Concordances. Obituary: Professor F. W. Clayton

Obituary: Professor F. W. Clayton
Independent, The (London), Dec 24, 1999 by T. P. Wiseman

“It was about 1950 when I first noticed in both Latin and English that there were curious apparent echoes of quotations, conscious or unconscious, inside a single author or between authors, based on associated ideas or words.” Two particular areas came to fascinate him: Horace’s use of astrology, and Shakespeare’s use of the Latin poets.

He worked obsessively with concordances, trying to prove, in those pre-computer days, that the collocations of word and phrase that leaped out at him were not merely random.