--I say we
must not
So stain
our judgement, or corrupt our hope,
To
prostitute our past-cure malady
To
empirics;
-King
All’s Well That Ends Well Act
II, scene i Line 121-124
Okay, this is a bit of a tough one and will require some
re-reading of the line. Did you ever run into stuff like that? The stuff that
you have to re-read two, or three, or more times in order to understand it? I’m
not talking about Shakespeare, I’m talking about stuff you run into that was
written in this century. And a lot of times it’s not because it’s got words
that you don’t know (yeah, sometimes there’s words that you need to look up)
but rather that the length of the sentence, or the structure of the sentence is
such that by the time you get to the end of it you forgot where you were in the
beginning and you lose track of the meaning. Like that sentence you just read. Sometimes
when I run into that kind of writing I just give up. Sometimes I decide that
I’m really not that interested in what I’m reading, or that it’s just not that well
written. Sometimes I get pissed off at the author for writing that way. But
sometimes I’m reading something that I feel is worth the effort. And sometimes
I’m reading stuff by a writer who has already won my respect so that I’m
willing to put in the extra time or effort. One really good example of this is
Toni Morrison and her Nobel Prize acceptance speech. It’s a fabulous piece of
writing that took me several times reading it to understand. I found that to be
true of some of her other non-fiction writing as well (in fact I have gotten a
little pissed off at her for some of the other stuff), but the Nobel speech is
really a superb piece of writing. If you ever get the chance just google Nobel
Prizes to find it. Oh heck, I’ll do it for you. Here’s the link https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1993/morrison-lecture.html
But trust me, unless you’re way smarter than me (okay, yeah,
that’s possible), you’re going to have to invest a little time in this one.
Anyway, the moral of the story (or of that long paragraph
you just stumbled through) is that there is some good stuff out there that you have
to work for if you want to get it. And that’s true of quite a bit of
Shakespeare’s stuff. So let’s take a second (or third) look at this line.
First off I’ll tell you that I don’t know this play (By now
you’re not surprised, and you may be asking yourself if I know any plays, and
what the heck am I doing writing a Shakespeare blog. You can get a little bit
of an answer to this by reading the ‘About me’ on this blog), so I’m going into
this blind. There are two words that kind of threw me; prostitute and empiric.
The first one gets a little confusing when being used as a verb and the second
is confusing when being used as a noun. Further I think the second one might
have a particular meaning in 1604 that it doesn’t have today. But the most
confusing part of this line is the order, so let’s break it down. Oh, and by
the way if you read the page leading up to this line you’ll realize that the
King is addressing someone who’s come to offer a cure to his sickness. I don’t
know yet what his sickness is, but apparently it’s an incurable disease (past-cure
malady).
So I used the glossary that is included in my Shakespeare
App, which I believe is from PlayShakespeare.com, and it told me what I had
assumed, and that is that empiric is 1600 speak for medical quack. So bottom
line, pretty much what the king is saying is that he doesn’t want to use bad
sense and take false hope by buying into some quack’s advice for a cure to his
sickness. But you probably already had that figured out, didn’t you?
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