Mojo, The Bard, & Me

Now, citizens of Angiers, ope your gates,

Let in that amity which you have made;

-King Philip

King John            Act II, Scene i, Line 537

Okay, couple of things here. One is grammar, and two, we’ve been here before  and I still don’t understand  what the heck is going on here.

First, a little bit of commentary re grammar. It seems that Will was really fond of the semi-colon. He really seems to favor it over the period, and I’m not sure why. Oh sure, he uses the period. But it seems that just as much, if not more, he uses the semi-colon to end his sentences. At least it seems like they’re ended in a lot of places where he uses it. Strictly speaking the semi-colon is not the same as a period (the latter of which definitely ends the sentence). The semi-colon is some sort of connecting punctuation. So maybe I’m just missing something here and he’s not really wanting to end sentences. Or maybe they worked with punctuation a little differently back then. I just don’t know.

And secondly, we’ve been here before and I still don’t quite get it. The French and the English are outside a French town that doesn’t want to let either of them in and therefore the French and the English are going to gang up and sack the town? Well, actually at this point they’ve decided not to sack it because the town has come up with a better idea. But that’s still pretty confusing, don’t you think?

It’s a fairly long scene (you can see that we’re on line 537), and stuff has gone back and forth here. In the interest of clarity Itried to read as much of the scene as I could today, but again, 537 lines. Well… 

And by the way, wasn’t Amity the name of the beach town in the original Jaws movie? I’m just saying.

Now this is that same gate from the 2/15 post. Remember? That's the other post about this same scene where I said this gate reminded me of this scene at the gate of Angiers. Except now the girls are on the top of the gate and I climbed a really tall tree nearby and I started to recite some of this scene. I think this is the part where I was saying 'Now, citizens of Angiers, ope your gates, Let in that amity which you have made;' And the girls shouted back 'Amity Schmamity Dad! We're not getting off this gate until you stop with the Shakespeare stuff!'