[59] mopping and mowing: Making facial expressions like grimacing and pouting. Albert’s performance recalls Tom o’Bedlam’s description of the fiend “Flibbertigibbet, of mopping and mowing, who since possesses chambermaids and waiting-women” (King Lear, IV.i), a description later echoed in Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market”: “Mopping and mowing, / Full of airs and graces, / Pulling wry faces” (lines 336–38).

  [60] Hoppety, jiggety: A phrase akin to the reduplicative compound words characteristic of nursery rhymes, such as “Higgledy piggledy, / My black hen.” Other nursery rhymes folded into Albert’s lines are “In and out the windows” and “Hickory, dickory, dock.”

  [60] dandelion clock: A game explained in the story “Dandelion Clock” by Juliana Horatia Ewing (1841–1885), one of England’s most popular writers of children’s literature: “You blow till the seed is all blown away, and you count each of the puffs—an hour to a puff.” The story concerns a little boy who wonders why such “fairy clocks” tell different times for different people.

  [61] a scene from a play: Perhaps anticipating Tom Stoppard’s riotous fifteen-minute and then two-minute Hamlet (Dogg’s Hamlet, 1979), Miss La Trobe offers a condensation of all Shakespeare and Elizabethan drama in the space of approximately half an hour. A false Duke (who turns against his brother) can be found in bother You Like It and The Tempest; a girl disguised as a boy figures in the plots of As You Like It, Twelfth Night, and Cymbeline; in Twelfth Night, a brother and sister identify themselves to each other by divulging that each had a father with a mole on his brow, and in Cymbeline the king’s daughter hides for safety in a cave and the identity of her long-lost brother, stolen in infancy, is at the end proven by a mole on his neck; the aged crone recalls both Juliet’s nurse and the “aged beldame” in Keats’s “The Eve of St Agnes,” a poem much patterned on Romeo and Juliet, but with a happier ending for the lovers. A hilarious pastiche, this scene in the pageant nevertheless encompasses most of the standard plot elements in comedy and romance, with traces of the histories and tragedies, as evident in the quotations below.

  [61] Play out the play: Falstaff’s line in Henry IV, part I, challenging Prince Hal to follow through to the end of an argument (II.iv). The figurative meaning is to carry on in the face of all odds, as notably (combined with a near-quotation from Macbeth), in Byron’s Don Juan: “Life’s a poor player,”—then “play out the play, / Ye villains!” (canto n, stanza 86, lines 684–85).

  [62] Yet the cock did crow ere he left me—: In act I, scene i of Hamlet, the apparition of Hamlet’s father is about to speak when the cock crows, causing the ghost to disappear. Horatio and Marcellus discuss the belief that the crowing of the cock, the “bird of dawning,” nullifies the power of fairies, witches, and spirits. In Eliot’s The Waste Land, a cock crows, “Co co rico co co rico,” just before a promising “gust / Bringing rain” (lines 392–95). Associations of guilt with the moment before dawn stem from Peter’s thrice-uttered denial of Christ (Matthew 26:34).

  [62] There is little blood in this arm: The bloody hands above, and the guilty scene, prompt associations with Lady Macbeth’s “Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?” (Macbeth, V.i)

  [63] The plot was only there to beget emotion: In “On Re-Reading Novels,” Woolf rejects Percy Lubbock’s formalist approach to the structure of a novel, arguing that a work of literature “is not form which you see, but emotion which you feel,” and that the accumulation of detail, in building up impressions, leads the reader to moments of emotional understanding (Essays 3: 340).

  [63] Look where she comes!: “Lo where she comes . . . /. . Clad all in white, that seems a virgin best” (Spenser, “Epithalamion”).

  [63] pearl in night’s black ear: Romeo’s response on first sight of Juliet: “It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night / As a rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear” (Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, I.v).

  [64] Peace, let her pass: Echoing Kent’s words on the death of King Lear: “O, let him pass! He hates him / That would upon the rack of this tough world / Stretch him out longer” (Lear, V.iii).

