George I Goes to the Masquerade (1721)

Abstract

123 ‘‘The writers I was much more conscious of while writing are Sterne and Dickens and Swift.’’ (1983) ‘‘I didn’t consciously think of a single writer as a model. Even the correspondences with Sterne were for a time unconscious, and I only realized that Tristram Shandy had gone before me when I was some way into the drafts. When I remembered it, I did little bits of stylistic underlining, to make sure that people knew that I knew.’’ (1983) (Conversations with Salman Rushdie, ed. Michael Reder, Mississippi, 2000, pp. 2, 17, 47.) JAVIER MARIAS AND STERNE In Spanish novelist Javier Marı́as’s 1989 novel, All Souls, one of the Oxford dons, Toby Rylands, retires at age 70 but asserts that ‘‘I am not inactive. I’m writing the best book ever on Laurence Sterne and his Sentimental Journey. . . . I love that book and it matters to me that it should be properly understood . . . .’’ Unfortunately, Rylands dies before he puts a word to paper, but the allusion to Sterne is not entirely unexpected: Marı́as translated Tristram Shandy into Spanish in 1978. APHRA BEHN ONLINE The editors invite submissions for the inaugural edition of The Aphra Behn Online: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts 1640–1830, an annual publication which serves as a forum for interactive scholarly discussion. The online format will be comprised of four divisions: Scholarship, Pedagogy , New Media Applications, and Reviews . The journal is associated with the Aphra Behn Society and hosted by the University of South Florida. For the first edition, articles, essays, and reviews on women’s poetry from 1660–1830 are especially welcome. Text submissions should be 5,000 to 8,000 words in electronic form, using MS Word or RTF formatting. Guidelines for each section can be found on the website: http://www.aphrabehn.org/ aphraonline/. FRYE REDUX The Collected Works of Northrop Frye (University of Toronto Press) has reached volume 17 (2005), ‘‘Writings on the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries.’’ Four pieces addressed to the earlier period (though not quite returning to the heart of Scriblerian territory), are here reprinted, two of them landmark essays, ‘‘Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility’’ (ELH, 1956) and ‘‘Varieties of Eighteenth-Century Sensibility’’ (ECS, 1990–91). Also included are two book reviews , one of Frederick Pottle’s edition of Boswell’s London Journal, and the other of Bonamy Dobrée’s English Literature in the Early Eighteenth Century. CORRECTION Ilias Chrissochoidis’s ‘‘George I Goes to the Masquerade (1721)’’ in Scriblerian, 42, No. 1 (Autumn 2009) contained an error in stanza 6, line 2 (p. 48). It should read: ‘‘That he never had felt such soft Bubbies before,’’ and we thank Dr. Georgianna Ziegler, Louis B. Thalheimer, Head of Reference at the Folger Shakespeare Library, for her help with this. The correct transcription appears in the online version of the issue, currently available through ProQuest. NOTICE Aubrey Williams’s obituary published in the Autumn 2009 issue was printed from an imperfect copy. Infelicities crept into the tribute during the editing process and are not the fault of its authors. We regret our oversights . The revised transcription will appear in the online version of the issue, available through ProQuest. 47 numerable unknown pre-publication ‘‘readers’’ and ‘‘correctors,’’ they overcome a lack of interest in modernization by printers themselves. Although close analysis unsurprisingly shows the decline of the majusculeand italic-laden text to have been spasmodic , Mr. Wendorf charts this process precisely and eruditely, calibrating it to changes in taste. GEORGE I GOES TO THE MASQUERADE (1721) Ilias Chrissochoidis Students of early Hanoverianism will be intrigued by the discovery of an anonymous two-volume manuscript recently acquired by the Folger Shakespeare Library. Packed with Jacobite poetry, it includes among others a libelous satire on the dynasty ’s founder. George I disliked (and was disliked in) his new kingdom. He barely knew English, loathed British political freedoms, and spent as much time as he could in his native principality. What he certainly liked about London was opera (his sponsorship of the Royal Academy of Music raised Britain’s music profile) and particularly masquerades, introduced by opera manager John James Heidegger. A huge cash machine, this type of aristocratic...