Mojo, The Bard, & Me

Costard the swain and he shall be our sport;

And so to study three years is but short.

-Longaville        

Love’s Labour’s Lost                       Act I, scene i       Line 180

Oh boy, where to start? There is just a whole bunch of stuff to pick on here to write about. It’s amazing! There’s Labour with the ‘u’, there’s the possessive Love’s and Labour’s, there’s Longaville’s name, there’s the rhyming couplet thing, there’s the goofy premise. Holy Smokes! And we could do all of this without context, but since I read most of the first act, and some intro stuff, I’ll give you the short version of context first.

This play is a comedy and in the first scene the Ferdinand, the king of Navarre (don’t ask me where Navarre is) has pulled together three of his noblemen (one of them is Longavile, today’s speaker) and they are signing a pact to spend three years together, the four of them, where they will study and fast and see no women. One of the only entertainments they will have is Armando (some Spanish wit who’s visiting the court, the ‘he’ referred to above) and Costard the swain (country bumpkin/clown). Simple, right? So, where do we start?

Okay, the 200 or so lines I read this morning (it’s really good when the Totally Random Daily Shakespeare line is in Act One, Scene One because then I know I’ll be able to read the play from the beginning at least up to the day’s line) is the only time I’ve ever read any of Love’s Labour’s Lost. According to my list this play was written around 1594. Just so you know, Will started writing around 1589 and finished around 1614. So this one was written fairly early on in his career. Also, according to my list and several Shakespeare scholars, there was a sequel written around the same time called Love’s Labour’s Won. However, this play did not survive. It was not in The First Folio and is not in my Shakespeare Compilation. There is no known copy of this one. If you can come up with a copy of Love’s Labour’s Won then you can retire quite rich. But enough about that.

I was considering getting into the whole clown/jester thing that I sort of ended on yesterday. However, today’s clown is not a hired clown (jester), but just some country bumpkin that they consider a clown. So this is a little different, and kind of mean. Sort of like that Steve Carell movie Dinner For Schmucks where this Costard fellow is a schmuck to laugh at. But I haven’t read far enough to find out if this is really what he’s all about in the play, so…..

Okay, I got sucked into the internet there for a few minutes. I had to google Steve Carell to get the name of that movie and, well you know how that goes! But I’m back, didn’t get too far from the entrance to the cave so I was able to find my way back to daylight. Close one though!

And moving on. Okay, going to pick one more thing to go after for a minute this morning, then I’ve got to get on to other stuff for the day.

Rhyming couplets. I added the second line today to show the rhyme going on here. In some plays you see these random two lines of rhyme come up, mostly at the end of a fairly long rant, or at the end of a scene. But this play, at least so far as I read (again, only 200 lines) is all rhyming. Hold on, I’ll take a look. Okay, I gotta backtrack on this one. Not only is the rest of the play not in rhyming couplet, it’s not all in blank verse. A lot of it is plain prose. And not only that, I went back and looked at the first 200 lines again and not even all of that is rhyming. A lot of it is, but not all. So we’re back to the fact that Will liked to throw in a lot a rhyming couplets but that he was pretty random (oh, I know, it wasn’t random, it’s all done for a reason) about where he put all this stuff. Perhaps we’ll get more into the whole blank verse, rhyming couplet thing at a later date, but I think I’ve worn you out enough for today. You can look at that other stuff I mentioned on your own.

So go on out there and enjoy the day. But please, go easy on making sport out of any country bumpkins. Besides, they’re probably a heck of a lot smarter than you realize.

In the meantime I just rolled the die for tomorrow's page and we're going to be in the courtroom scene of The Merchant of Venice. I hope you're as excited about that as I am. I am extremely fain to find out what tomorrow's Totally Random Daily Shakespeare line will be! How will I ever sleep tonight!?!?