France
is a bawd to Fortune and King John,
That
strumpet Fortune, that usurping John!
-Constance
King John Act
III, scene i Line 60-61
And we’re back to King
John. Apparently fortune favors King John as this is our third visit here
in 23 days. I guess I’m really going to have to start reading/listening to more
of these plays so that I know the whole thing. Anyway, I keep reading more
parts of King John, albeit randomly, as we go along. So what’s this line about?
Let’s take a look.
Well apparently the whole play King John is about John trying to keep the throne while other people are trying to take it away from him, with other countries, principally France, getting involved backing different people. One of the people with a good claim to the throne is young Arthur. This kid's parents are Geoffrey (John's older brother who's now deceased) and Constance. Arthur's mother Constance is the speaker here and she's making reference to the fact that there's just been some sort of deal brokered whereby France will be backing John’s right to the throne.
Of course, she’s not too happy that her kid Arthur is getting screwed out of
his right to the throne (which would have made her the mother of the king; not
a bad job all things considered). Keep in mind that this is the same Arthur
that John eventually imprisons and tries to have killed later in the play, and
who eventually dies trying to escape (see August 21 post). Anyway, at this
point Constance is just plain pissed off. In 1600 terms a bawd is a pimp and a
strumpet is a prostitute. So you can put the line together from there and
realize that she’s saying some pretty not nice things about France and her
brother-in-law John. Of course, she’s speaking figuratively. (it just occurred
to me that even though I don’t have a brother-in-law named John, I do have ones
named Richard and Edward. And though neither of them was a British monarch,
they both have British monarch names. Hey, how about that!)
On a separate note, In 23 random lines so far I believe this
is at least the third one where we’ve run into Will’s reference to prostitution
in either a figurative sense (here and August 25 post) or literal sense (August
30). So can we assume that the bawdy old Bard had some sort of fixation with
prostitution? Well, that’s probably not enough evidence for that. Yet.
And finally, let’s talk about using (or not using) those
Shakespearean insults. You can find whole websites devoted to Shakespearean
insults where you can get all sorts of neat sounding insults to use against
your friends and enemies without them actually knowing that you’re insulting
them. I’m not really a big advocate of the Shakespearean insult thing. I mean, we’ve
just learned that Strumpet is prostitute and bawd is pimp. Well even though you
could get away with using these words because no one will know what you’re
saying, you should consider what they really mean and realize that you probably
don’t want to call that person a prostitute. Do you?
No comments:
Post a Comment