>Are you suggesting that Shakespeare really meant that the event in > >Winter's Tale occurred on the 80th April? Well it certainly looks to me as though Shakespeare meant the 80th April, in the light of the following line's reference to 'forty fathom ABOVE water'. But he meant it as a nonsense. 80th April is an impossible date: 40 fathoms above the water is an impossible place for a fish to appear (whether it means, as I think it does, 40 fathoms up in the air, or 40 fathoms inland, as I think John Barton is suggesting). Shakespeare is surely burlesquing the contemporary taste for reports of impossible or improbable events and investing them with supernatural significance (cows born with two heads, women giving birth to rabbits etc etc). Is the 'ballad of fish' a hint that this is just a fishy tale? Also, it's interesting to see the reference lower down in John Barton's earlier posting to the hole in Kinnaston which was 'forty foot broad, and forescore ells long' - it makes one wonder whether Elizabethans used 'forty' and 'fourscore', not as precise measurements but rather as a general but imprecise indication of large size or number. Similar to the way we talk about there being hundreds or thousands of something without meaning that we have actually counted them. Matt Tompkins Blaston, Leics