Mojo, The Bard, & Me

Nothing.

-Valentine

Two Gentlemen of Verona          Act III, scene i    Line 198

Well, I guess I should have known that we’d come up with this sooner or later. Nothing. Just plain nothing. We came up with nothing. But it’s not literally nothing, it’s the word ‘nothing’. It’s Valentines response to Proteus. It's not that he doesn't say anything; he says, ‘Nothing’. So, as usual there are a few directions I can go here. I could do a little reading above and below this line and see what they’re talking about. I could spend some time writing about nothing. I could spend some time writing about the play in general (except for the fact that I know pretty much nothing about this play; ahh! Nothing!).

However, the first thing I'd like to write about that I noticed about today's line is that it is seven lines away from the Totally Random Daily Shakespeare line of two days ago. That's right, I've managed to randomly end up on the same page (1 of 1,252) and only seven lines above the line that I randomly picked two days ago. Se we're actually in the very same conversation. I think that's a little odd, and I'm not sure what to do with it. Should I perhaps do nothing?

But doing nothing is tricky. It can sometimes be a good idea. After all, it can be better to do nothing than to do something terribly wrong. The old ‘do no harm’ axiom. On the other hand, I’ve usually found that doing something, anything, in an attempt to get something done is better than doing nothing, because doing nothing just gets you more frustrated. Something about ‘don’t act and get frustrated, or act and don’t be frustrated’. That’s not it, but it’s along those lines. Look at Hamlet. Sometimes I feel like Hamlet. I guess we all do.

So, once again, nothing. It really is an interesting line/word. It’s a line Cordelia uses at the beginning of King Lear when Lear is asking her what more she has to say; ‘Nothing’. To which Lear responds, ‘Nothing will come of nothing.’ It’s a good response to ‘nothing’ and in fact I use it often with my wife and son when I get a ‘nothing’ response from them. ‘Nothing will come of nothing!’ By now they’ve come to expect this response, and their response back to me is of course the eyes rolling back in the head and... Nothing.

So I think we’ll stick with that for our commentary on this line. And nothing more.