Comment on April 30th, 2007.
I can push that 1895 reference back to 1886. The Rhode Island Newport Mercury newspaper of May 22, 1886, had a column called "Business Common Sense." In that column, this paragraph appears:
"It is said limberger cheese is now adulterated. That man will next gild the lily and adorn the rose."
Comment on April 30th, 2007.
Excellent, thank you!
Comment on April 30th, 2007.
It may be that I have not immersed myself in G&S enough to know any different, but "Topsy-Turvy" is one of my favorite movies, one of the few that I'll get sucked into whenever I discover it on TV (seems like IFC plays it often).
Linguistic anachronisms aside, the other period details -- the telephone calls, the self-contained fountain pen -- are fine little lagniappes. I especially enjoy the "making-of" scenes, which are too seldom shown in movies about music or musicals. Sullivan rehearsing the orchestra, Gilbert staging the play with blocks, or rehearsing lines and choreography with the actors. Broadbent in particular is a joy to watch.
Comment on April 30th, 2007.
Oops -- sorry, poisted without signing in!
Comment on April 30th, 2007.
OK, so tdanaher found it dating back to 1886, and The Mikado (subject of the film) premiered in 1885. That doesn't strike me as too much of a stretch.
Topsy-Turvy is, of course, Leigh's most tightly constructed film.
Comment on April 30th, 2007.
Robert, are you suggesting that an American cite of "gild the lily" makes it likely that an English writer of the theater would have have made that mistake? I guess it's distantly possible, but it seems much more likely to me that Leigh didn't know any better.
I can't tell if your joking about Topsy-Turvy being tightly constructed, or if it is only so in comparison to Leigh's other movies. It's constructed like a bag of porridge.
Scott, I enjoy the acting of Topsy-Turvy a lot, especially Martin Savage. And the play-in-construction stuff is by far the most interesting stuff in the movie. The script, though, is just interminable to me, bulging with plot superfluities that don't adequately compensate in other ways, and often descending (especially in domestic scenes) into trite movieisms.
Comment on May 4th, 2007.
I love other Leigh films (esp. Naked, Life Is Sweet, and Secrets & Lies) but have not seen Topsy-Turvy, though I keep being told that it's great--yours being the only vote sort of against it I've seen. The point being that I can't comment on it, per se, except to say that Leigh films are not exactly known for their tight construction--his strengths lie elsewhere, I would think.
On the actual subject here, I think it's a mistake to assume that an appearance in print is the first appearance of a phrase. It strikes me as quite likely that the phrase "gild the lily" could easily have been in the air before appearing in print in the US in 1886. Nor does it necessarily seem to be a "mistake" that it's replaced the original. The newer phrase condenses the two phrases together, and by itself sounds better, I think, than does "paint the lily". As for its appearance in the movie, it could easily have been Leigh "not knowing any better" (and, yeah, Gilbert probably knew his Shakespeare), but it seems that it's not obvious that it's really an anachronism.
Comment on May 4th, 2007.
Richard, I haven't studied the subject, so I may well be talking through my hat, but my guess is that if a phrase can only be found in a couple newspapers in the late nineteenth century, and no books, that the phrase probably hadn't entered common parlance. Particulary it seems to me that if it wasn't being used in books at that time, it wasn't being used by educated people.
I think "paint the lily" is considerably more elegant than "gild the lily" -- though of course that's a matter of taste -- especially since I don't think you can gild a lily without the flower collapsing.
Comment on May 4th, 2007.
I wasn't being sarcastic. The other Mike Leigh movies I've seen, even the recent Vera Drake, which actually has a plot of sorts, are far more rambling and go off on various tangents emotionally and plotwise. I use the word "plot" in its loosest sense.
This is not a criticism--I love Mike Leigh's movies. They're all about character. Naked, in particular, totally blew me away.
But if you watched Bleak Moments after Topsy-Turvy you would feel as if you'd sat through a Tarkhovsky film after watching Die Hard with a Vengeance...
As for the topic in question: I'm all in favor of avoiding anachronisms, but I feel that particularly with language, there should be a little leeway. If the first definite cite for an expression is a year after the time in question, that strikes me as all right. After all, that's not evidence of absence. And although of course Britain and the U.S. are "two countries divided by a common language," there was certainly at least a bit of cultural interchange by then.
I mean, it's not like Gilbert is supposed to be saying, "Whoa, dude..." or something.
Comment on May 5th, 2007.
I love Mike Leigh, but "overlong and intermittently entertaining" is about right for Topsy-Turvy. It was also sentimental, while pretending to be tough-minded.
Comment on May 13th, 2007.
I enjoyed Topsy-Turvy immensely, but it dealt with a subject and mileu I'm pretty naturally attuned to. And the few Mike Leigh films I've seen (Secrets & Lies included) are definitely sentimental --not so much that it isn't compensated by their other strenghts. But it's been awhile since I've seen any, so I dunno. Anyway, I just wanted to mention it as, after just seeing Broadbent in Hot Fuzz, I was thinking about renting Topsy Turvy again and then saw this...now I'm curious to watch it and see just how baggy it feels (or doesn't)
In any event, while I'm certainly not sharp enough to have caught it on first viewing, even if there's an 1886 example of the "gild" substitution for "paint," I'm with Scraps -- it's not a mistake that W.S. Gilbert is likely to have made. From what I've read about him, the man was demanding and correct about details such as that, and would have been unlikely to parrot the popular mangling of a line of Shakespeare -- he wrote a burlesque of Hamlet (anticipating Stoppard by calling it Rosencrantz and Guildenstern) in '74, so he was unquestionably intimate with Shakespeare, even beyond having it in his background.
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