Mojo, The Bard, & Me

 Today’s Totally Random Lines

 

 

'The rugged Pyrrhus, like th’Hyracanian beast,’ — ‘tis not so:—it begins with Pyrrhus;
‘The rugged Pyrrhus, — he whose sable arms,
Black as his purpose, did the night resemble
When he lay couched in the ominous horse,—
Hath now this dread and black complexion smear’d
With heraldry more dismal; head to foot
Now is he total gules; horridly trickt
With blood of fathers, mothers, daughters, sons,
Baked and impasted with the parching streets,
That lend a tyrannous and damned light
To their vile murders: roasted in wrath and fire,
And thus o’er-sized with coagulate gore,
With eyes like carbuncles, the hellish Pyrrhus
Old grandsire Priam seeks.’—
So proceed you.

  

Hamlet

Hamlet                         Act II, Scene ii,  Line 465

 

This is Hamlet reciting some lines for the players from a play that he once saw. Yes, he’s talking about the siege of Troy, couched in the ominous horse. Pyrrhus was one of the Greeks and he did some slaughtering in Troy, including killing King Priam. Gules, by the way, means red.

Hamlet prefaces today’s lines with
One speech in it I chiefly loved: ‘twas Aeneas’ tale to Dido; and there about of it especially where he speaks of Priam’s slaughter:

Then he gets into today’s lines. 

Hamlet starts the speech, then realizes he’s got it wrong, ‘tis not so, then starts again.

It’s an interesting few lines; okay, maybe not so few. Does one look at the lines themselves, ostensibly part of another, nonexistent play? Or does one look at what Hamlet is doing, and saying, and what the lines mean in relation to his situation in this play? You could do either, couldn’t you? This play, Hamlet, is full of these kinds of choices. All of Will’s works are, but none more than Hamlet.