Posted on 08/25/2017 9:27:16 AM PDT by nickcarraway
If Angelenos know one truth, it may well be this: There is absolutely no love lost between the University of Southern California and University of California, Los Angeles. In the classroom, on the football field, around campus — few places escape the pervasive sway of LA's great rivalry.
But this week, the battle has found a new theater: the proper spelling of Shakespear(e).
See, USC recently unveiled one of the most ambitious projects it has ever embarked upon: USC Village, a $700 million, 15-acre development that opened earlier this month to great fanfare. And towering over it all is a 20-foot-tall bronze statue of Hecuba, legendary queen of Troy, with a base sporting a few choice verses from Shakespeare's Hamlet.
There is just one snag. The school spelled his name "Shakespear":
"And all for nothing — For Hecuba! What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, That he should weep for her?" "Shakespear's Hamlet"
Naturally, the Trojans' nemesis took note.
"USC," said UCLA's official student-run account, in a tweet dripping with disdain, "The only place in America that can unveil a statue as the centerpiece of a $700 million project and manage to misspell Shakespeare."
The statue — and specifically its base, which also features women of different backgrounds — was meant to represent USC's "commitment to all of the women of the Trojan Family ... who share the same spirit as the majestic Queen of Troy," school President C.L. Max Nikias said at the unveiling.
So how could something so important go so wrong?
Well, if you ask USC, it didn't go wrong at all. In fact, the school says it used the unusual spelling for a very specific purpose.
"To E, or not to E, that is the question," the university said in a statement to The Los Angeles Times. "Over the centuries his surname has been spelled 20 different ways. USC chose an older spelling because of the ancient feel of the statue, even though it is not the most common form."
Doth USC protest too much?
Martin Butler, professor of English renaissance drama at the University of Leeds, tells The Guardian the base isn't actually, well, off-base after all.
There's a "lot of variation in the way the name is spelled when it appears in contemporary legal documents and the early printed texts of Shakespeare's works," he explains. And that includes not just Shakespeare and Shakespear — but also "Shakspeare, Shakspere ... Shaksper, Shackspeare, even Shagspere."
He tells the Guardian that the version sans "E" was picked up especially by 18th-century editors, including even such literary heavyweights as Alexander Pope.
"Leaving the 'E' off is probably an attempt to make Shakespeare seem to belong to a more distant past; it feels more antique, but it doesn't really have any special claim to be the preferred spelling."
In other words, a bard by any other name ... would probably be just as likely to inspire a kerfuffle. As you were, Trojans and Bruins.
Who cares? He’s a dead white cracka writer.
Shakspere ping list (not a misspelling)
The most amazing part of this story is that UCS has a statue honoring a dead, white, Western male. Shouldn’t this be torn down and replaced with a statue of some urban street philosopher?
There is no “correct” way to spell it. As noted, contemporary documents were inconsistent.
People today have no serious problems, so they get spun up over things like how to spell the name of the guy who wrote Hamlet, or should my town have a statue of that old general?
Small minds.
> Who cares? He’s a dead white cracka writer. <
Exactly. And because of his white privilege status, he’ll be scrubbed from history anyway.
Shake spear: What Zulus do before getting slaughtered by Englishmen with rifles.
Read the article again. The statue doesn’t honor the English writer, it quotes one of his verses.
What Would Dan Quayle Do?
>>Who cares? He’s a dead white cracka writer.
And Hecuba owned slaves.. so clearly the statue needs to be torn down.
Correct. In fact, it wasn't until Noah Webster started publishing his English dictionaries (starting in 1828) that we finally began to get consistent spelling of words.
But then, this controversy was stirred up by UCLA's official Student Union Twitter account and radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt (a Harvard and University of Michigan graduate).
How was his name spelled in his day? That’s the way it should be spelled.
That’s the problem - it wasn’t spelled consistently back then. He wasn’t even consistent with his own name.
Well, in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-Upon-Avon, they display a copy of his Christening and his Burial records. Both have an ‘e’ on the end. As does every monument in the village.
Why do we have to be pigeonholed into consistancy if Will wasn’t?
Jasper Fford had a lot of fun with this in his mystery book “Something Rotten” in his Thursday Next series.
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