Now,
God delay our rebellion! As we are
ourselves, what things are we.
-First Lord
All’s Well That Ends Well Act IV, scene iii Line 17
It occurred to me this morning, while contemplating on this
line, the genius of the Totally Random Daily Shakespeare project. And what I
mean is this; By taking these lines randomly there is not one line in all of
Shakespeare’s works that is deemed unworthy of our study. They are all up for
grabs. And accordingly, if we go at it long enough we’ll look at every single
line that Will wrote (admittedly that’s going to take quite a while; I think it
was estimated at 342 years). The other way that we could accomplish this would
be to go in order, play by play, line by line. Now you could easily argue that
this would make more sense. But I beg to differ. For one thing, if we were
trying to work our way through one play this way we would find it much too
tedious. Can you imagine? It would have taken about ten days to get from the
beginning of this scene to where we are now, which is a little less than a
quarter of this page in my compilation. It would be almost impossible to keep
ourselves from moving faster through the play. And so we would never end up
being able to give each line the attention that it gets by being singled out in
the Totally Random manner. Further, I’m sure you must agree that doing it this
way is much more adventurous and interesting. Yes, this is clearly the way to
go. Now, today’s line…
Today’s line is an exclamation which could just have easily
been “What a piece of work!” They’re talking about Bertram who is the main
character in this play. These guys are no-names and this beginning of the scene
is meant to give us, the audience, a bit of an update on Bertram’s state of
affairs. They’re telling us that Bertram got a letter from his mother in which
she’s laid into him about treating his wife poorly. They’ve told us the king is
mad at him (I’m not sure why the king is mad). And finally they’ve told us that
irrespective of these things, Bertram is now busy spending time with some new
lady in town that he just met. So today’s Totally Random line is really nothing
more than an exclamation. We’re not talking about any specific rebellion here any
more than we’re talking about any specific cow when we say ‘Holy Cow!’ It’s
basically ‘Holy Cow’ (Now, God delay our rebellion), ‘What a piece of work!’
(as we are ourselves, what things we are).
So we’ve basically picked up two exclamations here that are
perfectly usable, and can be used separately or together. I would suggest
separately. I think ‘God delay our rebellion’ should be used very
non-specifically. Again, like ‘holy cow!’.
But ‘as we are ourselves, what things we are’ is basically a kind of
non-specific, and yet you know what I’m thinking, response to, and about, what
someone has done.
‘Did you hear that Lucy went to the casino last week and
lost fifteen hundred dollars at the roulette table, and then picked up some
twenty-five year old guy and spent the night with him!?’
‘Oh my God! As we are ourselves, what things we are!’
See, we might have passed right over that line and missed
out on the opportunity to appreciate it. God delay our rebellion, Totally
Random!
When a moose sticks his head in your car window it qualifies for a "Now, God delay our rebellion! As we are ourselves, what things are we!"
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