month's mind and chameleon living on air

In addition to beadsman, in the preceding essay, these words or phrases appear in the first two Acts of Shakespeare's TG. The purpose of this and the next essay is to tell us what these all mean. Let's begin with those changeable little things: the chameleons.

Chameleons--Who Subsist on Air

In TG 2.4 Valentine is talking with his beloved Silvia and a rich man, Thurio, who has designs on Silvia. After punning with Thurio for a while, Silvia sees that Thurio is getting angry. And so she says: "What angry, Sir Thurio. Do you change color?" Valentine, however, responds: "Give him leave, madam; he is a kind of chameleon." Then, Thurio says: "That have more mind to feed on your blood than live in your air." All commentators note at this point that Thurio is reflecting the commonly-held medieval belief that chameleons lived on air alone. Where did this belief arise?

Well, I repaired to the OED, and it had few helpful comments. It of course described the reptile known as the chameleon (which was spelled cameleon before the 20th century; though this insight won't help me in my Senior Spelling Bee). It also says, however, that "from their inanimate appearance, and power of existing for long periods without food, they were formerly supposed to live on air." But the word "formerly" isn't very helpful, either. Then, I discovered the following quotation from the 3rd century (CE) encyclopedist and collector of odd data, Solinus, whose work happend to have been translated into English in 1587, about three or four years before S penned TG. Solinus says:

"Throughout all Asia is great store of Chameleons, a fourefooted beast, in making like a Lucert, but that hee hath straight and somewhat longer legges growing to hys belly, with a long tayle wrythed rounde in, with hooked talants finely bowing inwarde, slowe of gate, and in a manner trayling like a Snayle: rough bodyed, wyth such a hyde as we see Crocodiles have, and hollowe eyes suncke farre into his head, which he never shadoweth with twinckling. Moreover, he beholdeth thinges not with rolling the bals of his eies, but with staring continually forward. His mouth is ever gaping, and serveth to do no kind of thing wyth all: for he neyther eateth meate, nor is nourished with drink but liveth onely by drawing in the ayre, which is hys onely sustenaucne. Hys colour is variable, and everie moment changable: so that to what thing he ever beleaneth himsefe, hee becommeth of the same colour."

Aha! But we can go back one step further. Solinus largely cribbed his work from Pliny the Elder, whose Natural History, written in 77 CE, just a few years before Pliny died in the Vesuvius eruption. Pliny may have been the first to note this characteristic. In Book VIII of his work, Pliny says:

"ipse celsus hianti semper ore solus animalium nec cibo nec potu alitur nec alio quam aëris alimento" (NH 8.122). The last phrase, the important one, is translated "Neither by food nor by any other drink other than air as food..."

But, even though Pliny antedated Solinus by two hundred years, Pliny wasn't translated into English until Holland's translation of 1603; thus it seems like S might have gotten his information from the later Latin source, which happened to be translated earlier into English. This, then, is the story of the chameleon who was said to eat the air...

Month's Mind

After Julia, the beloved of Proteus, had a long argument with her servant girl Lucetta because of the way the letter from Proteus was delivered to her, Julia, who has now shredded the letter, says: "I see you have a month's mind to them" (2.1.134). The note says: "strong desire." Even if this results in a "translation" that flows freely, we really don't know anything about this phrase "month's mind" and why it should mean "strong desire." The OED informs us that it is derived from post-classical Latin dies mensis or dies mensis obitus, meaning a month after death. Well, in the Roman Catholic Church in England, Scotland and Ireland during the late Middle Ages, the "month's mind" was a commemoration of a deceased person by the celebration of a requiem mass on a day one month from the date of death or funeral. The earliest reference we have is from a collection of Sussex wills of 1466-67 where a person expresses his last wish as follows: "I will have X torchies...to brenne about me at my deth and monethese mynde." But people could require all kinds of things to be done at month's mind.

For example, one Thomas Windsor, who died in 1479 ordered that "on my moneth's minde there be a hundred children within the age of sixteen years, to say for my soul." He also wanted candles to be burned before the cross of the parish church and twenty priests, who would be paid by his executors, to sing various songs and hymns in his memory.

Once this usage had become established, however, the term could become loosed from its original context and come to be used in synonymously with the word "mind," when that latter word is used with the meaning of "inclination, will or desire" ("I have half a mind to do X before she comes tonight."). Lyly, one of S's predecessors in writing plays, whom S no doubt read, has this line from 1580, about a decade before TG was written: "Determining to ende his life in Athens, although he had a monethes minde to England." So, S picked up on a usage which wasn't that common at the time to refer simply to a desire, and used it here in the conversation between Julia and Lucetta.

Don't you love the way that the language, in this instance, began with a picture and then evolved into an abstraction? Language doesn't always work that way--witness my argument in the beadsman article--but it evidently did this here. Alas, however, the figurative use of month's mind dropped out of use in the 19th century, and an occasional 20th century appearance has failed to resuscitate it (from 1956:"I've got a months' mind to have you keel-hauled"). But we have lost almost all our historically rich words. We don't speak of buildings being grimthorped or quislings who betray causes or Potemkin villages of opposition or things of that nature. Maybe we should bring back a few, beginning with "month's mind." Any takers?

2012