In a word

All’s well? Yes and no. No, being the operative word.

In his address to the Royal Shakespeare Company on his State visit to the UK last April, President Michael D Higgins quoted Václav Havel:

“Words are a mysterious, ambiguous, ambivalent, and perfidious phenomenon. They are capable of being rays of light in a realm of darkness. . . They are equally capable of being lethal arrows. Worst of all, at times they can be the one and the other. And even both at once!”

So true. Such treacherous things, words.

You may remember I quoted from that wonderful speech of the President’s in this column last month (available at http://www.president.ie/speeches/speech-by-michael-d-higgins-president-of-ireland-at-the-royal-shakespeare-company-stratford-upon-avon/).

I drew attention to where he said: "In Henry IV, Act i., Scene 4, Pistol responds to a greeting in French with what to the groundlings, and no doubt their betters, would have sounded like gibberish. He employs the phrase 'Caleno o custure me'.This apparent nonsense phrase is a phonetic rendition of the Irish 'Cailín ó cois Siúire mé', 'I am a girl from the banks of the Suir.'

Except that it wasn't Henry IV. It was Henry V! Woe to me.

He also said: "The tune to this Irish folksong appears in the The Virginal of Queen Elizabeth the First, most likely conveyed to her by Edmund Spenser. Alfred Perceval Graves, son of the Bishop of Limerick wrote new words for the tune. . ."

Which came out as “Edmund Spenser Alfred Perceval Graves”, in this column. Woe is me.

My thanks to all who drew these errors to my attention. Not least the man who responded: “I blame Shakespere. He should have put it where you said, but as there was no such scene in H. IV, so he put it in H. V instead!”

He was replying to an earlier email from me where I said I had quoted correctly but that “the reference was wrong in the original (meaning the President’s speech)”.

Henry V is famous for another reason. It features the only known Irish character in Shapespeare, Captain Macmorris who, at Act 3 Sc 2 asks the perennial question "what ish my nation?"

In fact he said: “Of my nation! What ish my nation? Ish a villain, and a bastard, and a knave, and a rascal. What ish my nation? Who talks of my nation?”

It seems at times we talk of little else on this island. No?

inaword@irishtimes.com