  [64] Love. Hate. Peace. Three emotions: Earlier versions of the novel show Woolf experimenting with different configurations of these emotions: love, hate, fear (PH 103); love, sorrow, fear (PH 104); love, hate, anguish (PH 329); and sometimes with four emotions: love, hate, fear, sorrow (PH 105), and love, hate, anguish, peace (PH 330). The implication is that more important than the specific emotions named is her plan to isolate a few basic emotions to suggest a pervasive and continuous rhythm underlying all life. Her final choice of the “three-fold ply” of emotion finds an echo in the frequent repetition of three words (“chuff, chuff, chuff”; “tapping, tapping, tapping”). In similar rhythmic fashion, Sir Thomas Browne’s The Garden of Cyrus (1658)—a work Woolf knew well—traces occurrences of quincuncial patterns (patterns of five) in gardens and nature to evidence the universe’s underlying pattern.

  [64] Of her frailty, let nothing now remembered be: Having killed Lord Henry Percy (Hotspur) in battle, Prince Hal absolves him of his guilt: “Adieu, and take thy praise with thee to heaven! / Thy ignominy sleep with thee in the grave, / But not remembered in thy epitaph” (Henry IV, part I, V.iv).

  [64] Call for the robin redbreast and the wren: The dirge Cornelia distractedly sings (in close parallel with Ophelia) for her dead son, Marcello, in John Webster’s tragedy The White Devil (1612; V.iv). The robin and the wren are called on to bring leaves and flowers to cover the grave; the song continues: “But keep the wolf far thence, that’s foe to men, / For with his nails he’ll dig them up again” (lines 110–1). Compare lines 74–75 in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.

  [64] Cover the corpse: Recalling words spoken over the dead body of the duchess in John Webster’s tragedy The Duchess of Malfi: “Cover her face. Mine eyes dazzle” (IV.ii.253).

  [64] waft you to your slumber: Horatio’s words over Hamlet’s dead body: “Good night, sweet prince, / And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest” (Hamlet, V.ii.351).

  [64] Lead on the dance!: The traditional ending of a comedy.

  [64] a mellay; a medley: The shift in connotation from mellay or mêlée (suggesting confusion, chaos, and conflict) to medley (indicative of multiplicity, heterogeneity, and interrelation) identifies a crux of the pageant, of the novel, of life. Do the mixed styles and diversity of sources and voices create a muddle or a new hybrid form? A similar dilemma is posed by another likely intertext, Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem “The Princess, A Medley.”

  [65] skimble-skamble: A reduplicative compound (like “Hoppety, jiggety”), derived from scamble, meaning rambling or foolish. The first recorded use is Hotspur’s railing against fancy and superstition in Henry IV, part I: “such a deal of skimble-skamble stuff” (III.i.153). In the same month that Woolf began the first typescript of this novel, she referred to her own “rather skimble skamble works” (Diary 5: 134).

  [67] Follow, follow, follow: Repetitions of follow occur in many folk songs, but Woolf’s continuing emphasis on three associates the phrase most specifically with a three-part round, or “catch,” by the seventeenth-century poet John Hilton. Catches were notable for off-color double entendres or for bitter satire, so that during the nineteenth century most were revised to be more suitable for children’s singing. By Woolf’s time, the most common words for Hilton’s round were: part 1, “Come, follow, follow, follow, / Follow, follow, follow me”; part 2, “Whither shall I follow, follow, follow, / Whither shall I follow, follow thee?”; part 3, “To the greenwood, to the greenwood, / To the greenwood, greenwood tree.” The original lines for part 3, however, were “To the gallow, gallow tree.”

  [67] Red Indians the game was: Allusions in these mystifying comments have not been identified. The oddity of “a note wrapped up in a pebble” may be explained by the usage of pebble as a short form for pebble-leather—leather with a mottled appearance produced by pebbling. But if there are specific allusions here, they are again likely multiple and syncretic; holograph versions of this passage include the details of “the beat of the tom-tom in India” and “the reed with the message . . . rolled round a pebble, shot over the fort” (PH 335; 484–85).

