Orlando (38 page)

26.
Je crois avoir fait… la sienne
: Sasha’s French here was supplied by Vita who, like Orlando, was bilingual in French and English. She was apparently translating Woolf’s phrases, ‘I think I met a gentle man of your family in Poland last summer’, and ‘The ladies of the English Court ravish me with their beauty. Never have I seen so graceful a lady as your Queen or so fine a head dress as she wears.’ Vita also supplied the translation of ‘rigged up like a Maypole’ (see p. 28), as well as a number of other phrases that Woolf did not finally use (
Letters of Vita,
26 April 1928, p. 284).

27.
George Villiers
: (1592–1628) was King James’s favourite, later made Duke of Buckingham.

28.
the Tower… Royal Exchange
: the Yeomen of the Guard, known as
‘Beefeaters’, guard the Tower and wear a distinctive red Tudor uniform. The Temple Bar, the gate between Westminster and the old City of London, was topped with iron spikes, on which the heads of executed rebels were displayed. The Royal Exchange was built as a money market in 1564, on the corner of Threadneedle Street in the City.

29.
a white Russian fox
: Nigel Nicolson suggests that this refers to the Russian bear-cub given to Vita by Ivan Hay when she was nineteen; it had to be put down (
Vita,
p. 41). Orlando had earlier compared Sasha to ‘a fox in the snow’ (p. 26). Virginia later described Violet Trefusis (whom she did not meet until 1932) as ‘like a fox cub, all scent and seduction’ (19 January 1941,
Letters,
VI, p. 462).

30.
the arras… at home
: Vita wrote of the Leicester Gallery that ‘the tapestry sways, and the figures on it undulate and seem to come alive (
Knole,
pp. 14–16); but Nicolson identifies this with the tapestry in the Venetian Ambassador’s room.

31.
the philosopher is right
: Robert Burton takes this view in his
Anatomy of Melancholy
(1621), but as an Anglican he would have disapproved of the Anabaptists, a radical sect who aroused great fear since they did not believe in the sacraments (including baptism) and were permitted to conform outwardly.

32.
palanquin
: a canopy.

33.
sennight
: in seven days’ time (archaic).

34.
the cross of St. Paul’s
: a deliberate anachronism – old St Paul’s had a square tower that was burnt down in the fire of London of 1666. It was rebuilt with a dome and cross by Christopher Wren (see also pp. 38, 117 and 157).

35.
stags… bucket
: this happened at Knole once according to Nicolson. Vita described a stag wandering into the banqueting-hall on one occasion during the summer when the doors were left open (
Knole,
p. 4).

36.
cony catchers
: Elizabethan slang for ‘confidence tricksters’ (literally, rabbit catchers).

37.
Punch and Judy show
: a traditional children’s show performed with glove-puppets in a small booth, in which Punch first beats, then kills, his wife Judy. Orlando is watching a street performance of Shakespeare’s
Othello
(as the index reference shows).

38.
Methinks … should yawn: Othello,
V. ii. 99–101; perhaps with an allusion to the total eclipse of the sun on 29 June 1927 which the
Woolfs and Vita and Harold Nicolson travelled up to Richmond in North Yorkshire to see (30 June 1927,
Diary,
III, pp. 142–4), and which she also wrote of in ‘The Sun and the Fish’ (
CE,
IV, pp. 178–83).

39.
Jour de ma vie!
: ‘Day of my life’, the Sackville family motto, derived from the Battle of Crécy (1346) where one of the family had fought (Nicolson).

40.
Drake, Hawkins, and Grenville
: heroes of Elizabeth’s naval wars against the Spanish.

41.
the Irish rebels
: the English government under Elizabeth and James made a series of attempts to colonize Ireland. Lands in Donegal and Tyrone had been declared forfeit in December 1607, and later in 1608 a further rebellion broke out. In the MS, the old nobleman is exceptional among those dying in the flood; for the rest, ‘Nobody of very high birth seemed to be included … as if the thaw had been the work of these rebels… which seemed to show that the upper sort had received warning & made for safety.’

42.
standing out to sea
: sailing out to sea.

1.
The biographer… truth
: at much the same time as Woolf began writing
Orlando
she completed an essay on ‘The New Biography’ (
CE,
IV, pp. 229–35), in part a review of Harold Nicolson’s
Some People.
It opens with a quotation from Sir Sidney Lee: ‘The aim of biography is the truthful transmission of personality.’ Woolf goes on to argue that truth and personality are opposed, and that though truth is required in a biography it does not combine easily or comfortably with fiction or with the depiction of inner life. Themes from this essay are taken up again on p. 55.

