To beg of you, kind friends, this coat of worth,
For it was sometimes target to a king;
I know it by this mark.
-Pericles
Pericles Act II, Scene I, Line 136
Pericles has just ended up on shore after being shipwrecked.
The fishermen nearby have just hauled in Pericles’s suit of armor with their
nets, and Pericles is asking them to give him the armor. Of course, they’ll
hand it right over. How that armor managed to wash up on shore quite so quickly,
well that’s another thing altogether, but I guess we’ll just have to suspend credulity
for the time being.
On the other hand, what’s credulity? Well that could get us
into a very long, philosophical discussion. Couldn’t it?
Speaking of credulity, consider Exhibit A: Here we have a picture of my two Cordelias. Now they’re both in their
thirties, so even though they are my little girls, I think it’s fair to refer
to them as grown women. So, does it strain credulity that one grown woman would
stand on the back of another grown woman to spy over the fence at the neighbors?
Well if we want to get into a philosophical discussion of it, I suppose we
could ask Jess’s fiancĂ© (Jess is the one peeking over the fence) since he is a
philosophy professor. Isn’t that a coincidence. And just to make it more
interesting, Jess and Andy (that’s the philosophy professor) went to see the
play Pericles when they were dating early on. I was supposed to go with
them but hurt my back and got sidelined. And, by the way, Andy has told me I
could declare myself a philosopher if I wanted to (which I have).
So there’s a
lot going on here; certainly enough to strain, if not shatter, credulity. A suit of armor washing up on shore? Well I guess that's nothin'.