Mojo, The Bard, & Me

…nor have we herein barr’d

Your better wisdoms, which have freely gone

With this affair along.

-King    

Hamlet                 Act I, scene ii      Line 14

The king speaking is Claudius. That’s Hamlet’s Uncle Claudius who is now also Hamlet’s stepfather since he’s married Hamlet’s mother (Claudius’s sister-in-law and widow of his brother (the brother that Claudius murdered)). Got it? This is the second scene of the play, but the first scene where we get the setting of what’s going on. The first scene was on the castle rampart at night where Hamlet got his first glimpse of the ghost of King Hamlet (Hamlet’s father) and there wasn’t too much setup there.

Now Claudius is talking to an assemblage of lords and such, and he’s noting what’s transpired (basically the king died and he, Claudius, has married the king’s widow in pretty quick fashion) and he’s acknowledging that the marriage was pretty quick but, ‘hey, I was listening and I didn’t hear any of you guys objecting’ (that’s what today’s Totally Random Daily Shakespeare line is saying). Of course, Hamlet has yet to weigh in.

So what of this line? It’s part of a long ramble by Claudius that opens Scene Two. Shortly after this speech we get a back and forth between Hamlet and his mother and Claudius and we quickly start to see that Hamlet’s not real happy with the situation. He doesn’t know yet that Claudius killed his dad (the ghost of his dad will tell him that later), but just the fact that this guy married his dad’s widow, and so quickly, has got young Hamlet a bit upset. Can you blame him? I can’t.

Now I can’t help myself, but I’ve gotta comment on the last part of today’s Totally Random line; With this affair along. Here’s the deal: I realize that Will plays around with sentence structure and in particular with word order and the idea is that he needs to in order to get the meter right (remember- iambic pentameter: ten syllables of words with stress, unstress, stress, unstress, etc). So this line fragment works: with THIS af FAIR a LONG, da dum, da dum, da dum. However, if he had used the more conventional word order of Along with this affair it still works. No problem. So why did he use the line With this affair along instead of the more easily understandable Along with this affair. Anybody? I need an answer on this one, so somebody out there take a look at it and let me know.

Okay, that’s it for now. Tomorrow our first look at Cymbeline.