Saturday, November 17, 2018
Muck
F.R.D. Goodyear, review of Housman on Plautus: Manuscript Notes in the Rudens of Friedrich Marx (Leiden: Brill, 1979), in
Classical Review 30.2 (1980) 321:
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This distasteful booklet contains Housman's marginalia, down to the last dash and squiggle, from his copy of Marx's Rudens. Amongst the more informative are 'shame, booby, stuff, false, pooh, knave, dirty dog, silly, ugh, no, you lie'. According to R. Smitskamp, in an impertinent preface, they 'deserve publication as a supplement to Housman's classical papers edited in 1972'. That edition, intended as a tool for scholarship, requires no such supplements. As to E.J. Brill, a publishing house should have better to do than scavenge for muck to be flung at a great scholar's memory.
