Guinness later disingenuously claimed that Star Wars enabled him to “live for the rest of my life in the reasonably modest way I am now used to”. He earned an estimated $95 million from the film.
Many of the stories he recounts in the book are from the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, about characters who are long forgotten. No one nowadays remembers theatre impresario Tyrone Guthrie (1900–1971), for example, or actress Martita Hunt (1900–1969). Few enough still recognize the names John Gielgud (1904–2000) or Ralph Richardson (1902–1983), both (like Guinness himself) knighted for their services to theatre. But Sir Alec writes in a refreshingly precise and lucid style, so that his stories are charming and readable.
In Chapter 4, concerning his early struggle with religious faith and Roman Catholicism, Guinness refers to “the naive strugglings of an adolescent English schoolboy kicking, so to speak, against the pricks”.
Spurs and pricks
Quite by chance, I had recently come across the same peculiar phrase in the Penguin edition of Cervantes’ Don Quixote (2000).In Chapter 20, Sancho Pansa hobbles the Don’s horse, Rocinante, with his ass’s halter in order to thwart his master’s desire for continuous (usually disastrous) knightly adventure.
I have no idea what the original medieval Spanish reads, but John Rutherford’s translation (which elsewhere very cleverly brings out Cervantes’ humour by avoiding literality) has Sancho say, “The heavens have ordained that Rocinante can’t move, and if you keep on spurring him again and again, you’ll only annoy fortune and, as they say, kick against the pricks”.
Dictionary definition
Curious to find where this phrase came from, I turned to the Oxford English Dictionary, where I found this definition: “Phrase: to kick against the pricks (spur, goad): to strike the foot against such sharp-pointed or piercing objects; also figurative to be recalcitrant to one’s own hurt”. But where did it come from? The OED gives credit squarely to the fourteenth-century Christian scholar John Wycliffe for coming up with the phrase. But why?
The biblical reference at the end turns out to be revealing, for these words do not occur in the Greek text of Acts 9:5 (the “road to Damascus” story), but are, in fact, found at Acts 26:14. What has caused the mistaken reference?
Both dictionaries are technically correct, for the phrase occurs in Wycliffe’s translations of Acts (or Deeds of Apostles, as he prefers) at 9:5 — “it is hard to thee to kike agens the pricke”, in Wycliffe’s Middle English. (The phrase occurs on the fourth line from the bottom of the left column of this manuscript page.)
The King James Version of 1611 — along with Webster’s revision of the KJV and one or two other nineteenth-century versions that took their text unacknowledged from the KJV — is the only bible to retain the phrase at Acts 9:5, for in the accepted Greek text, these words only appear at Acts 26:14, when Paul relates the story of his conversion to King Agrippa. Here is the original:
In the words of the King James Version of 1611 (which is easier to decipher than Wycliffe’s Middle English, pictured here), “And when we were all fallen to the earth, I heard a voice speaking unto me, and saying in the Hebrew tongue, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me? It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks.”
With all due respect to the Oxford English Dictionary, it seems that the phrase should be credited not to Wycliffe, but to the writer of the Acts of the Apostles, usually taken to be Saint Luke. Or should it?
Doubt only arises because it seems that the same phrase was used half a millennium earlier by the Athenian playwright Aeschylus, in his Agamemnon (line 1624), as we can see here.
