Item 1 - Letter from Alice Walker to R. B. McKerrow

1 single sheet

2 Bankfield Lane, Southport.—Defends her theory that Hamlet contains a reference to Malchus.

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Transcript

2 Bankfield Lane, Southport.
28 November 1935

Dear Dr. McKerrow,

Thank you very much for your letter. I’m disappointed not to have convinced you about Malchus {1} as, quite apart from the aptness of the reference, it avoids the necessity for altering the 2Q. and F. readings as well as the awkward conjunction of a verb used only with agent nouns with a concrete noun. I can’t believe that Hamlet was ever intended to reply ‘This is skulking misdeed’ or that the difficulty can be got round by assuming (with Mr. Dover Wilson) {2} that an abstract noun can be substituted for a concrete in this context as there seems no warrant for this in malhecho or any other derivative from malefactum. However, as everyone seems quite satisfied with the emendation and its explanation, perhaps I’m wrong. I havn’t any idea where Shakespeare could have come across Malchus unless it was in Josephus {3} (unlikely I think), a Herod and Antipater play or some collection of exempla (perhaps under ‘revenge’ as the revenge motive enters). I can’t do anything about the last here (except get the L.L. collection of exempla with Sabellicus etc. in) {4} and the only relevant plays I can find in the Elizabethan Stage are too late or academic: {5} but I hope to convince you!

I was interested in what you had to say about dumb shows, but I think that as I know so little about them I had better leave the question to those who know more. I sympathise with your wish not to embroil yourself or the R.E.S. in interminable Hamlet arguments (is Hamlet the editor’s nightmare?). Unfortunately, I can’t resist the challenge of a problem.

Thank you very much for forwarding my enclosure and for bothering to answer my letter when you are so busy.

Yours sincerely,
Alice Walker.

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Typed, except the signature.

{1} Walker’s idea was that the phrase ‘Miching Malicho’ (Hamlet, III. ii. 137, spelt as in F1) refers to Malichus, or Malchus, the poisoner of Antipater, father of Herod the Great. She expounded the theory in the Modern Language Review the following October. It would appear from the present letter that she may previously have offered an article on the subject to the Review of English Studies.

{2} See What Happens in ‘Hamlet’ (1935), pp. 153–63, and the gloss in the New Cambridge Hamlet (1934), p. 277. In The Manuscript of Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’ and the Problems of its Transmission (2 vols., 1932) Dover Wilson was concerned only with the Q2 reading ‘munching’ (pp. 107, 248, 253).

{3} See Jewish War, Book i, sections 220–35 (Loeb ed., Books i–iii (1927), pp. 103–11).

{4} Marcus Antonius Coccius Sabellicus (1436?–1506) was the author of a history of the world entitled Enneades sive rapsodiae historiarum (Venice, 1504), in which the story of Antipater’s poisoning is related, from Josephus (see Ennead vi, Book ix). But the book Walker refers to is the London Library’s (‘L.L.’) copy of the compendium Exempla virtutum et vitiorum (Basel, 1555), compiled by Johannes Heroldt, which contains, among other things, Sabellicus’s Exemplorum libri decem, first published at Strasbourg in 1507. However, there appears to be no mention of Malchus in the latter work; the story certainly does not occur in the section entitled ‘De contemptu religionis et ultione’, where one would expect it to be. Probably Walker knew that Sabellicus had told the story but mistook the work in which it occurred. The only other works by Sabellicus in the London Library are 18th-century editions of books on Italian antiquities, namely De situ urbis Venetae and De vetustate Aquileiae et Fori Julii libri sex, both in Graevius’s Thesaurus antiquitatum et historiarum Italiae (Leiden, 1722), and Historiae rerum Venetarum ab urbe condita libri XVIII in Degl’istorici delle cose Veneziane (Venice, 1718–22). There is a reference to exempla in Walker’s article ‘The Reading of an Elizabethan: Some Sources of the Prose Pamphlets of Thomas Lodge’ (RES, viii. 268).

{5} See E. K Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols. (1923). The plays to which Walker refers probably include the academic play Herodes (iv. 375).