Vol. 13 No. 8 · 25 April 1991
pages 18-19 | 2936 words
True Words
A.D. Nuttall
- The Names of Comedy by Anne Barton
Oxford, 221 pp, £22.50, August 1990, ISBN 0 19 811793 0
‘The French call it pain, the Germans call it Brot and we call it bread; and we are right, because it is bread.’ So wrote (I have been told though I have not been able to verify the reference) an English theorist of language in the 17th century. The thought is at once robust and lunatic. The writer believes that there are true words and false. His is an extreme case of what Anne Barton calls cratylism.
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Letters
Vol. 13 No. 10 · 23 May 1991
From George Watson
A.D. Nuttall, in a splendid review of Anne Barton’s The Names of Comedy (LRB, 25 April), may be right to say that Juliet’s remark about a rose-by-any-other-name is unquoted there because it is too well known. Another reason may be that Shakespeare did not write it. What he did write is:
What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other word would smell as sweet,
which makes the point, perhaps even more sharply than in the familiar misreading, that (like Aristotle and Aquinas before him) he was a Saussurian before his time. But then Saussure publicly disavowed having discovered the arbitrariness of the sign, which he called an uncontested principle. It is a passage his modern disciples prefer not to read.
George Watson
St John’s College, Cambridge
