And
partly, seeing that you are beautified
With
goodly shape, and by your own report
A
linguist, and a man of such perfection
As we do
in our quality much want,--
-First Outlaw
Two Gentlemen of Verona Act
IV, scene i Line 55
From feast
to famine! I wonder if that saying has its roots in Shakespeare? Oh well and
anyway. Yes, from nothing yesterday to four lines of….well, not much. In any
event we’ve only traveled four pages forward since yesterday, from Act III scene i to Act IV
scene I; same play. We still don’t know much of what’s going on with this play,
but I’ll give you some very brief context for today’s line. Valentine,
yesterday’s speaker, is now traveling through the woods when he gets accosted
by ‘certain outlaws’. After a brief exchange these three outlaws decide
they want to recruit Valentine as their leader. This First Outlaw, speaking
above, gets interrupted by Second Outlaw who completes the sentence and asks if
Valentine will become their general. And he does. Yeah, pretty kooky stuff, but
I guess we’d have to better understand the full story to understand what’s
going on here. On the other hand, we do have two lines already and they were
both spoken by Valentine. The first might give us some clue because he was
saying something about having gotten so much bad news. So maybe Valentine is so
fed up with how things are going for him that he’s ripe for the picking by
these outlaws. Who knows? I suppose we could listen to the play. Did I already
mention that I have the Arkangel version of this play on CD. Well I do. Am I
going to listen to it? Not today. Sorry.
However, let’s take a little closer look at this. Here we
have one of those instances where I’m not completely sure of how to interpret
this because I know I’m not thinking like a sixteenth century Englishman. I
assume, though, that this line is comedy. Put this into modern context. Can you
imagine a guy running into three hoods on a dark street. They start to rough
him up, looking to rob him. But then they realize he’s got no money, and that
he’s an educated fellow, so instead of robbing him they recruit him as their
leader. But it's not only that they want him for their leader, it's why they want him;
‘You’re a good looking fellow, and well spoken. A fellow of your qualities is
exactly what we’ve been looking for to be our leader.’ Yes, I believe that
would be part of a comedy script. Again, it’s hard to appreciate much of
Shakespeare without seeing it performed. And of course even a little harder
when you’re getting it one random line at a time!
No comments:
Post a Comment