Therefore lay bare your bosom.

                                                      Ay, his breast:

-Portia/Shylock

The Merchant of Venice                                Act IV, scene i    Line 250

Well I’m not sure where to start. Perhaps a brief explanation of the line.

The first part of the line, ‘Therefore lay bare your bosom,’ is spoken by Portia who is masquerading as a male doctor, and the second part, ‘Ay, his breast,’ by Shylock (who, by the way, is NOT the merchant of Venice; he’s the money lender of Venice). You will notice that combined it’s a perfect verse of iambic pentameter. At this point in the proceedings it looks like Portia is about to agree that Shylock’s claim is valid and that Antonio (THE Merchant of Venice) is going to have to surrender a pound of his flesh to Shylock. Of course we know how this thing ends up, so no need to worry about Antonio.

Now I’m inclined to get philosophical about this play on the whole (and there’s a lot to philosophize on here), but I’m going to try to stick to this specific line instead even though it’s a somewhat innocuous line (at least in comparison to some of the other ones in this scene). Or is it?

Portia (disguised as Doctor Balthazar, and I’m not even going to start in on Shakespeare and his love of having women masquerade as men – which by the way ends up as men (all the actors in the plays back then were men) masquerading as women masquerading as men) says ‘Therefore lay bare your bosom’ to Antonio. Now keep in mind that Antonio is the guy who started this whole thing rolling by signing this deal in the beginning of the play to borrow money from Shylock. Why did he borrow the money? He borrowed it because he was cash poor; all his money was invested in ships he had out at sea seeking treasure. But what did he need the money for? To give to his friend Bassanio. And what did Bassanio need it for? He wanted to impress a rich young woman so that he could get her to marry him and then he would come into her money at which point he’d be able to pay Antoino back, and then Antonio wouldn’t forfeit on the loan and have to pay the pound of flesh. And who was this rich young woman that he was able to impress and marry? Portia/Bathalzar. The whole plan worked, except not quite quick enough and Antonio defaulted on the loan before Bassanio completed his end of the task.

Now in all the stuff I’ve read about this play (and I’ve read a bit) this little circle of events is never really addressed. There is boatloads of analysis on all sorts of aspects of the play, but I’ve never run into Portia being much troubled by Bassanio’s duplicity in courting her, or Antonio’s part in that duplicity. And yet at this point she knows all these facts. So I say, based on this little circuitous train of thought, and keeping in mind that at this point Portia knows all of it, isn’t it just possible that when she says ‘bare your bosom’ to Antonio she’s asking Antoino to ‘fess up and spill the beans on helping Bassanio to deceive her? Well isn’t it? So this line just might be a really, really key line that no one ever keys in on.

There, I’ve done it. I’ve left the very famous ‘quality of mercy’ and the ‘(but not) one drop of Christian blood’ lines completely alone, and I’ve focused purely on today’s Totally Random Daily Shakespeare line which, as usual, appears to be anything but random. Well I feel pretty good about that.

                                                                                    

Costard the swain and he shall be our sport;

And so to study three years is but short.

-Longaville        

Love’s Labour’s Lost                       Act I, scene i       Line 180

Oh boy, where to start? There is just a whole bunch of stuff to pick on here to write about. It’s amazing! There’s Labour with the ‘u’, there’s the possessive Love’s and Labour’s, there’s Longaville’s name, there’s the rhyming couplet thing, there’s the goofy premise. Holy Smokes! And we could do all of this without context, but since I read most of the first act, and some intro stuff, I’ll give you the short version of context first.

This play is a comedy and in the first scene the Ferdinand, the king of Navarre (don’t ask me where Navarre is) has pulled together three of his noblemen (one of them is Longavile, today’s speaker) and they are signing a pact to spend three years together, the four of them, where they will study and fast and see no women. One of the only entertainments they will have is Armando (some Spanish wit who’s visiting the court, the ‘he’ referred to above) and Costard the swain (country bumpkin/clown). Simple, right? So, where do we start?