  [68] made them see: A number of writers have articulated their task in this way, emphasizing, too, the active role the reader/viewer performs in seeing. Robert Browning grouped artists into three different gradations of imparted vision: “For the worst of us to say they so have seen; / For the better, what it was they saw; the best / Impart the gift of seeing to the rest” (Sordello 3.866–68). In his preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” Joseph Conrad similarly claimed that his task was “to make you hear, to make you feel . . . before all, to make you see!” And in a fictionalized conversation between two writers in Virginia Woolf’s essay “Walter Sickert,” one of the writers says, “The novelist after all wants to make us see” (The Captain’s Death Bed and Other Essays [New York: Harcourt, 1950], 198). The complexities of this task for the modernist writer, when both seeing and the seen are fraught with uncertainty, belie the seeming simplicity of the statement.

  [69] a snake . . . choked with a toad in its mouth: This haunting image has been linked to an incident Woolf described on September 4, 1935: “We saw a snake eating a toad: it had half the toad in, half out; gave a suck now & then. The toad slowly disappearing. L. poked its tail; the snake was sick of the crushed toad” (Diary 4: 338). The entry, which proceeds to Woolf’s dreaming of men committing suicide, also records intense political discussion of Mussolini’s threatened invasion of Abyssinia (Ethiopia)—a concern Woolf wrote was disrupting her sleep (Letters 5: 428). The League of Nations’ inability to avert this crisis was a major factor in the downfall of the League and of the escalation of tensions leading to a European war. Some knowledge of Woolf’s thoughts seems implicit in Vita Sackville-West’s column in the New Statesman and Nation, “Country Notes,” for July 20, 1940, which comments on the “permanence and recurrence” of nature as a “calming and reassuring thought” in wartime, and yet draws attention to nature’s cruelty as well. Sackville-West describes a “small horrifying sight”: an injured frog on the garden path and, issuing from a hole in the wall, “a beautiful snake full of venom, that drew the frog towards him, terrified and fascinated by the superior power.” Sackville-West continues, “The frog remained frozen as a bas-relief, his body flattened in terror against the wall. The snake put out his dangerous, his fanged head, alive, spiteful, menacing. He did not dare to send out the length of his lithe body because of my presence there.” Stories of snake-frog encounters are relatively common, but what is striking in these descriptions is the powerful symbolic reading—“a psychological effect,” Sackville-West posits, “of wartime” (62).

  [70] Lathom: A village in Lancashire, England, notable for the vast lands of the Manor of Lathom recorded in the Domesday Book.

  [70–71] They come every year . . . From Africa: The migration of swallows to southern Europe and Africa is a persistent theme in Gilbert White’s The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, in the County of Southampton (1789), a work that Woolf reviewed in 1939. Like Cowper, White is notable for his intense focus on nature and on a small rural community, yet White’s fascination with migratory patterns imparts a global dimension to his otherwise intensely local history. Woolf also notes White’s sensitivity to “unsought memories that come of their own accord” and his propensity for making the same comments every year (“White’s ‘Selborne,’” The Captain’s Death Bed and Other Essays [New York: Harcourt, 1950], 18).

  [71] the wishing well, where the washer-woman’s little boy . . . dropped a pin: An ancient custom, spread throughout Ireland, Great Britain, and Europe, of dropping pins into holy wells (or inserting pins or nails into sacred trees) to achieve the granting of some prayer or wish. The origins of the practice are buried in early folklore, but the ritual implies an offering to a god or presiding spirit.

  [72] Canada, not India: In 1939, both countries were asserting increasing independence from England, although the situation in India was more turbulent and antagonistic. The visit of King George VI and his consort, Queen Elizabeth, to Canada and the United States was intended, from the British side, to consolidate support in the anticipated European war, but as the New Statesman and Nation warned, the more immediate result was to reinforce developing ideas of Canadian identity, since the domestic focus was on loyalty to the king of Canada, rather than to the British Empire (“A London Diary,” June 17, 1939: 927). In any event, Canada followed closely on the heels of Britain in declaring war.

  [72] the Duke of Windsor: Determined to marry Mrs. Wallis Simpson, a twice-divorced American with two previous husbands still living, Edward VIII abdicated on December 11, 1936, before the official coronation could take place, and was given the title Duke of Windsor. Enjoying the gossip, and perhaps the affront to respectability, Woolf joked, “If you ask me would I rather meet Einstein or the Prince of Wales [as he had been known], I plump for the Prince without hesitation” (“Am I a Snob?,” Moments of Being 208).

