If,
in thy wisdom, thou canst give no help,
Do
thou but call my resolution wise,
And
with this knife I’ll help it presently.
-Juliet
Romeo And Juliet Act
IV, scene i, line 54
Pronouns. In the case of today’s line, ‘it’. There are a lot
of times in Will’s works (and certainly elsewhere, not just in Will’s works)
where a line can be made a little more confusing by the fact that it’s unclear
as to what or whom a pronoun is referring. In this case it’s not all that tough,
just a little murky. I believe she’s referring to her resolution. She’s going
to use the knife to help her resolution. And I believe her resolution is to
kill herself. Good Friar Laurence, in his infinite wisdom, is going to give help in the
way of a sleeping potion. And we all know how well that’s going to work out.
Now here’s something interesting. I ran into an article
about Stephen Booth yesterday. Booth is a Shakespearean scholar and the article
was about Booth’s writings about, and theories on, Will’s syntax. More specifically,
and forgive me for trying to explain a fairly complex idea in one or two sentences,
Booth talks about the way that many of Will’s sentences are structured in such
a way as to increase the theater going experience. I know, that doesn’t explain
it much, but the reason I bring it up at all is because one of the techniques
that Will uses to do this, according to Booth, is the so called ‘garden-path phenomena’. In a
nutshell, that’s where the words appear to lead us in the direction of one
understanding or conclusion but in the end get us somewhere else. Now there’s a
whole thing about how this affects us as readers or theater-goers and adds to
the experience. I’m not going to pretend to be able to adequately explain this.
But suffice it to say that today’s Totally Random line might fall into this
category. What I mean is that Juliet seems to be telling the friar is that if
he can’t help get her out of her predicament then at least just go along with
her resolution (the predicament, by the way, is having to marry Paris). But she
doesn’t end there. She adds the part about using a knife to help her resolution.
That is to say, she’s going to kill herself. But the knife part is at the end
and in a way unexpected. It’s in the syntax. Take my word for it. Here’s the
article if you want to read it for yourself. Spoiler alert: it’s not very easy
reading.
I was going for the unexpected. How'd I do?
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