Mind your language
The celeb Angelina Jolie is pregnant and was photographed last week with a tattoo around the growing bump that read, Quod me nutrit me destruit — What feeds me destroys me. A strange motto in the circs, you might think. Not since David Beckham had Ut amem et foveam tattooed on his arm has there been such excitement in the Latin tattooist community. Where did Miss Jolie’s tag come from?
If it was a classical line it would be easily traceable — my more learned neighbour Dr Peter Jones would have known it just like that. I see in a letter to the Daily Telegraph last Saturday that he mentioned a line in a Shakespeare sonnet that describes love as ‘consumed with that which it was nourished by’. It is also common knowledge that the Latin line appeared on a portrait, said in a hopeful moment by the fellows of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, to be that of Christopher Marlowe, after it was discovered behind a gas fire in 1952. That picture was dated 1585.
The same thought is in Shakespeare’s Pericles (II.ii.33), where six knights pass in triumph, bearing shields with devices and mottoes or ‘words’. The fourth knight has an emblem: A burning torch that’s turned upside-down; The word, Quod me alit, me extinguit.
This is just what the sonnet-line means, and what Angelina Jolie means by her epidermal ventriloquism.
Now I’ve found a source for Shakespeare and Angelina. I don’t think anyone has noted this before, though they might have. The source is 16th-century emblem books. These amazingly popular publications showed little printed images with a motto and verse, about love and divinity. Francis Quarles (1592–1644) is about the only English writer of these remembered here, but they’d been going for a century before he joined in. An emblem book Amorum Emblemata by Otho Vaenius (1608) has a motto Quod nutrit, extinguit, with the image of a cupid holding a torch flame-down, and a verse that later appeared in English as:
The torche is by the wax maintained whyle it burnes, But turned upsyde-down it straight goes out and dyes,
Right so by Cupid’s heat the lover lyes lykewyse, But thereby is hee kild, when it contrarie turnes.
This might not console Miss Jolie, but it explains Shakespeare and ‘Marlowe’.
Other versions of the thought are Qui me alit, me extingui and Quod nutrit me consummat. This last is in an emblem book by Georgette de Montenay published in 1571, when Shakespeare was a little boy.
Dot Wordsworth
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