Mojo, The Bard, & Me

 

I am near to the place where they should meet; if Pisanio have mapt it truly.

  

Colten

Cymbeline              Act IV, Scene i, Line 1

This is the first line of a twenty-seven line paragraph that is the totality of this scene. It is Colten talking to himself about how he’s going to kill Posthumus and get Imogen. Though this first line, Today’s Totally Random Line, is pretty easily understood, the rest of the paragraph…eh, not so much. This is the kind of stuff that people who don’t know or care about Will’s works would look at and say “What the heck is this!?” Myself, on the other hand, looks at this and says, “Hmmm, this looks interesting. Let’s see what I can do with it.”

So there’s a few ways I go about understanding a challenging piece of Will's text. First, of course, I read it over a few times. That’s what I would do with any text, Shakespeare or otherwise; and read it out loud. Second, I use the Shakespeare online glossary or M-W to get the meaning of any words I don’t know. Some of those words are archaic, and some of them mean something different in 1600 than they do now. Some of them, though, are simply words I don't know the proper meaning of. It's surprising how many words I run into that I can find the proper contextual meaning of in the Merrian Webster online dictionary. Next, if I’m down at the pc in my home office (I’m not right now) and have the time, I might listen to the Arkangel recording of the scene. That’s usually really helpful. And lastly (sometimes firstly) I’ll read the scene summary in my online Shakespeare app. Oh, and one other option that I might go to is to look at the footnotes that some of my other compilations might have. The compilation that I use on a daily basis to pick my lines has no footnotes. That’s about it, I think.

So if that sounds like a lot, well, the thing is – I want to figure it out. I guess it would be safe to say that most people wouldn’t. And that makes all the difference, doesn’t it.

Here's the whole paragraph/scene, if you want to take a crack at it. A couple of other things that I didn't mention above: It helps to have a decent understanding of what's going on in the play, and in some cases (especially the history plays) it helps to have an understanding of what was going on in England at the time. But you can't really pick that knowledge up too easily in just a few minutes. Finally, it helps to see the play performed, as opposed to just hearing it, but you can't do that in a few minutes either.

Good luck!