javasaurus (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
javasaurus) wrote2003-09-17 11:16 am
javasaurus) wrote2003-09-17 11:16 am
upstart crow...
Again, from my "forgotten English" calendar.
In addition to a forgotten word-of-the-day, the calendar includes a daily entry "on this date in history" which is related to the word-of-the-day.
Today's word is "nose-swelling"
"To make a person's nose swell, to make him jealous of a rival"
"On this date in 1592, playwright and pamphleteer Robert Greene's A Groatsworth of Wit with a Million of Repentence was licenced for publication. In it Greene jealously warned budding writers in Cambridge about the mediocrity of writers such as young Will Shakespeare denouncing him as 'an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his tiger's heart wrapped in a player's hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you; and being an absolute Johannes Factorum [a Jack-of-all-Trades] is, in his owne conceit, the onlie Shake-scene in a countrie.'"
In addition to a forgotten word-of-the-day, the calendar includes a daily entry "on this date in history" which is related to the word-of-the-day.
Today's word is "nose-swelling"
"To make a person's nose swell, to make him jealous of a rival"
"On this date in 1592, playwright and pamphleteer Robert Greene's A Groatsworth of Wit with a Million of Repentence was licenced for publication. In it Greene jealously warned budding writers in Cambridge about the mediocrity of writers such as young Will Shakespeare denouncing him as 'an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his tiger's heart wrapped in a player's hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you; and being an absolute Johannes Factorum [a Jack-of-all-Trades] is, in his owne conceit, the onlie Shake-scene in a countrie.'"
no subject
I checked a bit on the web, and learned that the "upstart crow" was probably a reference to an Aesop fable about a crow who dressed in peacock feathers to appear better than he actually was.