Mojo, The Bard, & Me

I know vat I have to do. Adieu.

Doctor Caius

The Merry Wives of Windsor                  Act V, scene iii   Line 5

And finally, we’ve got a sample from The Merry Wives Of Windsor. I believe this is the first time we’ve gotten to this work and if I’m not mistaken, the only play now left in my compilation that we’ve not randomly sampled is Julius Caesar. I’ll do some reconnaissance on my random die system just to make sure that numbers 550 to 610 (the corresponding pages in my compilation) are not problematic. I don’t suspect that they are and I’m pretty sure we’ll get to Julius Caesar, as well as back to The Wives, eventually.

Now, The Merry Wives. As I think I mentioned once, this is a play that Will wrote specifically to resurrect the character of Sir John Falstaff. You’ll recall that we’ve twice discussed the scenes in Henry V, here and here that relate to the passing of good Sir John. I’ve also previously mentioned, and reiterate here, that I know very little about this play. And since this is our first foray in, and also because this line is only three pages from the end of the play and I have no idea what’s taken place up to this point, I think we’ll stay in the dark for now and just focus on the line that we have.

This is the first instance I’ve run into where Will is writing the replication of an accent into the script. The ‘vat’ in today’s line is his way of saying how a Frenchman (apparently Dr. Caius is French) would say the word ‘what’. I thought this was what Will was doing but I wasn’t sure, and so I thumbed through the play and can see that the lines of Dr. Caius have these types of spelling throughout. So I think that’s pretty interesting. Vat do you theenk? Will had a healthy sampling of latin and greek, as well as real French in his plays, so he relied on a fairly well educated audience. In this case, however, he’s just working with a bawdy French accent; fairly low brow stuff.

Brief program note: I missed the last two nights due to some health issues. We'll see if we can keep that from happening again. Also, I'm counting this post as Friday, 12/23 post, even though it's now a few hours into Saturday, Christmas Eve. No promises for the next two nights' posts, but we'll try.

And if I don't make it, Merry Christmas!

This is pretty  much the extent of my personal library (I know, pretty messy). I looked all through here for some vestige of the seven years of French that I took, but no luck. And after that seven years, what is the extent of my understanding of French? Well, I understood today's line. And that's pretty  much how I would say it in French. 'I know vat I have to do.'