Okay, the 200 or so lines I read this morning (it’s really good when the Totally Random Daily Shakespeare line is in Act One, Scene One because then I know I’ll be able to read the play from the beginning at least up to the day’s line) is the only time I’ve ever read any of Love’s Labour’s Lost. According to my list this play was written around 1594. Just so you know, Will started writing around 1589 and finished around 1614. So this one was written fairly early on in his career. Also, according to my list and several Shakespeare scholars, there was a sequel written around the same time called Love’s Labour’s Won. However, this play did not survive. It was not in The First Folio and is not in my Shakespeare Compilation. There is no known copy of this one. If you can come up with a copy of Love’s Labour’s Won then you can retire quite rich. But enough about that.

I was considering getting into the whole clown/jester thing that I sort of ended on yesterday. However, today’s clown is not a hired clown (jester), but just some country bumpkin that they consider a clown. So this is a little different, and kind of mean. Sort of like that Steve Carell movie Dinner For Schmucks where this Costard fellow is a schmuck to laugh at. But I haven’t read far enough to find out if this is really what he’s all about in the play, so…..

Okay, I got sucked into the internet there for a few minutes. I had to google Steve Carell to get the name of that movie and, well you know how that goes! But I’m back, didn’t get too far from the entrance to the cave so I was able to find my way back to daylight. Close one though!

And moving on. Okay, going to pick one more thing to go after for a minute this morning, then I’ve got to get on to other stuff for the day.

Rhyming couplets. I added the second line today to show the rhyme going on here. In some plays you see these random two lines of rhyme come up, mostly at the end of a fairly long rant, or at the end of a scene. But this play, at least so far as I read (again, only 200 lines) is all rhyming. Hold on, I’ll take a look. Okay, I gotta backtrack on this one. Not only is the rest of the play not in rhyming couplet, it’s not all in blank verse. A lot of it is plain prose. And not only that, I went back and looked at the first 200 lines again and not even all of that is rhyming. A lot of it is, but not all. So we’re back to the fact that Will liked to throw in a lot a rhyming couplets but that he was pretty random (oh, I know, it wasn’t random, it’s all done for a reason) about where he put all this stuff. Perhaps we’ll get more into the whole blank verse, rhyming couplet thing at a later date, but I think I’ve worn you out enough for today. You can look at that other stuff I mentioned on your own.

So go on out there and enjoy the day. But please, go easy on making sport out of any country bumpkins. Besides, they’re probably a heck of a lot smarter than you realize.

In the meantime I just rolled the die for tomorrow's page and we're going to be in the courtroom scene of The Merchant of Venice. I hope you're as excited about that as I am. I am extremely fain to find out what tomorrow's Totally Random Daily Shakespeare line will be! How will I ever sleep tonight!?!?

A worthy fool! Motley’s the only wear.

-Jaques

 As You Like It     Act II, scene vii  Line 35

Well friends, we came quite close to the ‘All the world’s a stage…’ line. One page off. Maybe next time. In the meantime, however, we’ve tapped into something worth looking at. This is Jaques, the sort of philosopher guy of Duke Senior’s bunch (in fact Jaques is the guy with the ‘All the worlds…’ line later on in the scene) and he’s talking about a run in he had recently with a fool, a motley fool. Now this brings up a few things to talk about.

For starters, apparently this is the source of the name that two brothers came up with to form the Virginia based financial services company, the Motley Fool. Does this mean these guys are Shakespeare buffs? I dunno. But they did seem to know enough to know that most of Shakespeare’s fools are the smartest people and that they manage to come up with the most intelligent things to say. So perhaps these guys knew that and were telling the world that they were anything but fools.

Which brings us to the second point, Shakespeare’s use of fools. He’s got one in this play, Touchstone (though I can’t figure out if that’s who Jaques is referring to or not), and he’s got a pretty famous one in King Lear who’s just called Fool, without any other name. And as I said, these fools, especially Lear’s Fool, speak mostly truths, so that neither of them is really much of a fool. Now what’s up with that? Is Will trying to tell us that we’re all the fools?

