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XXVI: Deloney's Sources for Euphuistic Learning
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
All critics of Thomas Deloney's novels have commented on the frequent passages in which, dropping his ordinary colloquial style, he indulges in euphuistic references to alleged wonders of natural history. His editor, Mr. F. O. Mann, explains many of the references by citing a probable source like Stephen Batman's Batman vppon Bartholome (1582) and highly improbable sources like Pliny, Sextus Empiricus, Cornelius Nepos, Belleforest, and the Nuremberg Chronicle. As I have recently shown, a large number of Deloney's “facts” about natural history and of his erudite-looking anecdotes were lifted directly from Thomas Fortescue's translation, The Forest or Collection of Historyes (1571, 1576). Many others (as well as a few that I supposed to have come from The Forest) were taken from Stephen Batman's The Doome warning all men to the Iudgemente (1581) and Thomas Johnson's Cornucopiæ, Or diuers secrets … Newlie drawen out of diuers Latine Authors into English (1595).
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1936
References
1 The Works of Thomas Deloney (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912).
2 PMLA. xlix, 679–686.
3 The references are to Mann's edition by pages, to Deloney's sources by signatures.
4 Compare also “I haue been where I haue seene men headed like Dogs, and women of the same shape” (p. 179) and Johnson's Cornucopiæ, D2, “There bee people vnder the great Cham which haue heads like vnto our dogs.”
5 Of course the “book” might have been Lyly's Euphues and his England (R. W. Bond's The Complete Works of John Lyly [Oxford, 1902], ii, 107) or Plutarch.
6 The Gentle Craft by Thomas Deloney, p. xxxv (Palaestra, xvii [1903]). W. J. Halliday, Deloney's Gentle Craft (Oxford, 1928), p. 8, agrees with Lange, adding (p. 91) that “There are incidents in it [that is, The Gentle Craft], such as the fight between the elephant and the dragon, that recall the Arcadia.” Mann, pp. 524 f., refers to Batman vppon Bartholome.
7 “As if you were tonguelesse like a Stork [misprinted stock]” (p. 75). Again in Thomas of Reading (p. 252), “I would I had beene like the storke tonguelesse.”
8 Compare also p. 96: “I would be as ready to guide thee from the dangerous rocks of my Fathers wrath, as the fish called Musculus is for the Whale.” Fortescue, The Forest, sig. Aa4v, in a passage which closely resembles Deloney's words, calls the fish “Talpamarina.”
9 Compare also p. 80: “they had no sooner shaken off their dropping wet garments on the shore [of Sicily], but that they were asaulted by a sort of monstrous men that had but one eye apiece, and that placed in the midst of their foreheads,” which may have come either from Johnson, sig. D1v (“In Sicile Ileland are Giants which haue but one eye and that is in the middle of their foreheades”), or from Batman's The Doome, sig. A4 (“The people of Arimaspi, haue but one eye in their foreheads, wherof they be so called, or wherof they toke their name, bicause Arima in y Scithiā tong signifieth one, & the word Spu an eye, we commonly cal them Cyclopes (one eied:)).”
10 Palaestra, xviii, viii.
11 Compare also p. 179: “othersome I haue seen, that one of their legs hath been as good as a penthouse to couer their whole bodies.” Johnson, sig. D4v, writes: “Suchlike [men] also are saide to bee in Indie that one legge being so great that therewith they they [sic] couer themselues from the sunne.” Batman, The Doome, sig. A4v, tells that “Scipodes and Monomeri are people hauing but one foote, without bending their knee at any time, and yet very swift. Plinie reporteth that in the great heate of the yeare, they lye vpon their backes and with the bignesse of their foote they shadow their bodies from the Sun”; and he gives a further account of one-footed Ethiopians at sigs. Bb4v–Bb5.
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