Mojo, The Bard, & Me

I’m vanquished; these haughty words of hers

Have batter’d me like roaring cannon-shot,

And made me almost yield upon my knees.—

 

Duke of Burgundy

 

King Henry The Sixth Part I          Act III, scene iii Line 78

Today’s line is in response to Joan telling the Duke that he needs to switch sides, and he does. As I explained on 11/14, the Duke is a Frenchie who’s been fighting with the Brits. And Joan tells him to get with the program and start fighting against the Brits. And of course he listens.

Now this is the Duke of Burgundy and he’s making an aside in regards to what Joan has just said to him (more on asides in a moment). I think it’s interesting that pretty much all of the French listen to, and are in awe of Joan. Conversely, pretty much all the Brits think she’s some form of witch or prostitute. I mean it’s really amazing, almost alarming.

Okay, asides. There’s a lot of these in the plays. It shows up next to the speaker’s name before the script

                                                Duke of Burgundy [aside]

                I’m vanquished; these haughty words of hers…..             

And it means that the Duke’s not talking to anyone on stage, he’s just telling the audience what he’s thinking. So basically this entire Totally Random line is an aside. Maybe I’ll go back and put that at the beginning of the first post just to cover myself. Anyway, I think (I’m not sure, I didn’t go back and check) that this is the first time in 140 Totally Random lines that we’ve hit an aside, and that’s pretty surprising. There are two asides on this one page alone. To be sure, Will is famous for his lack of stage directions in his works, but he’s fairly liberal with his asides, which are a sort of stage direction.

In any event, it seems to me that the Duke here comes off as a bit of a weenie in that Joan simply tells him he should be fighting with the French since he is, well, French. And he’s all ‘vanquished’ and ‘battered’ and ‘made to yield upon his knees.’ What’s up with that?

Now if you want to talk about something that's battered and vanquished, how about these puppies. These are my little buddie's school shoes, and I think he got about as much out of them as we could have hoped for. In fact, with the shape that they're in I'm surprised he wasn't made to yield upon his knees!