2.
of what nature life?
: Orlando’s seven-day sleep, a figure for oblivion or death, prepares us for his Jacobean preoccupation with ‘the skull beneath the skin’, on display in this chapter, as well as for other unexpected developments.

3.
Mrs. Grimsditch
: all the names listed here are taken from the third Lord Dorset’s catalogue of his household between 1613 and 1624 (
Knole,
pp. 78–81). At the parlour table are listed (among others), Mrs Field, Mrs Grimsditch, Mrs Stewkly, Mr Dupper, Chaplain; in the Nursery, Nurse Carpenter; at the Laundry Maids’ Table, Mrs
Judith Simpton, Faith Husband and Grace Robinson, a Blacka moor.

4.
the crypt where his ancestors lay
: the crypt of Orlando’s ancestors lies beneath the house, symbolizing an awareness of death below or behind all human existence and prompting Orlando to a Hamletlike soliloquy over the old bones. The Sackville family vault is not actually at Knole but at Withyham parish church. The Jacobean diarist Anne Clifford recorded visiting ‘my Lord Treasurer’s tomb’ there and returning in tears. Vita added, ‘I have been down into that vault myself, and it is not a cheerful expedition. In a small, dark cave underground, beneath the church, among grey veils of cobwebs, the coffins of the Sackvilles are stacked on shelves…’ (
Knole,
p. 71.)

5.
Thomas Browne
: (1605–82), a Norwich doctor famous for his elo quent Latinate prose (cf. ‘the delicate articulation of one of the doctor’s longest and most marvellously contorted cogitations’, p. 52).
Hydriotaphia, or Urn Burial
(1658) is a meditation on death, time and eternity. According to
Knole
(p. 105), Richard Sackville, third Earl of Dorset, recommended Browne’s
Religio Medici
to Sir Kenelm Digby when the latter was imprisoned during the Civil War. Digby was so impressed with the book that he sent back a long letter of his
Observations
on it to Lord Dorset. Woolf had always admired Browne’s prose (see
Essays,
III, pp. 153–9, 368–71).

6.
asphodel
: see Chapter I, Note 2.

7.
every gift… beaten gold
: the four acres have now become nine; this catalogue of Orlando’s possessions suggests the 1624 household inventory (see
Knole,
pp. 95–6; and Note 35, below).

8.
a great inlaid cabinet… cedar wood
: this cabinet belonged to Vita, and was where she kept all her most intimate letters. It may be what Virginia had in mind when she asked Vita, ‘Will this letter go into the cupboard?’ (30 October 1927,
Letters,
III, p. 434). Orlando’s prolific writings parallel those of Vita, both as a child and a young woman (
Vita,
pp. 25–6, 33). The play printed by John Ball suggests Vita’s
Chatterton,
privately printed at Sevenoaks in 1909 (Nicolson). Orlando’s poem ‘The Oak Tree’, whose writing extends throughout the book, corresponds to Vita’s long poem
The Land
(see Chapter I, Note 9).

9.
of rainbow and granite
: this passage closely echoes Woolf’s essay ‘The
New Biography’ (see above, Chapter II, Note i) in its distinction between ‘truth as something of granite-like solidity and personality as something of rainbow-like intangibility’. The essay ends with a reference to Harold Nicolson’s ‘mixture of biography and autobio graphy, of fact and fiction, of Lord Curzon’s trousers and Miss Plimsoll’s nose…’ The ‘even now (the first of November, 1927)’ is likely to have been the actual date of composition since, according to the MS, she began Chapter II on 29 October.
Orlando
was begun on 8 October 1927 and completed on 17 March 1928 (see
Diary,
III, pp. 161, 176;
Letters,
III, pp. 428, 474).

10.
This is the face… Twitchett’s room
: the face is Shakespeare’s (see Chapter I, Note II). Twitchett is Orlando’s mother’s waiting maid (see p. 12).

11.
how difficult it is for a nobleman to he a writer
: in
Knole
(p. 32) Vita quoted Edmund Gosse to the effect that Thomas Sackville was ‘a born poet… diverted from poetry by the pursuits of statesman ship’, and thus ‘a very good instance of the disadvantage of fine birth to a poet’. Woolf told Vita’s cousin Edward Sackville-West, ‘How no aristocrat can write a book’ (Letter to Vita, 17 February 1926,
Letters,
III, p. 241), and in a slightly later essay, ‘The Niece of an Earl’, made the related point that ‘It is from the middle class that writers spring’ (
CE,
I, p. 222).

