http://www.tarot.com/about-tarot/library/boneill/sun

I'm not repeating their notes, I'm just suggesting that as a start if people do not feel familar to such motifs. I know this is only my opinion, but this is my thought below, having thought about the above references...

But to be honest, I believe Shakespeare did pull from the common motifs that Elizabethan England would have known for his theatrical entertainments. I read a suggestion that the Sun card of the Visconti-Sforza might be an uncommon motif...but in the poetic landscape of European understanding of Roman triumphs, here's a description that sounds to me to show common understanding of the cherub holding a blood-red head, with somewhat crownlike rays--I believe there is a satirical element in a gaming card, even if the "Sun" motif was beneficial.

Poets in a Landscape
Gilbert Highet
published by Alfred A. Knopf,
New ork, 1957

Rome: The Gate, p.246-247

...the Sacred Road.It slopes down from a ridge of the Palatine Hill into the valley of the forum, runs past the ruins of great porticoes and temples and finally turns into the asscent twoard the Capital....old road was most important when it was the scene of that perculiarly Roman ceremony, the triumphal procession of a victorious general; a fantastic blend of ancient ritual, modern power-politics, sacral formality, and truly Italian informality--unless the obscenity too was religious. the general, reaching the pinnacle of earthly felicity, wore a magnificent robe of crimson and gold, a sumptuous tunic embroidered with figures of victory, and a golden crown. The crown was held above his head, partly because it was too heavy for him to wear, and partly so that he should remember it was not for his to own forever. It symbolized the fact that he had almost crossed the line between humanity and divinity; he was nearly a god. His face was painted red. The Romans themselves did not know why, or did not say; but we believe it was a symbol of blood, his own strength and the strength of the defeated enemy. the custom surely went back to a remote epoch, when the victorious general was felt to have taken the blood from his enemies of his state and given new blood to his own countrymen.

Behind the general marched, or lurched, his soldiers, usually singing disrepectful songs about their leader. Yet they were not arrested or even discouraged. They were felt to be doing the right thing. Caeser himself scarecely dared to object when his faithful troops marched into Rome behind him, singing (in the fine old metre of most Roman folk songs):

"Watch your wives, you poor civilians, Here comes Baldheaded Lover-Boy!"

Such behavior took he curse off the triumphant general's good luck. It diverted the energy of any enemy who might put the evil eye on him. It was like the deprecatory words of a primitive mother whose child has been priased for its beauty. A Roman triumph was a combination of gravel political and military thanksgiving with jolly, care-free human irreverence. the general was almost divine. The soldiers were human, all too human. Such was the ancient tradition.

Then came the symbols of the general's victories: his booty--gold dishes, rich clothes and tapestries, jewels, works of art--and models of his battles and sieges, in the form of floats showing the cities he had captured, the rivers he had crossed, the tribes he had subdued. There were the prisoners he had taken, headed by their princes and captains, sch as had not been wise enough to commit suicide before their capture. And there were priests, musicians and dancers and jestors and relatives of the general and his friends and dependents, and the friends of the returned soldiers, and Roman prisoners set free by their victories and hundreds of grateful people. They all marched along the Sacred Road, singing and rejoicing. At this corner, on the northwest of the Forum, where we can stand today, the procession broke up. The soldiers went off to mingle with the crowd, to spend their back pay and their share of the of plunder on jollification. The chief prisoners went down to the cells hidden below the spurs of the Capitol Hill there to be executed. This a rare and cruel ceremony. It took place after a triumph because a triumph was an ancient ritual, going back to the era when every war was a holy war and had to be concluded by a sacrifice to the gods who granted victory. Meanwhile, the general with his suite and with attendent riests climbed the Capitol Hill, to offer, with white bulls from the banks of the Clitumnus gratitude to supreme Jupiter. This was Rome; power, efficiency, cruelty, frank humanity, frequent gaiety, and grave reference for the gods.

...I only took one reference and opened a book that might suggest how the visual representation of the Visconti gilded minature harkened backed to their beloved and romanticized "Roman" roots. The visual in that time of the 1400's for the Milanese Visconti and Visconti-Sforza usually followed a carefully visualized program under a patron's specification and poetic humanist scholar. Even the satirical had a purpose and reminder that a victorious general and lord had to endure...

Triumphs for the Italian city-state families of the Viscontis, Estes and I believe the Florentine di Medicis from the 1400s came to be done not only after military triumphs, but engagements, marriages and visiting dignatories (a new Holy Roman Emperor or Papal visit).

I thought the Hundreds Years War that went through the early 1450s made England more independent of Continental Europe in terms of trading, fashion and cultural interplays--their Parlimentary system and conflicts with the French might have limited influence and tastes of the English, to my mind.

