Then have I reason to be fond of grief.

Constance

King John                                            Act III, scene iv Line 98

Stick with me for a minute so that I can explain who and what’s involved, and then we’ll get back to the line. Constance, today’s speaker, is the widow of King John’s older brother, Geoffrey. Her young son, Arthur, has a legitimate claim to the throne over King John, and John is very well aware of this. Arthur has just been captured by John’s men and now Constance is sure that John will kill her young son and that she will never see him alive again. She happens to be right, and this is what she’s talking about in this scene.

Cardinal Pandulph (the name alone is enough to make you not like this guy) has just told Constance that she has ‘too heinous a respect for grief’ and that she is ‘as fond of grief as of your child,’ basically, ‘get over it!’ And then she gets into what grief is all about to her.

                Grief fills up the room of my absent child,

                Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,

                Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,

                Remembers me of all his gracious parts,

                Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form;

                Then have I reason to be fond of grief!

Yeah, okay, I added the emphasis and the exclamation point on the last line. But I can see these words being spoken by some mistress of the stage, a Streep or a Mirren, and I can’t help but feel that this last line would be spit at Cardinal Pandulph. Honestly, I can’t read these words without being moved. Grief ‘stuffs out his vacant garments.’ I really don’t think Will ever did any better than this. I really don’t.  Can’t you feel a mother’s broken heart? Please tell me you can.

So there's not going to be a picture today. That's right, sorry, no picture. There is no picture that’s worth these 51 words. Today you’re just going to have to savor the words because you’re not going to be reading anything as well written as this for quite some time. Go ahead, one more time read these six lines again. Please.

                             Grief fills up the room of my absent child,

                    Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,

                    Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,

                    Remembers me of all his gracious parts,

                    Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form;

                    Then have I reason to be fond of grief!

                               

              

                  

Some blood drawn on me would beget opinion

                              [Wounds his arm]

Of my more fierce endeavor:

Edmund

              

King Lear                                            Act II, scene i     Line 34

This is an interesting line. It’s got a stage direction right in the middle of it. Now Will is a little bit famous for his lack of stage direction. If you read his plays you’ll notice this. It makes it a little hard on the reader, it does. Because as you read the play, and you get all the dialogue, it’s sometimes hard to understand what’s going on. That’s why it’s so much better to see the play. When you see the play you might not understand every word, but when you see what’s going on things are a lot clearer. Anyway, I think this lack of stage direction in his plays has been a kind of good thing because it allows for that much more freedom in interpretation when staging these plays. Don’t you agree?

So this is the scene where the rotten kid Edmund is convincing everyone that the good son Edgar is the bad one. He’s alone as he speaks right now, and he’s going to be telling everyone in a moment how Edgar pulled a sword on him and wounded him. So he’s going to cut himself to show everyone his wound [wounds his arm]. I hope he’s had his tetanus shot.

There’s a lot of talk and show of wounds in Will’s plays. Remember all that talk in Coriolanus of how he’s supposed to show his wounds to the voters? I don’t think the theater goers get to see any actual wounds in that instance though. Except at the end when Coriolanus gets stabbed to death.

Yes, lots of violence and lots of swordplay with Will. Though not so much in King Lear. Except here where our buddy Edmund is playing with his sword on himself. Rotten kid.

Here's a sword that we have in our house. It's not as impressive as it looks, and it's certainly not very sharp. As far as I know no one has ever been wounded with this sword. At least I'm pretty sure that no one's been wounded with it since it came into this house. Before then? Well I just don't know.

…face to face

And frowning brow to brow, ourselves will hear

Th’accuser and the accused freely speak:--

King Richard

King Richard The Second                              Act I, scene i       Line 16

Richard’s not talking about a group here, he’s referring to himself as ourelves in the plural. Oh sure, there’s other people there, but Richard is just talking about himself when he refers to ourselves. It’s that royal ‘we’ thing. I guess a reference to themselves as the state and as such, not just themselves, but representing all.

Anyway, this is the very beginning of the play, the sixteenth line of the first act. Bolingbroke (the future Henry IV) and Thomas Mowbray are being brought before Richard. Each of them’s going to be accusing the other of some sort of treason or other and in the end Richard will exile them both. But for now he’s just talking about having them face each other, ‘face to face and frowning brow to brow’. That gives a pretty good mental picture, doesn’t it? There not just going to be in the same place looking at each other, it sounds like they’re going to be on top of each other. Brow to brow. Will their faces be touching each other? It sort of sounds like it, doesn’t it? I can’t remember the last time I was frowning brow to brow with someone. Can you?

We got face to face, and very nearly brow to brow with these critters. But I couldn't quite tell if they were frowning or not. Can you?

Trouble yourselves no further: pray you, hasten

Your generals after.

Lepidus

 

Antony And Cleopatra                                 Act II, scene iv  Line 1

This is a scene where Antony is back in Rome, though in fact Antony’s not in this short scene at all. It’s a really short scene, I think ten lines, and I’m not even sure why it’s needed. But of course it’s Will, so you can bet there’s some really good reason. I think that if I was watching the play, this scene would make more sense, because I’d have a better idea who these guys were and what they’re up to.

