Nothing.
-Valentine
Two Gentlemen of Verona Act
III, scene i Line 198
Well, I guess I should have known that we’d come up with
this sooner or later. Nothing. Just plain nothing. We came up with nothing. But
it’s not literally nothing, it’s the word ‘nothing’. It’s Valentines response
to Proteus. It's not that he doesn't say anything; he says, ‘Nothing’. So, as usual there are a few directions I can
go here. I could do a little reading above and below this line and see what
they’re talking about. I could spend some time writing about nothing. I could
spend some time writing about the play in general (except for the fact that I know pretty much nothing about this play; ahh! Nothing!).
However, the first thing I'd like to write about that I noticed about today's line is that it is seven lines away from the Totally Random Daily Shakespeare line of two days ago. That's right, I've managed to randomly end up on the same page (1 of 1,252) and only seven lines above the line that I randomly picked two days ago. Se we're actually in the very same conversation. I think that's a little odd, and I'm not sure what to do with it. Should I perhaps do nothing?
But doing nothing is tricky. It can sometimes be a good
idea. After all, it can be better to do nothing than to do something terribly
wrong. The old ‘do no harm’ axiom. On the other hand, I’ve usually found that
doing something, anything, in an attempt to get something done is better than
doing nothing, because doing nothing just gets you more frustrated. Something
about ‘don’t act and get frustrated, or act and don’t be frustrated’. That’s
not it, but it’s along those lines. Look at Hamlet. Sometimes I feel like
Hamlet. I guess we all do.
So, once again, nothing. It really is an interesting
line/word. It’s a line Cordelia uses at the beginning of King Lear when Lear is
asking her what more she has to say; ‘Nothing’. To which Lear responds,
‘Nothing will come of nothing.’ It’s a good response to ‘nothing’ and in fact I
use it often with my wife and son when I get a ‘nothing’ response from them.
‘Nothing will come of nothing!’ By now they’ve come to expect this response,
and their response back to me is of course the eyes rolling back in the head and...
Nothing.
So I think we’ll stick with that for our commentary on this
line. And nothing more.
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