If first you don’t succeed,
Then try and try again,
And if you don’t succeed again,
Just try and try and try.

Useless, it’s useless,
You can never try enough,
Take it from me, it’s useless,
You haven’t got the stuff.

Which is of course sung to a jaunty, stacatto, major-key show tune.

Bert “Cowardly Lion” Lahr as Estragon and Tom Ewell (who I pretty much know solely as Marilyn Monroe’s foil in The Seven Year Itch) as Vladimir.

She is not pretending that she is using the quote in context. She doesn’t really care who wrote it. She is using the quote as an aphorism. Just like everyone else who uses the quote.

The rest of the speech is pretty scary. (If I understand it right. Damn Straussians.)

And based on the Guardian article, it sounds like Beckett scholars consider his English writings to be apprentice material or something. What the hell.

It’s funny—but it’s not the three stooges, either. Same deal with Chekhov. He always described his plays as comedies, but I’m not sure your average theatre goer would agree…

I know Henry doesn’t refer to this as a misquotation, but it follows on his reference to Mark’s use of the word “misquotation,” when as far as I can tell he’s identified one misattribution (of the sort that’s cringe-inducing but common enough—attribution to a secondary source who herself didn’t think to footnote because of an assumption of shared cultural literacy) and one true statement that Mark thinks is being given an unwarrantedly sinister cast (that Marshall was Keynes’ teacher), and no misquotation.

Mark doesn’t say he’d identified misquotations, either—he compares her to the misquoting Otto. But—game of telephone—Henry characterizes Mark as having caught her in misquotations.