Greetings one and all. I raise my head above the parapet of my mansion for the first time. I have enjoyed reading many of the comments and the arguments and look forward to joining in at some time. But for the moment, I am appearing in The Sorcerer at Stewartby in Bedfordshire starting on 18th November and finishing on Saturday 22nd. Stewartby was famous last century for producing bricks for the building industry in Britain and before that was probably the Slough of Despond in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. I came back to G&S relatively late in life, but thoroughly enjoy it – the tunes are great and the humour is still relevant. I am glad to see and hear how well the colonials maintain such a high standard, putting much of what the home country does to shame, even if some of them don’t play cricket. Anyway, my first time in The Sorcerer and I am to play Sir Marmaduke and if anyone has anything to say about the pronunciation of Sangazure and even Pointdextre then I will be pleased to take it on board. However, I have a couple of points to make on my first reading of the part. That Aline is 7037 in direct line from Helen of Troy would seem to imply that, if we take each generation to be 20 years, then this would have been approximately 140,000 years ago, obviously absurd, but then that was pure hyperbole from WG. Most accounts assume about 1000 BC for the Troy debacle so then it would be about 150th in line. ‘Obleege’ caught my eye and I wondered if the role would then be filled with many other odd pronunciations, but there are none. I then considered that maybe it had something to do with ‘noblesse oblige’, which is pronounced in that way and in my searches came across this wonderful reference that seems to throw considerable light on the matter in that 200 years ago there was the change from the pronunciation of ‘obleege’ to oblige. Please note that there is a letter that looks like an ‘f’ which is an ‘s’. books.google.co.uk/books?id=PzVWAAAAYAAJ&pg=PT44&lpg=PT44&dq=obleege++pronunciation&source=bl&ots=l7Ydz_8JKr&sig=rWi_G3kRYN5zF4T0-Nqc1Sm09aw&hl=en&sa=X&ei=vvlfVMWcFYTBPLyLgNAH&ved=0CCEQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=obleege%20%20pronunciation&f=false Obviously, Sir Marmaduke revelled in being part of a bygone era, but whether your view agrees or disagrees will you obleege me with a copy of it, in clerkly manuscript, that I myself may use it on appropriate occasions?
Posted on: Mon, 10 Nov 2014 00:41:01 +0000
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