M & D. Deep Aping.

[Mark Kohut]

So, you read "Parlor Ape", p. 7, and took it in
as you have hundreds of ape--man metaphors?

Not so fast. it is 1786.

 p. 7 'Parlor Apes'. Anachronous phrase, it seems. No Google Books use
before an opera(1) of 1794.! Then in Prokofieff ballets early 20th
Century.
The stage. "it was all theater then"---GR allusion.

'Naked ape' phrase arrives with Desmond Morris's 1967 book.

Apes of God, a savage
satire by Wyndham Lewis, 1930's, which is said to satirize Proust's
masterwork (among much else) for not satirizing French society deeply
enough!--see "Remembrance of a Time better forgotten" ! (I,
rationally, think TRP had human-ape similarities in mind with the
phrase but the rest??? Too unlikely except I will add that when I
recently did some intensive rereading of Shakespeare, such as the
'simple' sonnets, the latest deeply-annotated Arden editions showed
root linguistic connections within plain English and within so many
Latinate-based words he used....surely NOT consciously patterned but the
result of a wordsmith's natural feel for the right words in the right
places.


Yet

"The ape has 'always' been seen as a border [sic!]
--human/animal--creature."!! See below:

In European consciousness since 15th Century:

https://books.google.com/books?id=k26bWPvyYzQC&pg=PA113&dq=ape+as+human&hl=en&sa=X&ei=lNyWVOrTMK_LsATzsYKwAw&ved=0CDYQ6AEwBTgU#v=onepage&q=ape%20as%20human&f=false
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