Friday, July 19, 2024

 

Today’s Totally Random Lines

 

Not know my voice! O time’s extremity,

Hast thou so crack’d and splitted my poor tongue

In seven short years, that here my only son,

Knows not my feeble key of untuned cares?

 

Aegeon

The Comedy of Errors                   Act V, Scene i, Line 308



There is only one scene in Act Five of this play, so we’re at the end of it where all the confusion and mistaken identity stuff gets resolved. This line is pretty easy but for the last part. Here’s GB Harrison’s take on the fourth line above:

Knows not my voice made feeble by my sorrows.

Better? So if you read the first three lines and use that for the fourth it should make sense. At least I hope so.

Aegeon is speaking to Antipholus and Dromio of Ephesus who are claiming not to know him. Aegeon, of course, thinks they’re the guys from Syracuse whom he raised from infants up until seven years ago when they went off in search of their brothers. These guys from Ephesus, that Aegeon is talking to, last saw him when they were infants and getting separated in the shipwreck. So of course they don’t recognize him. Don’t worry though; this is all going to be resolved in the next hundred or so lines.

One thing about the comedies is that they do usually have a pretty happy ending, albeit contrived and often unbelievable; not just a bunch of dead bodies like the tragedies.  


Dead bodies? What dead bodies?

Ugghh. 





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