CAPELL, EDWARD (1713-1781), English Shakespearian critic, was born at Troston Hall in Suffolk on the 11th of June 1713. Through the influence of the duke of Grafton he was appointed to the office of deputy-inspector of plays in 1737, with a salary of £200 per annum, and in 1745 he was made groom of the privy chamber through the same influence. In 1760 appeared his Prolusions, or Select Pieces of Ancient Poetry, a collection which included Edward III., placed by Capell among the doubtful plays of Shakespeare. Shocked at the inaccuracies which had crept into Sir Thomas Hanmer’s edition of Shakespeare, he projected an entirely new edition, to be carefully collated with the original copies. After spending three years in collecting, and comparing scarce folio and quarto editions, he published his own edition in 10 vols. 8vo (1768), with an introduction written in a style of extraordinary quaintness, which was afterwards appended to Johnson’s and Steevens’s editions. Capell published the first part of his commentary, which included notes on nine plays with a glossary, in 1774. This he afterwards recalled, and the publication of the complete work, Notes and Various Readings of Shakespeare (1779-1783), the third volume of which bears the title of The School of Shakespeare, was completed, under the superintendence of John Collins, in 1783, two years after the author’s death. It contains the results of his unremitting labour for thirty years, and throws considerable light on the history of the times of Shakespeare, as well as on the sources from which he derived his plots. Collins asserted that Steevens had stolen Capell’s notes for his own edition, the story being that the printers had been bribed to show Steevens the sheets of Capell’s edition while it was passing through the press. Besides the works already specified, he published an edition of Antony and Cleopatra, adapted for the stage with the help of David Garrick in 1758. His edition of Shakespeare passed through many editions (1768, 1771, 1793, 1799, 1803, 1813). Capell died in the Temple on the 24th of February 1781.
CAPELLA, MARTIANUS MINNEUS FELIX, Latin writer, according to Cassiodorus a native of Madaura in Africa, flourished during the 5th century, certainly before the year 439. He appears to have practised as a lawyer at Carthage and to have been in easy circumstances. His curious encyclopaedic work, entitled Satyricon, or De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii et de septem Artibus liberalibus libri novem, is an elaborate allegory in nine books, written in a mixture of prose and verse, after the manner of the Menippean satires of Varro. The style is heavy and involved, loaded with metaphor and bizarre expressions, and verbose to excess. The first two books contain the allegory proper—the marriage of Mercury to a nymph named Philologia. The remaining seven books contain expositions of the seven liberal arts, which then comprehended all human knowledge. Book iii. treats of grammar, iv. of dialectics, v. of rhetoric, vi. of geometry, vii. of arithmetic, viii. of astronomy, ix. of music. These abstract discussions are linked on to the original allegory by the device of personifying each science as a courtier of Mercury and Philologia. The work was a complete encyclopaedia of the liberal culture of the time, and was in high repute during the middle ages. The author’s chief sources were Varro, Pliny, Solinus, Aquila Romanus, and Aristides Quintilianus. His prose resembles that of Apuleius (also a native of Madaura), but is even more difficult. The verse portions, which are on the whole correct and classically constructed, are in imitation of Varro and are less tiresome.
A passage in book viii. contains a very clear statement of the heliocentric system of astronomy. It has been supposed that Copernicus, who quotes Capella, may have received from this work some hints towards his own new system.
Editio princeps, by F. Vitalis Bodianus, 1499; the best modern edition is that of F. Eyssenhardt (1866); for the relation of Martianus Capella to Aristides Quintilianus see H. Deiters, Studien zu den griechischen Musikern (1881). In the 11th century the German monk Notker Labeo translated the first two books into Old High German.