  [72–73] the neck was broad as a pillar, against an arum lily: Isa’s appearance continues to link her with nineteenth-century aestheticism: A swanlike, or pillarlike, neck is a characteristic feature in the Pre-Raphaelite painting of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, whose ideal of female beauty, typified in Jane Morris, contrasted strongly with the blond, fragile, corseted female form made desirable by Victorian convention. Rossetti also used the lily as a sexual/sacred symbol connected with the Virgin Mary, and the arum lily, though properly not a lily, is a symbol of purity, while highly sexual (and hermaphrodite) in appearance. The phrase Tower of Ivory perplexes the young Stephen Dedalus with similarly mixed connotations, as an epithet applied to the Virgin Mary (and deriving from the Song of Solomon), but which for Stephen attaches as well to his emerging fascination with the female body. The sexual/sacred overtones are united in Spenser’s “Epithalamion,” in which a litany of the bride’s beauties includes “Her snowie neck lyke to a marble towre” (177).

  [73] the greenhouse, the pig sty, or the stable: Book III of Cowper’s “The Task” includes a long passage on the greenhouse (“Who loves a garden loves a greenhouse too”), following what must be the first extended poetic description of a manure pile, a composting “hotbed” used to generate heat for growing cucumbers in cold weather (“The stable yields a stercoraceous heap”). Cowper implies the interrelatedness of functions—a theme pertinent to Between the Acts.

  [75] Swallow, my sister, O sister swallow: Bart quotes, and continues to quote, from Algernon Charles Swinburne’s poem “Itylus,” thus weaving together the repeated references to swallows and nightingales and the pervasive theme of rape. According to the Greek myth as told by Ovid in his Metamorphoses, Tereus, King of Thrace, raped his wife’s sister, Philomela, and to ensure her silence cut out her tongue. But Philomela wove her story into a tapestry to let her sister, Procne, know the truth. In revenge, Procne killed her son, Itylus, and fed him to the unsuspecting Tereus and the two sisters were then transformed into birds—Procne into a swallow and Philomela into a nightingale—to enable their escape. Swinburne’s poem is Philomela’s elegiac lament—a contrast to the sister swallow’s ability to follow the natural cycle by welcoming the spring and later migrating south. The myth has supplied the subject or an informing trope for numerous works of literature, painting, and music—perhaps most notably among the modernists, in T. S. Eliot’s “Sweeney among the Nightingales” and The Waste Land.

  [76] The idiot? . . . in the tradition: A reference to the humble fool of folk festivals or mummer’s plays, not to the jester or court fool, from whom Shakespeare’s fools derive. The spring festival plays are understood to be reenactments of the death and rebirth of the year, and the fool, who may wear a hood with ass’s ears, suggesting an animal disguise, is often killed and then resurrected.

  [76] what his left hand was doing: Presumably either stimulating himself or trying to control an erection. Left-handedness has traditionally been associated with what falls outside the norm.

  [77] Old Man’s Beard: The description of a bitter herb with pungent leaves indicates the plant is actually southernwood or old man (a variety of wormwood) rather than old man’s beard (a wild clematis, with mildly almond-scented flowers). Both plants occur in poems by Edward Thomas (1878–1917), but it is his poem “Old Man” (rather than “Lob,” which mentions old man’s beard) that most connects with Isa’s mood. The poet muses on the double and seemingly paradoxical names of the herb—“Old Man, or Lad’s-love”—both perhaps deriving from the folkloric belief that it could heighten male virility, or that rubbing it on the face could promote the growth of a beard. The herb’s scent tantalizes the poem’s speaker with elusive but powerful memories: “I, too, [like his daughter] often shrivel the grey shreds, / Sniff them and think and sniff again and try / Once more to think what it is I am remembering, / . . . / I have mislaid the key” (26–28, 230). The botanical name for southernwood, Artemisia abrotanum, indicates it belongs to the genus Artemisia—named for Artemis, the Greek goddess whose name, in Roman myth, is Cynthia or Diana.

  [79] Books: the treasured life-blood of immortal spirits. Poets; the legislators of mankind: Bart is thinking of two of the most memorable testimonies to the value of the written word: John Milton’s Areopagitica (1644), with its arguments against censorship: “Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye. . . . a good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit”; and P. B. Shelley’s “A Defence of Poetry” (1821), which ends, “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”