And then this brings me to my final observation or thought. What was the deal with these fools in reality. I mean, did kings or rich noblemen actually have guys dressed in funny outfits whose job it was to hang around and act stupid so as to entertain them? I know there was a lot of other stuff going on back then that was pretty weird and that we know to be true. But having some guy sitting around in some colorful getup acting like an idiot whenever the king wanted him to? That is very strange. Isn’t it?

Please your ladyship

To visit the next room, I’ll presently

Acquaint the queen of your most noble offer;

-Emilia

The Winter’s Tale                            Act II, scene ii    Line 47

And back once again to The Winter’s Tale. I guess we can spend a little time on the context here.

It turns out that the king of Sicilia, Leontes, is convinced that his wife, Hermione, has been cheating on him with his best friend, Polixenes, the king of Bohemia. If you recall, that last time we visited this play it was a line out of the conversation of Hermione and Polixenes. Well, Leontes was watching them have that conversation and decided that those two were a little over-friendly, and well, he managed to make the leap to conclude that they were cheating on him behind his back. They weren’t. Anyway, Hermione got sent to prison (he’s the king so he can do that). While in prison Hermione’s friend Paulina comes to visit to help. She’s not allowed to see Hermione, but is allowed to talk Hermione’s lady in waiting, Emila (who apparently is doing the prison time with Hermione) who tells her that Hermione has given birth to a daughter. Paulina tells Emila to get the baby from Hermione and she, Paulina, will bring the baby to Leontes and use it to convince him that he is wrong and to let Hermione out of prison. And today’s Totally Random Daily Shakespeare line is Emilia’s answer. Whew, that was a lot of setup for this line. Makes you wonder if this Totally Random stuff is worth it!

So where do we go from here? There’s nothing really too exciting about the line. It’s pretty understandable. I guess we could find a current use for it (with a little modification). We could discuss the play a little more, but as I said previously, it’s one that I need to do more work on before I can discuss it too much. So then, what else? I managed to ramble on about the line ‘Nothing’, so you’d think I could ramble on about this one. And yet, I believe I’ve hit a wall. So let’s let this one go. We’ll hope for better luck tomorrow. 

                                                               

I thought my mother, and my brother York,

Would long ere this have met us on the way:

-Prince

 

King Richard the Third                   Act III, scene i    Line 21

Okay, our second shot at Richard III, and today we can at least make sense of what we’ve got. Thank Goodness!

 If memory serves, the first time we visited Richard III they were talking about killing a kid, or a baby. I still don’t know what kid that was. This kid talking here (the Prince) ends up in the Tower of London and gets killed with his brother, but that takes place later than this scene. Lots of killing in Shakespeare plays (except the comedies). So I left it up to you folks to figure out what kid got killed last time. I didn’t hear from any of you, so I guess we’re gonna leave the identity of that other kid a mystery for now.

This time I can tell you that this poor kid talking is the presumptive king, but that good old Uncle Dick (Richard III) is going to be taking the crown for his own. And this kid, I’m not sure how old he is, doesn’t see it coming. Oh his mother does (which is likely why she hasn’t met them on the way), but he doesn’t. I like the innocence and naïvete in this kid’s line. I think Will does a real good job with this. I got the same sense reading Arthur talking in King John (see 8/21 post). I don’t think they actually had kids playing any parts in these plays back in the day. I think men played all the roles; men, women, and children (and probably the occasional wild animal).

Now there’s a lot of people in these plays, especially the history plays. I find it a bit difficult to keep track of all of the characters and who’s on whose side. But I’m guessing that for the most part the play going public had a sense of who was who in their political history. Richard III was king about 110 years before Shakespeare wrote this play. So that would be like us today seeing a show about Teddy Roosevelt. Well, I’m thinking that most of us aren’t TR experts, but just the same, we’d probably know important stuff, like nephews that Teddy killed to get to be president, (if he had done that). Killing nephews, and brothers, and other miscellaneous people is something that ends up getting remembered. And that’s why I’ve decided to give up reading the news.

