Why,
there, there, there, there!
-Shylock
The Merchant Of Venice Act III, scene i, line 49
This is an odd line, don’t you think? At first blush it
looks like Shylock may be consoling someone. ‘There, there, everything will be
okay.’ But that’s not it. Tubal has just entered and Shylock asks him if he’s
seen his daughter Jessica. Tubal answers ‘I often came where I did hear of her,
but cannot find her.’ To which Shylock replies ‘Why, there, there, there,
there! a diamond gone, cost me two thousand ducats in Frankfort!’ And he goes on to moan about the jewels that
his daughter stole from him when she left. And that’s it. I guess the repeated
‘there’ is just a sort of exclamation? It could almost be any innocuous word. I
think it would really help to hear this spoken in the play if you want to
understand it better. It certainly looks odd just sitting there on the page.
But I think it’s meant to represent the words of someone who’s very out of
sorts with himself, which Shylock certainly is. I’m going to go home this
evening and listen to it. I don’t have the plays with me here at work. They’re
on my home pc. To be continued…
There are many times when I struggle with the Totally Random
line of the day only to have it become crystal clear later in the day. This
ain’t one of those times. I've now listened to it but even so, having heard it, and the more I think about this line the more puzzling it
becomes. I keep saying it over and over in my head and it just seems like it’s
the ‘There, there; everything’s going to be okay’, but I know that’s not it. I
can only imagine that Will had to explain this one to whatever actor it was who
played Shylock the first time. Or who knows, maybe it was Will himself? Yes, he
did act in some of these plays; probably not Shylock though. I guess? It’d be
great if we could get Harold or somebody like that to follow this blog, then we
could get some really good comments! Okay, I’ll see what I can do about that.
No promises.
This is Harold's pic from that back of his book Shakespeare The Invention Of The Human. How about that Harold, I just gave you a free plug for your book. Not that Harold needs it. He's a pretty big deal in the Shakespeare world. He works right here in New Haven at Yale. In fact, Science Park, the complex that we have our space in, is a part of Yale (or at least affiliated with Yale). So I guess you could say that Harold and I work in the same place! How about that?
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