CAPE MAY, a city and watering-place of Cape May county, New Jersey, U.S.A., on the Atlantic coast, 2 m. E.N.E. of Cape May, the S. extremity of the state, and about 80 m. S. by E. of Philadelphia. Pop. (1890) 2136; (1900) 2257; (1905) 3006; (1910) 2471. Cape May is served by the Maryland, Delaware & Virginia (by ferry to Lewes, Delaware), the West Jersey & Seashore (Pennsylvania system), and the Atlantic City (Reading system) railways, and, during the summer season, by steamboat to Philadelphia. The principal part of the city is on a peninsula (formerly Cape Island) between the ocean and Cold Spring inlet, which has been dredged and is protected by jetties to make a suitable harbour. The further improvement of the inlet and the harbour was authorized by Congress in 1907. On the ocean side, along a hard sand beach 5 m. long, is the Esplanade. There are numerous hotels and handsome cottages for summer visitors, who come especially from Philadelphia, from New York, from the South and from the West. Cape May offers good bathing, yachting and fishing, with driving and hunting in the wooded country inland from the coast. At Cape May Point is the Cape May lighthouse, 145 ft. high, built in 1800 and rebuilt in 1859. In the city are canneries of vegetables and fruit, glass-works and a gold-beating establishment. Fish and oysters are exported. Cape May was named by Cornelis Jacobsen Mey, director of the Prince Hendrick (Delaware) river for the West India Company of Holland, who took possession of the river in 1623, and planted the short-lived colony of Fort Nassau 4 m. below Philadelphia, near the present Gloucester City, N.J. Cape May was settled about 1699,—a previous attempt to settle here made by Samuel Blommaert in 1631 was unsuccessful. It was an important whaling port early in the 18th century, and became prominent as a watering-place late in that century. It was incorporated as the borough of Cape Island in 1848, and chartered as the city of Cape Island in 1851; in 1869 the name was changed to Cape May.
CAPENA, an ancient city of southern Etruria, frequently mentioned with Veii and Falerii. Its exact site is, however, uncertain. According to Cato it was a colony of the former, and in the wars between Veii and Rome it appears as dependent upon Veii, after the fall of which town, however, it became subject to Rome. Out of its territory the tribus Stellatina was formed in 367 b.c. In later republican times the city itself is hardly mentioned, but under the empire a municipium Capenatium foederatum is frequently mentioned in inscriptions. Of these several were found upon the hill known as Civitucola, about 4 m. north-east of the post station of ad Vicesimum on the ancient Via Flaminia, a site which is well adapted for an ancient city. It lies on the north side of a dried-up lake, once no doubt a volcanic crater. Remains of buildings of the Roman period also exist there, while, in the sides of the hill of S. Martino which lies on the north-east,[1] rock-cut tombs belonging to the 7th and 6th centuries b.c. but used in Roman times for fresh burials, were excavated in 1859-1864, and again in 1904. Inscriptions in early Latin and in local dialect were also found (W. Henzen, Bullettino dell’ Istituto, 1864, 143; R. Paribeni, Notizie degli Scavi, 1905, 301). Similar tombs have also been found on the hills south of Civitucola. G.B. de Rossi, however, supposed that the games of which records (fragments of the fasti ludorum) were also discovered at Civitucola, were those which were celebrated from time immemorial at the Lucus Feroniae, with which he therefore proposed to identify this site, placing Capena itself at S. Oreste, on the south-eastern side of Mount Soracte. But there are difficulties in the way of this assumption, and it is more probable that the Lucus Feroniae is to be sought at or near Nazzano, where, in the excavation of a circular building which some conjecture to have been the actual temple of Feronia, inscriptions relating to a municipality were found. Others, however, propose to place Lucus Feroniae at the church of S. Abbondio, 1 m. east of Rignano and 4 m. north-north-west of Civitucola, which is built out of ancient materials. On the Via Flaminia, 26 m. from Rome, near Rignano, is the Christian cemetery of Theodora.
See R. Lanciani, Bullettino dell’ Istituto, 1870, 32; G.B. de Rossi, Annali dell’ Istituto, 1883, 254; Bullettino Cristiano, 1883, 115; G. Dennis, Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria (London, 1883), i. 131; E. Bormann, Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum (Berlin, 1888), xi. 571; H. Nissen, Italische Landeskunde (Berlin, 1902), ii. 369; R. Paribeni, in Monumenti dei Lincei, xvi. (1906), 277 seq.