Mojo, The Bard, & Me

 Today’s Totally Random Lines

 

I would you had been by the ship-side, to  have helpt her: there your charity would have lacked footing.

 

Clown

The Winter’s Tale                  Act III, Scene iii, Line 110

Okay, first of all you should know that The Winter’s Tale has nothing to do with winter. I guess it’s a tale that’s good to be told when you’re in front of the fire on a cold winter’s day.  

Now, as for this particular line: it requires a bit of setup, but I’ll try to keep it as short as I can.

Antigonus has just left a baby on a deserted beach per the king’s orders. For sake of brevity, and sanity, we won’t get into the reason’s he’s doing this. Anyway, he drops it off and then leaves with a very famous Shakespearean stage direction

[Exit, pursued by a bear]

Trust me, anyone who knows anything about Shakespeare knows that bit of stage direction. Now you know it, so you can impress people.

To continue: an old shepherd comes along and finds the baby. He’s marveling over the baby when his son comes into the scene. His son is simply Clown in the script. You’d think they could have given the poor guy a name.

So the son tells the father of two things that he just this moment saw – one was a bear feasting on a guy, and the other was a shipwreck taking place in the rough seas just offshore (that's the boat that Antigonus and the baby arrived on). The Shepherd remarks that he wisht he’d been with his son because he would have tried to have helped the guy getting mauled by the bear. To which the son replies

I would you had been by the ship-side, to have helpt her: there your charity would have lacked footing.

I think that the there that the son is talking about is at the bear attack.

You’d have had better luck trying to save the sailors: any attempt to save the bear-attack guy(your charity) would have been useless (lacked footing).

Phew! That took a lot to get to what this line was about! Well, if one thing’s gonna stick with you, make it the stage direction Exit, pursued by bear. Trust me, it’s a great little piece of Shakespearean factoid. And also, now you know what happened to that guy being chased: he got eaten by the bear. I bet that most of the people who are familiar with that little bit of stage direction don't know that. 

This guy is such a Nervous-Nell. Now he's on the lookout for bears!

No Mojo, there's no bears in this yard: just rabbits.