Tuesday, January 28, 2025

Today’s Totally Random Lines

 

Frateretto calls me, and tells me Nero is an angler in the lake of darkness. – Pray, innocent, and beware the foul fiend.  

 

Edgar

King Lear                       Act III, Scene vi, Line 7

Will uses fool characters in lots of his plays. These characters sometimes take the form of actual fools (court jesters) but many times they’re just simpletons of one sort or another. In almost all cases these fools ramble on in apparent nonsense talk, but the talk often makes a lot of sense. Sometimes that sense is quite hard to find.

In this play we have a fool, a literal court jester, but we also have Edgar, today’s speaker. The latter is neither a jester nor a simpleton. Rather he is merely pretending to be either a fool or quite mad; key word, pretending.

So, you say, enough of the endless chatter, what the heck is Edgar saying? That’s the thing. I find it almost impossible to get any meaning out of these fools’ lines. I assume it’s not just random gibberish because, given the genius of Will, it seems illogical that he would just write gibberish. But what meaning does it have in this play? I have absolutely no idea.

Boy, as I look back on what I wrote so far, I’m beginning to think it looks like the ramblings of the fool. Is that me?



Why does this little guy always look perfectly coiffed and posed for these pics, and I always look like I just woke up?

Is he playing me for the fool?

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