Today’s Totally Random
Line(s)
‘Anon
he finds him
Striking too short at Greeks; his antiquie
sword,
Rebellious to his arm, lies where it falls,
Repugnant to command: unequal matcht,
Pyrrhus at Priam drives; in rage strikes wide;
But with the whiff and wind of his fell sword
Th’unnerved father falls.
-First Player
Hamlet Act II, Scene ii, Line 479
Yup, had to go with the full sentence. Don’t ask me why.
This is one of the actors that’s come to perform at Elsinore and, upon meeting him, Hamlet has asked him to perform a speech he remembers from a play. Hamlet gives the first part of it, ending with
With eyes like carbuncles, the hellish
Pyrrhus
Old grandsire Priam seeks,
Then the player picks up with Anon he finds him, and tells about Phyrrus coming to kill old Priam.
We could probably spend the rest of the day (and it is a nice rainy Sunday morning, so it’s tempting) dissecting this line, and the ones before and after. But I rather think not. I did listen to the rest of this scene; it ends with the rogue and peasant slave soliloquy. And that was fun.
One of these days I’m going to have to sit down (perhaps over the course of a few days) and watch Branagh’s Hamlet from beginning to end; perhaps rent it from the library. But, in the immortal words of Aragorn, it is not this day!
So, in the meantime, I'm going to let today’s line sit. I'll leave it up to you to do your own thing with it.
2 comments:
Is it that long? Why haven't you sat through all of it yet...?
Branagh's Hamlet, the original uncut play, is four hours long. And I finally did sit through it last week, over the course of three nights.
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