No, I’ll be sworn; I make as good use of it as

many a man doth of a death’s-head or a

momento mori:

-Sir John Falstaff

King Henry IV Part I        Act III, scene iii  Line 29

This is Sir John Falstaff. For those of you who don’t know, he’s a fairly famous character in the world of Shakespeare. He appears here in Henry IV as a bit of comic relief. He was received so favorably by the play-going public that Shakespeare wrote a whole play around him, just to bring him back. It’s called The Merry Wives of Windsor, and that’s all I know about that play. I suppose I’ll have to get to it one of these days. I don’t have that one on Arkangel CD, so I’ll have to get that as well.

By the way, you’ll be delighted to hear that I’ve ordered A.L. Rowse’s three volume set of The Annotated Shakespeare. I borrowed Volume III from the library last week for use in reading/listening to Coriolanus and found it very useful. Then I found it online for $25 which I thought was pretty reasonable. Why do I bring this up, you ask. Here’s why; today’s Totally Random Daily Shakespeare is barroom conversation of trading insults between Falstaff and Bardolph. As such it has more idioms than usual. Unfortunately, King Henry IV is not included in the volume I have from the library and the set I purchased online has not arrived yet. So…..

So bottom line, this is a pretty tough, make that really tough conversation to work through. Falstaff is talking about Bardolf’s face, but what exactly he’s saying, oof I dunno. So now what do we do? I found this play in one of my other compilations and it’s got pretty good notes, but the notes seem to be saying the same thing I just said—they dunno. So what happens if you’re performing this play and you’re the actor and you have to say this line? Now what? Not that I’ve ever done any acting, but I gotta believe there’s a lot of Shakespeare that’s tough to do. And yet if you ever watch them do it, well they generally do a damn good job. I wish I had something better to tell you, but I don’t. I have to admit, I’m a little discouraged by the last few days of lines. They’ve been tough and I really haven’t been able to get much out of them.

But I’m not giving up.

This is an old ring of mine. I have no idea what the stuff on it means either. It could be a momento mori for all I know!

And partly, seeing that you are beautified

With goodly shape, and by your own report

A linguist, and a man of such perfection

As we do in our quality much want,--

 

-First Outlaw    

 

Two Gentlemen of Verona          Act IV, scene i    Line 55

From feast to famine! I wonder if that saying has its roots in Shakespeare? Oh well and anyway. Yes, from nothing yesterday to four lines of….well, not much. In any event we’ve only traveled four pages forward  since yesterday, from Act III scene i to Act IV scene I; same play. We still don’t know much of what’s going on with this play, but I’ll give you some very brief context for today’s line. Valentine, yesterday’s speaker, is now traveling through the woods when he gets accosted by ‘certain outlaws’. After a brief exchange these three outlaws decide they want to recruit Valentine as their leader. This First Outlaw, speaking above, gets interrupted by Second Outlaw who completes the sentence and asks if Valentine will become their general. And he does. Yeah, pretty kooky stuff, but I guess we’d have to better understand the full story to understand what’s going on here. On the other hand, we do have two lines already and they were both spoken by Valentine. The first might give us some clue because he was saying something about having gotten so much bad news. So maybe Valentine is so fed up with how things are going for him that he’s ripe for the picking by these outlaws. Who knows? I suppose we could listen to the play. Did I already mention that I have the Arkangel version of this play on CD. Well I do. Am I going to listen to it? Not today. Sorry.

However, let’s take a little closer look at this. Here we have one of those instances where I’m not completely sure of how to interpret this because I know I’m not thinking like a sixteenth century Englishman. I assume, though, that this line is comedy. Put this into modern context. Can you imagine a guy running into three hoods on a dark street. They start to rough him up, looking to rob him. But then they realize he’s got no money, and that he’s an educated fellow, so instead of robbing him they recruit him as their leader. But it's not only that they want him for their leader, it's why they want him; ‘You’re a good looking fellow, and well spoken. A fellow of your qualities is exactly what we’ve been looking for to be our leader.’ Yes, I believe that would be part of a comedy script. Again, it’s hard to appreciate much of Shakespeare without seeing it performed. And of course even a little harder when you’re getting it one random line at a time!