Mojo, The Bard, & Me

 

The rest shall bear this burden

-Forester

As You Like It                Act IV, Scene ii, Line 14

This is a very short scene, and one we have visited previously. In fact, we had a line from the song that today’s line is drawn from previously. Perhaps you remember it?

Ordinarily I would have repicked a line, but this morning I was picking a line from my online source because I left my book at work. so I didn’t realize that I had already addressed this very short scene, and in fact, this specific song. But looking back now on 12/8/22 I can see that I didn’t have much to say about it, so I’ll say a little more here.

First off, the context: Jaques and company have come across a hunter with a fallen deer. They’ve set the deer’s horns upon the hunter’s head, and now one of the foresters is singing a song for him.

         What shall he have that kill’d the deer?

        His leather skin and horns to wear.

                 Then sing him home;

(The rest shall bear his burden)

        Take thou no scorn to wear the horn;

        It was a crest ere thou wast born:

                  Thy fathers wore it,

                 And thy father bore it:

        The horn, the horn, the lusty horn

        Is not a thing to laugh to scorn.

And that’s the end of the scene as they all parade off the stage. I told you it was short. There’s only eighteen lines total and the song is half of them.

Now, that’s as far as I went with it back in February. Today I’d like to take it a little further. Specifically, I’d like to resort to a little book I picked up a few years age. It’s called Shakespeare’s Use of Song by Richmond Noble. It’s an interesting little book and it does in fact have this song in it. But it doesn’t actually say much about the song. Instead, it talks about the fact that the scene is so short and disconnected and that it’s probably inserted in the play just to give some space between scenes IV, i and scene IV, iii because there’s supposed to be a two hour space between these two scenes. That is useful information because it had occurred to me in the past that this was a pretty odd and somewhat out of place scene. But, again, it doesn’t give much of any information about the song; for instance, why is today's line in parentheses?

Oh well; maybe the next time we pick this scene…

 

This is my little buddy on a horse. He had a little trouble with a car last night, so he may be back to riding a horse for a while. Well, we'll see. 

Nothing relevant to today's line. Sorry.