12.
shawms… had burst in
: Woolf may be thinking of the classical myth, according to which the head of the poet Orpheus was torn from his shoulders by a ‘horrid rout’ of frenzied women, perhaps with a distant echo of Milton’s
Lycidas,
where love is also a threat to poetic achievement. Shawms are antique wind instruments.

13.
Sir Boris… the Spaniard
: Woolf here echoes the ‘long monotonous list of Sir Jordans, Sir Andrews, Sir Edwards, Sir Richards’ (
Knole,
p. 30).

14.
the vales of Tempe
: in Greece, close to Mount Olympus, and praised for their beauty in classical poetry.

15.
Giles Isham of Norfolk
: Sir Gyles Isham (1903–76) was Woolf’s second cousin, son of her cousin Millicent (nee Halford Vaughan). On going down from Oxford in 1926, he became a Shakespearean actor.

16.
the glories of blood and state
: the opening lines of James Shirley’s best-known poem, from his play
The Contention of Ajax and Ulysses
(1659):

The glories of our blood and state
Are shadows, not substantial things.

17.
Lady Winchilsea’s fan
: Ann Finch, Countess of Winchilsea (1661–1720), wrote poems, some of which Woolf discusses in Chapter IV of
A Room of One’s Own
(1928; Penguin Books, 1945). This phrase echoes the title of Wilde’s play,
Lady Windermere’s Fan
(1892).

18.
Nicholas Greene of Clifford’s Inn
: an imaginary writer, supposed to live in a small court off Fleet Street (where Virginia and Leonard had lived in the year following their marriage). Greene is partly based on the Elizabethan hack writer, pamphleteer, poet and play wright, Robert Greene (1558–92), notorious for his envy of Shake speare, whom he denounced as ‘an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers’. He later reappeared in Chapter III of
A Room of One’s Own
as the seducer of Shakespeare’s (imaginary) sister Judith: ‘at last Nick Greene the actor-manager took pity on her; she found herself with child by that gentleman and so… killed herself one winter’s night…’

19.
Flodden…Agincourt
: the English defeated the Scots at the Battle of Flodden (1513), and had defeated the French at Agincourt a century earlier (1415).

20.
Malmsey
: a sweet Madeira wine.

21.
Shakespeare… Donne
: Orlando’s heroes are the major dramatists and poets of his day. John Donne, the love poet and Dean of St Paul’s, according to Izaac Walton, sometimes preached in the Chapel at Knole, and left Lord Dorset several pictures in his will (
Knole,
4th edn, 1958, pp. 32, 69). The dramatist Ben Jonson had his portrait in the Poets’ Parlour and is said to have enjoyed the patronage of Richard Sackville, third Earl of Dorset (1589–1624) (
Knole,
p. 59). For Browne, see above, Note 5.

22.
La Gloire
: glory.

23.
Cock Tavern in Fleet Street
: setting for a scandalous scene in which Charles Sackville, sixth Earl of Dorset, was involved (
Knole,
p. 117). Leonard and Virginia used to dine there when they lived round the corner at Clifford’s Inn.

24.
Cicero
: Roman statesman (106–43
BC
) whose prose style was much admired and imitated during the Renaissance.

25.
three hundred years ago
: in the MS, a passage follows insisting that Greene’s ‘impure’ sayings have had to be suppressed in the interests
of Modesty (who appears again in the masque in Chapter III), even though Greene had a letter from Shakespeare relating the true story of Mr W.H. and the dark lady, which he ‘gave to Orlando as a pleasant curiosity and a keepsake’, but which had to be burnt. The MS adds, ‘No one of British blood will censure us for the course we took.’

26.
a teg from a ewe
: a two-year-old (male) sheep from a female.

27.
the finest elk-hounds
: Vita kept elk-hounds (she inherited Canute from her father – see p. 169); one hound did have puppies under the dinner table at Long Barn, where Vita was then living (Nicolson). Like Vita, Orlando turned to dogs and gardening for consolation.

28.
Time passed
: Woolf here mocks the middle section, ‘Time Passes’, of her previous novel,
To the Lighthouse
(1927). The meditation on time that follows gives light-hearted expression to a serious artistic problem for the novelist.