The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman - Laurence Sterne [298]
44. doubled the cape: Extending Tristram’s play on the sailing metaphor, this is literally “sailed back around Cape Horn,” but figuratively “received a pair of horns, cuckolded by an unfaithful wife.”
45. distribute their types: Because there would be no more editions of these texts, the composed types would be put back in their alphabetical places in the printers’ cases.
46. square cap: a version of the familiar academic mortarboard.
47. implies contradictions: Florida quotes Chambers, “Imply a contradiction,” which deals with this question about the attributes of God.
48. can make two and two five: corrected from “cannot” in the third edition.
49. Thomas Aquinas: Although Aquinas was the most formidable Catholic theologian generally, his De potentia Dei (On the Power of God, 1259–68) deals explicitly with this question.
50. Parchmentarians … Turpentarians: mocks the numerousness and eccentricity of Protestant sects.
51. oracle of the bottle: Rabelais’s Pantagruel plans “to visit the oracle of Bacbuc” (3.47), sets off (4.1), and spends time on the island (5.34–47).
52. syndicks—beguines: Syndics (civil magistrates) often comprised city councils. Beguines are lay sisters whose vows are not as strict as those of nuns.
53. Protasis … them: In his Poetics, Aristotle emphasizes the causality of the plot of tragedy and the order of its parts. He also thinks that the good plot should have a “Peripeitia” (“reversal,” 40). The distinctions in tragic theory of “Protasis,” “Epitasis,” “Catastasis,” and “Catastrophe” (the last, literally, an overturning: resolution or dénouement), widely employed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for comedy as well, were developed from Aristotle’s discussion of the parts of a tragedy (12.1–2) and explained roughly as Tristram explains them, but the terms derive from J. C. Scaliger, not Aristotle. John Dryden understood the four parts as Aristotle’s divisions in his influential “An Essay of Dramatick Poesie.” See The Works of John Dryden, Prose, 1668–1691: An Essay of Dramatick Poesie and Shorter Works, ed. Samuel Holt Monk et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 17:23. The peripeitia was often regarded as part of the catastrophe.
54. rest and quietness: This is based on neo-Aristotelian interpretation of the Poetics.
55. Valadolid: Florida notes that Don Quixote mentions a man called Diego de Valladolid (1.4.2; 2:25) for the Spanish city northwest of Madrid from which he came. This story sounds like a parody of some of Cervantes’s interpolated tales.
56. dying un——: Although Slawkenbergius may be right (see following text), others have assumed the word would be “undone.”
57. eased his mind against the wall: To “ease oneself against the wall” is to urinate. The poem itself has bawdy overtones.
58. Colbert: the famous Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619–83), finance minister to Louis XIV.
59. Suabia: Historically, Swabia is located in southwest Germany, one of five major duchies.
CHAP. I
1. pupilability: the ability to become a student. The OED lists this word, modeled on “pupillary,” with only an attempt at definition and notice of the pun, as Sterne’s alone.
2. worth stooping for: Twelfth Night, 2.2.14–15; now proverbial.
CHAP. III
1. Mackay’s regiment: Hugh Mackay (?1640–92), Scottish general and leader of the British in Flanders, killed at the battle of Steinkirk (see V, xxi) in 1692.
CHAP. VI
1. Attitudes … all in all: Florida suggests Sterne draws on Charles Avison, An Essay on Musical Expression, 2nd ed. (1753), who makes the same comparison of painting and music.
CHAP. VII
1. When … born to it: Sterne borrows verbatim from his own sermon, “Trust in God” (Sermons, 4:322), much of which, though little of this passage, comes from Walter Leightonhouse’s “Twelfth Sermon.” See Hammond, 322, for the comparison between the two sermons.
2. Zooks: short for “gadzooks,” by God’s hooks (nails), a mild oath.
3. cutting the knot: the Gordian knot. The difficulty was solved by force. Confronted with King Gordius’s famous knot, Alexander