No, I’ll
be sworn; I make as good use of it as
many a man doth of a death’s-head or a
momento mori:
-Sir John Falstaff
King Henry IV Part I Act
III, scene iii Line 29
This is Sir John Falstaff. For those of you who don’t know,
he’s a fairly famous character in the world of Shakespeare. He appears here in
Henry IV as a bit of comic relief. He was received so favorably by the play-going
public that Shakespeare wrote a whole play around him, just to bring him back.
It’s called The Merry Wives of Windsor, and that’s all I know about that play.
I suppose I’ll have to get to it one of these days. I don’t have that one on
Arkangel CD, so I’ll have to get that as well.
By the way, you’ll be delighted to hear that I’ve ordered
A.L. Rowse’s three volume set of The Annotated Shakespeare. I borrowed Volume
III from the library last week for use in reading/listening to Coriolanus and
found it very useful. Then I found it online for $25 which I thought was pretty
reasonable. Why do I bring this up, you ask. Here’s why; today’s Totally Random
Daily Shakespeare is barroom conversation of trading insults between Falstaff
and Bardolph. As such it has more idioms than usual. Unfortunately, King Henry
IV is not included in the volume I have from the library and the set I
purchased online has not arrived yet. So…..
So bottom line, this is a pretty tough, make that really
tough conversation to work through. Falstaff is talking about Bardolf’s face,
but what exactly he’s saying, oof I dunno. So now what do we do? I found this
play in one of my other compilations and it’s got pretty good notes, but the
notes seem to be saying the same thing I just said—they dunno. So what happens
if you’re performing this play and you’re the actor and you have to say this
line? Now what? Not that I’ve ever done any acting, but I gotta believe there’s
a lot of Shakespeare that’s tough to do. And yet if you ever watch them do it,
well they generally do a damn good job. I wish I had something better to tell
you, but I don’t. I have to admit, I’m a little discouraged by the last few
days of lines. They’ve been tough and I really haven’t been able to get much
out of them.
But I’m not giving up.
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