Nay, I'll have a starling shall be taught to speak; Nothing but 'Mortimer,' and give it him

European starlings were first brought to North America in 1890 by Shakespeare enthusiast Eugene Schieffelin who released 60 starlings into New York City's Central Park.
Schieffelin wanted to introduce all the birds mentioned in Shakespeare's plays to North America. As a result, European starlings are now among the continent’s most numerous songbirds.

baynard's castle/// their exits and their entrances

Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything

where rainbows spangled the gilded air…

The bright sapphires slipped between his fingers and lay on the sequined grass behind him, illuminating his footprints as he entered the dark vaults of the forest.















With a cry Sanders raised his jewelled arm. In the sunlight the faint nodes of the gemstones he had stuffed into his cuff shone in the tissues of his arm like inlaid stars















Then he realised why Thorensen had brought the jewels to the young woman, and why she had seized on them so eagerly. By some optical or electromagnetic freak, the intense focus of light within the stones simultaneously produced a compression of time, so that the discharge of light from the surfaces reversed the processes of crystallization. Perhaps it was this gift of time which accounted for the eternal appeal of precious gems, as well as of all baroque painting and architecture. Their intricate crests and cartouches, occupying more than their own volume of space, so seemed to contain a greater ambient time, providing that unmistakable premonition of immortality sensed within St Peter's or the palace at Nymphenburg.


ballard / the crystal world























Here, wear this jewel for me, 'tis my picture
Twelfth Night / III iv 228

up and down

visor effect

The armour, this 'costume' which no stage production will ever be able to leave out, we see it cover from head to foot, in Hamlet's eyes, the supposed body of the father. We do not know whether it is or is not part of the spectral apparition. This protection is rigorously problematic (problema is also a shield) for it prevents perception from deciding on the identity that it wraps so solidly in its carapace. The armour may be but the body of a real artifact, a kind of technical prosthesis, a body foreign to the spectral body that it dresses, dissimulates, and protects, masking even its identity. The armour lets one see nothing of the spectral body, but at the level of the head and beneath the visor, it permits the so-called father to see and to speak. Some slits are cut into it and adjusted so as to permit him to see without being seen, but to speak in order to be heard. The helmet, like the visor, did not merely offer protection: it topped off the coat of arms and indicated the chief's authority, like the blazon of his nobility.

Derrida/ Specters of Marx p8

pearl diving

…the transmissibility of the past had been replaced by its citability…
Full fathom five thy father lies; Of his bones are coral made; Those are pearls that were his eyes; Nothing of him that doth fade, But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange. Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell: Ding-dong. Hark! now I hear them — Ding-dong, bell.






Stradanus / pearl diving/ C16

your napkin is too little: let it alone

The scene in which Desdemona loses the precious handkerchief that is to testify so fatally against her is given thus in the Folio:

Oth: I have a pain upon my forehead, heere

Des: Why that's with watching, 'twill away againe.
Let me but binde it hard, within this houre
It will be well.

Oth: Your napkin is too little,
Let it alone: Come Ile go in with you

Exit

Des: I am very sorry that you are not well.

III/3

es spukt.

contacts between civilisations in time
A renaissance, on the other hand, is an encounter between a grown-up civilisation and the 'ghost' of its long-dead parent. Though common enough, it may be described as abnormal, and will be found on examination to be often unwholesome. The other encounter between present and past from which renaissances are to be distinguished is the phenomenon which we have called Archaism, using this word to denote attempted reversions to an earlier phase in the development of the society to which the archaizers themselves belong. Toynbee A Study of History, 1934-1961












SCENE V. Another part of the platform.
Enter GHOST and HAMLET

HAMLET
Where wilt thou lead me? speak; I'll go no further.

Ghost
Mark me.

horridly trick'd

'Tis not so; it begins with Pyrrhus:
'The rugged Pyrrhus, he whose sable arms,
Black as his purpose, did the night resemble
When he lay couched in the ominous horse,
Hath now this dread and black complexion smear'd
With heraldry more dismal. Head to foot
Now is be total gules, horridly trick'd
With blood of fathers, mothers, daughters, sons,
Bak'd and impasted with the parching streets,
That lend a tyrannous and a damned light
To their lord's murther. Roasted in wrath and fire,
And thus o'ersized with coagulate gore,
With eyes like carbuncles, the hellish Pyrrhus
Old grandsire Priam seeks.'
So, proceed you.

Hamlet, II.2.

The Man in the Moone, or a Discourse of a Voyage thither, by Domingo Gonsales,

It was now the season that these Birds were wont to take their flight away, as our Cuckoes and swallowes doe in Spaine towards the Autumne. They (as after I perceived) mindfull of their usuall voyage, even as I began to settle my selfe for the taking of them in, as it were with one consent, rose up, and having no other place higher to make toward, to my unspeakeable feare and amazement strooke bolt upright, and never did linne towring upward, and still upward, for the space, as I might guesse, of one whole hower, toward the end of which time, mee thought I might perceive them to labour lesse and lesse; till at length, O incredible thing, they forbare moving any thing at al ! and yet remained unmoveable, as stedfastly, as if they had beene upon so many perches; the Lines slacked; neither I, nor the Engine moved at all, but abode still as having no manner of weight.

I found then by this Experience that which no Philosopher ever dreamed of, to wit, that those things which wee call heavie, do not sinke toward the Center of the Earth, as their naturall place, but as drawen by a secret property of the Globe of the Earth, or rather some thing within the same, in like sort as the Loadstone draweth Iron, being within the compass of the beames attractive.

This appears to be the first description of the idea of weightlessness in space.
Francis Godwin (1562-1633) Bishop of Hereford and author of what is arguably the first science fiction story to be written in the English language.


MOON: All that I have to say is to tell you that the lanthorn is the moon, I, the man i' the moon, this thornbush my thornbush, and this dog my dog. (V.1.241-3)