But I do not recall triumphs being a particularly English custom, even though there were beautiful parades and celebrations in honor of various times of the reigning protestant Elizabeth I. Since she avoided marriage and did not like to remind those of her Catholic rival, the very eager-to-depose-her, Mary Queen of Scots, my idea was that things that were popular and fashionable in Catholic countries were not always outwardly favored in the English landscape. I'll have to reread newer biographies, since my reading of that time has dimmed in my memory! Because Elizabeth's reign was more peaceable and wasn't the tastes for art and flavors of the 'Italianate' style undergoing a revival...

Perhaps by a hundred and thirty years later the playrights and poets of Shakespeare's time might be more outwardly favorable to Italian and French and German gaming and literature and art?

Sorry for the long twists and turns...will be editing this later.

Cerulean
 

kwaw

If you can point me to Shakespeare talking about a man being hung from one foot I'd be seriously interested -

Baffled (defeated): subjected to public disgrace. Literally, of the punishment of a recreant knight who was hung up by his heels.

quote:
A cowardly braggart of a soldier is made in one of Beaumont and Fletcher's plays* to describe the treatment he experienced, when like Parolles he was at length found out, and stripped of his lion's skin: "They hung me up by the heels and beat me with hazel sticks, . . . that the whole kingdom took notice of me for a baffled whipped fellow." The word to which I wish here to call your attention is ' baffled.' ^ Probably if you were reading, there would be nothing here to cause you to pause; you would attach to the word the meaning which sorts very well with the context—" hung up by the heels and beaten, all his schemes of being thought much of were baffled and defeated." But the word means a great deal more than this; it contains allusion to a custom in the days of chivalry, according to which a perjured or recreant knight was either in person, or more-commonly in effigy, hung up by the heels, his escutcheon blotted, his spear broken, and he himself or his effigy made the mark and subject of all kinds of indignities; such a one being said to be ' baffled’. Twice in Spenser recreant knights are so dealt with. I can only quote a portion of the shorter passage, in which this infamous punishment is described:

" And after all, fop greater infamy
He by the heels him hung upon a tree,
And baffled so, that all which passed by
The picture of his punishment might see.” $•

Probably when Beaumont and Fletcher wrote, men were not so remote from the days of chivalry but that this custom was still fresh in their minds. How much more to them than to us, so long as we are ignorant of the same, would those words I just quoted have conveyed ?

* A King and no King, iii. 1.
^ See Holinshed's Chronicles, vol. iii. pp. 827, 1218: Ann. 1513, 1570.
$ Fairy queen, 6. 7. 27 ; cf. 5. 3. 37.
end quote: English past and present (1855) by Richard Chenevix Trench p.141/142

And in Shakespeare, for example in King Richard II, Act I, Scene I Norfolk says:

I am digrac’d, impeach’d, and baffled here;

Quote
Baffled is here employed in the general sense of being treated with ignominy; but it particularly, and Nares says originally, meant, a degrading punishment inflicted on recreant knights: one part of which consisted in hanging them up by the heels.

... To this signification of the word Falstaff seems to allude when he says in "Henry IV" Part I. Act I. Sc. 21,—
" An I do not, call me villain, and baffle me." And afterwards, ibid., Act II. Sc. 4 :—
"If thou do it half so gravely, so majestically both in word and matter, hang me up by the heels for a rabbit-sucker," &c,
End quote of note a: on page 450 of The plays of Sheakespeare, Volume 1 (1858) Howard Staunton, Sir John Gilbert.

In 2 Henry IV (i.2) also, the Chief-Justice says to Falstaff “to punish him by the heels would amend the attention of his ears”.

quote:
BAFFLE, BAFFUL} v.(Fr.) To treat with indignity ; to expose. Properly speaking, to baffle or bafful a person was to reverse a picture of him in an ignominious manner.

Baffulling is a greatt disgrace among the Scots, and it is used when a man is openly perjured, and then they make an image of him painted, reversed, with his heels upward, with his name, woondering, crying, and blowing out of him with horns. Hollinshed. And after all, for greater infamy,

He by the heels him hung upon a tree,
And baffled°so, that all which passed by
The picture of his punishment might see,
And by the like ensample warned be,
However they through treason do trespass.
Spenser, F. Q., B. VI, vii, 27.

I am disgrac'd, impeach'd, and baffled here,
Pierc'd to the soul with slander's venom'd
вреаг. К. Richard П, i, 1.

(2) v. To cheat, or make a fool
of; to manage capriciously or
wantonly ; to twist irregularly
together. East.

(3) In Suffolk they term baffled, corn which is knocked down by the wind.

(4) v. To twist or entangle. Northampt.

BAFFLING, s. Opprobrium ; affront.
end quote: Dictionary of obsolete and provincial English by Thomas Wright
 

Huck

Baffled (defeated): subjected to public disgrace. Literally, of the punishment of a recreant knight who was hung up by his heels.
...

Interesting finding, Steve. I wasn't aware of this.