Mojo, The Bard, & Me

 

Today’s Totally Random Line(s)

           

To prove you a cipher.

  

-Moth

Love’s Labour’s Lost             Act I, Scene ii, Line 53

                       

A cipher, in this context is a zero, a nonentity, a nothing. Moth says today’s random line as an aside, presumably to get a laugh.

An aside is a dramatic device in which a character speaks to the audience. By convention, the audience is to realize that the character’s speech is unheard by the other characters on stage. There, that’s Wikipedia’s words, not mine.

Will makes great use of the aside. To my knowledge he didn’t invent the aside, but he certainly used it to great effect. His works are peppered with them, especially the comedies. The aside is sort of a verbalization of what a character is thinking since it’s assumed that no one else on stage hears it. It’s really a rather clever device, actually. Without it the audience would have to rely on facial expressions to get an idea of what a character is thinking. In movies and tv shows this is exactly what we do. And of course, with close-ups and great actors, we usually have a pretty good idea, or at least can make some pretty good guesses, as to what the character is thinking.

A lot of Will’s asides, particularly in the comedies, are lines expected to get a laugh. So, they do more than just give the audience a clue as to what a character on stage is thinking.

Whilst you don’t often see the aside used in TV or movies, there is a sit-com currently, Call Me Kat, where the lead character uses asides quite frequently; always to comic effect. She turns to the camera, which zooms in on her face, and she makes her comment. Any other characters on stage at that point act oblivious to her comment. Come to think of it, if you might be wondering whether or not they realize that this is a Shakespearean (or at the very least, an Elizabethan) convention, consider this: they also do something else that hails from Shakespeare’s time. In Will’s day, the performance would end with all the actors coming on stage and doing a bit of jig (supposedly they did this with all shows, even the tragedies. Can you imagine that?). Every episode of Call Me Kat ends with the entire ensemble coming out on stage and waving to the audience whilst they do a bit of improvised dancing. I never thought of Call Me Kat as Shakespearean, but maybe…

No, no, no. That's not the Kat I'm talking about. In fact, that's a hyena and I'm not sure if that's in the cat family or dog family, or something in between. 

However, whatever it is, it's giving us a prime example of working without an aside. Of course, in this case it's not using an aside because Hyenas can't talk. But, in the same way that most modern actors count on us to get an idea of what they're thinking without saying anything, so too is this Hyena doing that. 

Care to guess what he's thinking. Here, let me show you what he was looking at.

He was looking at this pride of lions chowing down on a water buffalo. 

Now I don't know for sure, but my guess is that he was thinking something along the lines of "When are those guys going to be through eating so that I can get in there for some leftovers?"

 That's my guess. What's yours?