Mojo, The Bard, & Me

O world, thy slippery turns! Friends now fast sworn,

Whose double bosoms seems to wear one heart,

Whose hours, whose bed, whose meal, and exercise,

Are still together, who twin, as ‘twere, in love

Unseparable, shall within this hour,

On a dissension of a doit, break out

To bitterest enmity: so, fellest foes,

Whose passions and whose plots have broke their sleep

To take the one the other, by some chance,

Some trick not worth an egg, shall grow dear friends

And interjoin their issues. So with me:

My birth-place hate I, and my love’s upon

This enemy town. –I’ll enter: if he slay me,

He does fair justice; if he give me way,

I’ll do his country service.

 

 -Caius Marcius Coriolanus

Coriolanus                          Act IV, scene iv Line 12-26

Okay kids, I really did it to you today. I know, you’re saying ‘wait a minute, this is supposed to be a line of Shakespeare. A line!’ Well you’re right. But on the other hand it’s called Totally Random Daily Shakespeare, so there’s nowhere in the title that says ‘a line’. Nonetheless, I’ll explain.

Today’s Random line landed me right in the middle of a pretty long sentence, the one where he’s talking about his friends becoming enemies. So I couldn’t give you the line without the whole sentence. And that sentence was really almost inseparable (or as Caius would say, ‘unseparable’) from the next sentence where he talked about his enemies, fellest foes, becoming his friends, interjoin their issues. And those since those two long sentences made up ninety percent of this brief soliloquy, well I decided to give you the whole thing. I knew you’d understand.

Now, what’s it all about? Well, it seems that Caius Marcius Coriolanus (that’s a hell of a name, isn’t it? And the best part is that it ends in ‘anus’ so you know if you teach this in a high school class one of the guys is gonna pick up on that and use it somehow to have some fun with it. I’ll let you see what you can do with that on your own) has been banished from his country and so has decided to effectively defect to the enemy and see if they want him to fight for them. You can look at the posts from 8/13, 9/4, and 9/28 (just go to Coriolanus in the Will's Works tab) for some more details on the play. But anyway, today’s Totally Random lines are from Marcius as he is standing alone outside the house of his enemy, in his enemy’s country. He’s about to go inside and see if they want him to fight for them, or if they’ll just want to kill him. I particularly like the very beginning of the speech where he’s commenting on the capriciousness of fate: Oh world, thy slippery turns! That is just absolutely fabulous language, isn’t it? I worked with a high school teacher once and she was talking about teaching Shakespeare to high school kids. She said that a lot of Shakespeare was pretty tough to teach, and she’s not sure how much they understood or appreciated it. But she was sure it was worth it just to expose them to the beauty of Shakespeare’s language. I wasn’t quite sure I understood or agreed with her then, but I most certainly do agree with her now.

Okay, I’m still stuck on that line. Oh world, thy slippery turns! I can’t go any further today. I’m just going to take those five words, consider myself blessed, and move on with my day. No pic today. You don't need one with a line this great.