Mojo, The Bard, & Me

‘…my free drift

Halts not particularly, but moves itself in a wide sea of wax:’

-Poet

Timon of Athens              Act I, scene 1     lines 48 – 50       

Oof, that's a line! Okay, this is a tough one. Remember, totally random.

Now first off, Timon of Athens is a really obscure play. I did a little research on it and it was one of his later plays and there’s lots of Shakespeareans who believe that it’s not even totally Shakespeare, that he wrote this play with another fellow named Thomas Middleton. So maybe we can blame Middleton for this stupid line.

Anyway, it’s a tragedy about an Athenian named Timon who apparently starts out as a Pollyanna and ends up a dead cynic. What a lovely story! But enough, how to go about working with this line?

Well, since it’s the 48^th line of the play, I’ve tried reading the play up to this point. But I think I’ll have to try that a few more times, and maybe read a little past this line. I’ve also tried to find the internet residence of the complete annotated works of Shakespeare, because that would be really helpful. No dice on that yet. My previous ideas to simply relate the line out of context to whatever seems applicable in my world is hampered by the fact that I can’t understand this line. But let’s stop here for a moment. What are we trying to do?

We’re trying to take one random line a day from Shakespeare and work with it. How? Well, we want to learn a little about Shakespeare and his world/works by working with the line. We want to find a way to understand the relevance of Shakespeare to 2016 by working with the line. We want to have some fun working with the line. We want to get a bit creative working with the line.

Now, having said that, there are a few different types of lines we can end up with. There is the line that is relatively easy to understand (like yesterday’s) so that you can pretty much do anything with it. And now there are the lines like today’s that are a bit tougher. And without being able to understand it, well that makes it hard to do absolutely anything with it. Perhaps a hard copy of annotations to the this play would be helpful?

Fine then, I’ve looked into my Shakespeare Complete copy (this is not the book I’m picking the random lines from, it’s an older copy of his works that I have) and I’ve found some hidden treasures.

This bad boy, printed in 1925, has notes! Well I’ve tried in the past not to use this copy too much because it’s sort of falling apart. But if it’s got the goods, well…

So first let’s look at a little more background. This line is the Poet speaking to the Painter. They’re guests at a party that Timon has thrown. Now this 1925 version actually has a slightly different line. Here’s the whole section, with the line included. They are remarking about the senators that have come to Timon’s party.

Poet:

You see this confluence, this great flood of visitors.

I have, in this rough work, shaped out a man,

Whom this beneath world doth embrace and hug

With amplest entertainment: my free drift

Halts not particularly, but moves itself

In a wide sea of verse: no levell’d malice

Infects one comma in the course I hold;

But flies an eagle flight, bold and forth on,

Leaving no tract behind.

Okay, forget it.  I’m giving up on this line. I can't work out who or what he's referring to. I realize that this is only the second line that I've tried to work with but, no, I'm not giving up on the project. I'm just giving up on this one line. I'll be back with a new random line tomorrow. I promise.