By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘To thine own self be true’ is a well-known proverbial expression which means ‘be true to yourself’ or ‘don’t do anything that would go against your true nature’. But what are the origins of this phrase? To discover those, and why they may come tinged with irony in their original context, we need to turn to the text in which ‘to thine own self be true’ first appears: William Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116, a popular poem to be read or recited at weddings, ends with the couplet:
If this be error, and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle analyses the lasting power of Ovid’s great poem
Ovid’s wasn’t the first Metamorphoses. Before him, there was Nicander’s Heteroeumena, whose title is usually translated as ‘metamorphoses’, but Nicander’s poem has been lost. It was Ovid’s vast retelling of the great myths of Greek and Roman civilisation that became the definitive classical text on the subject of transformation.
This song, from one of Shakespeare’s most popular comedies, is sung by the Clown or Fool character, Feste, at the end of Twelfth Night. Some critics have expressed doubts over Shakespeare’s authorship of the song, which may have been written by Robert Armin (who played the fool characters in the original productions of many of Shakespeare’s plays) or may be an earlier song that predates the play. It uses wind and rain as symbols of life’s hardships, and thus concludes the poem on a somewhat bittersweet note. All revels and festivities – such as those enjoyed at Twelfth Night – are short-lived intervals in life’s daily grind (‘the rain it raineth every day’, after all). The song is also the only good poem we know that features the word ‘toss-pots’.
When that I was and a little tiny boy,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
A foolish thing was but a toy,
For the rain it raineth every day.
But when I came to man’s estate,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
’Gainst knaves and thieves men shut their gate,
For the rain it raineth every day.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Not marble, nor the gilded monuments’ is one of the more famous poems in Shakespeare’s sequence of 154 sonnets. The poem is a version of the popular conceit that the poet’s words can make his lover immortal through ‘rhyme’. As commentators are quick to point out, the Bard failed in one sense, in that we cannot say for certain what the name of the addressee of the poem was (the Earl of Pembroke? or the Earl of Southampton?).