Not enough research

Some writers don’t look deeply enough into the background.

Our town has a free monthly magazine, boasting regular columns on a variety of subjects.  Its main purpose seems to be promoting local businesses, especially restaurants, which is fine.  One doesn’t expect the deepest insight or the finest writing; that’s not what it’s for.  Still, a small article in a recent edition caused us to sigh.

The author discussed, briefly, the phrase “Ides of March.”  Some reference was made to it being a calendar date, but mostly he wrote about it having ominous connotations, attributing that fact to Shakespeare.  No doubt the reference is to the play Julius Caesar.  Well, for all that Shakespeare was an incomparable master of language, it’s not his phrase, and he can’t even take credit for publicizing it.

We’ve discussed elsewhere the construction of the Roman calendar, with kalends, ides and nones, and the idea of counting down instead of up.  That forms the background.  The story of Julius Caesar being warned by a soothsayer to be wary of the Ides of March comes to us from Plutarch, who wrote biographies of prominent Greeks and Romans of the ancient world about the year 100 AD.  Shakespeare no doubt got the story (and much else that appears in his plays) from one of the translations of Plutarch’s Lives that appeared with the Renaissance (the original was written in Greek).  Though Shakespeare could invent incidents or characters of his own as he saw fit, this one isn’t his.  It was already well-known among literate people.

We’re reminded of an article we saw in an in-flight magazine years ago.  The theme of the issue was the legend of King Arthur and Camelot, no doubt with a view to getting more passengers on flights to Britain.  Clearly a set of writers had been tasked with coming up with something on that theme.  One of them wrote that the only distinction Camelot really had was unusually fine weather, showing that all he or she knew about the legend came from the musical of that title, and worse: only one song from that musical.  It was a pretty breathtaking lack of research, even for a free publication.  We should have kept a copy just to put in our “bad examples” file.

We’re not saying that the “Ides of March” author needed to explain the Roman calendar or system of omens (though that might have been a good idea); his emphasis was on the use of the phrase in modern productions (TV, movies and books).  But a little more research would have kept him from making, and now propagating, an error.  Similarly, the “Camelot” author needn’t have traced the legend back to its misty origins, or followed its evolution from the twelfth century through the twentieth.  Even reading the most modern retelling we’re aware of, T. H. White’s The Once and Future King, would probably not have been quite reasonable as research for a short article (it’s a long book).  But at least sitting through the whole movie would have helped.