But since I don’t know, maybe we could just talk about ‘Trouble yourselves no further.’ I added the ‘hasten your generals after’ because it was part of the thought that began with ‘pray you,’ and ‘pray you, hasten’ was on the line that I picked today. Here look; today’s Totally random line was

Trouble yourselves no further: pray you, hasten

And the next line in the book that followed was

Your generals after.

So you see why I had to add those last three words, don’t you? I get faced with this more days than not. In fact it’s not all that often that I can just take the one line that I randomly picked and use it as a stand- alone line. Am I spending too much time explaining this? Perhaps I am. Well then, if you’re not interested and you’re content to let me worry about how I pick the lines, then I guess I could say to you

                Trouble yourselves no further.

I certainly hope you saw that line coming.

Well here's something that you certainly didn't see coming. It's a picture of my La Brea Tar Pits pencil. What's it got to do with today's Totally Random line? To be honest, I just grabbed a random pencil from my pile of pencils, because I really couldn't think of a relevant picture. But then I got to thinking about it, and well, it seems that I kind of got stuck today trying to come up with much to say about today's line. And the more I tried, the more stuck I got. Sort of like those animals in the tar pits. Once they were in the pit, the more they tried to get out, the more stuck they got. So this is actually a perfectly relevant picture for today's line.

And if you find yourself having a problem with that explanation, then I guess I'd just say

Trouble yourselves no further.

If I were a woman, I would kiss as many of you

as had beards that pleased me, complexions

that liked me, and breaths that I defied not:

Rosiland

 

As You Like It                                    Epilogue               Line 18

Okay, I took stock today. There are epilogues in six of the thirty-seven plays in my compilation. Three are in histories and three are in comedies. You’d think he might have thrown one or two in the tragedies where we really could have used and epilogue to tell us what went wrong.

This is also the only epilogue to be spoken by a female character. Though to be fair, in King Henry The Eighth the speaker of the epilogue is not named, so I guess that could be a woman as well. The other four epilogues are given by a dancer, a chorus, a king, and Prospero. So that’s a pretty wide range of characters.

So I think a lot of this epilogue, like the part that is today’s Totally Random lines, is pretty meaningless, and the meaning that does come out on the whole is simply that she hopes you liked the play. That's it. And if you read the epilogue of The Tempest, that one spoken by Prospero, you’ll find that its meaning is the same; he hopes you liked the play. So I suppose that means I should go read the other four epilogues and see if they all say the same thing. Tell you what, you go read them and let me know.

This is my illustrator (on the left) and his father-in-law. Question: Do you think the beard pleased his father-in-law?

To lend me arms and aid when I required them;

The which you both denied.

Octavius Caesar

Antony And Cleopatra                                 Act II, scene ii    Line 92

This is Antony and Cleopatra, and Antony and Octavius are trying to work out some differences. Octavius is talking about the article of the oath that Antony broke. I’m not too sure of the details so that I can’t tell you exactly where or when Antony failed to provide Octavius the arms and the aid. But before this scene is over it gets decided that the best way to bury the hatchet between these two is for Antony to marry Octavius’s sister Octavia. Yes, that’s right. Octavius’s sister is named Octavia. Apparently the parents were hung up on the eight thing. Maybe they met on the eighth day of the eighth month. Surely I don’t know, but just as surely they liked Octav for a name.

And also just as surely I have a very apt anecdote for today’s line. I was trying to wash out my coffee pot earlier this evening, and was having a hard time fitting my big fat mitt into the pot. I wanted to scrub the bottom inside because there was some burnt coffee inside. My son passed by on his way through the kitchen and I asked him to try because his hands are smaller, but he pretty much ignored me and kept going. Then my wife passed by on her way through the kitchen and I asked her to try, because her hands are smaller and she pretty much ignored me and kept going. So what did I do? Well of course I went to the end of the hallway they had both disappeared down and I yelled. And you know what I yelled, don’t you?

To lend me arms (more so in this case, hands) and aid when

I required them; the which you both denied!

Yeah, I’m not kidding. That actually happened today and that’s what I yelled. I was able to use today’s Totally Random line. Today. It was fantastic.

The aforementioned pot, sponge, and over-sized mitt.

Your uncle York is join’d with Bolingbroke, And all your northern castles yielded up,

And all your southern gentlemen in arms

Upon his party.

Sir Stephen Scroop

 

King Richard The Second              Act III, scene ii   Line 201

Yes, that’s right, Scroop is basically saying to King Richard ‘You’re screwed, pal.’ Bolingbroke is the guy who’s about to become Henry IV. He’s returned from exile while Richard was over in Ireland and he’s managed to get pretty much all of England on his side. Now Richard has returned from Ireland, he’s just landed on the west coast of England, and he’s asking his buddy Scroop what the situation is.  Uncle York is the guy that Richard left in charge while he went on his Irish expedition. And if Uncle York, and everybody in the north and the south has gone over to Bolingbroke’s side, well then… that doesn’t leave too much left for Richard.

About ten lines further down Richard ends the scene with a rhyming couplet that pretty much sums it up.

                Discharge my followers: let them hence away,

                From Richard’s night to Bolingbroke’s fair day.

This was a very fair day, and it's me on my Irish expedition. That's Howth Castle there in the background and I think the Irish Sea beyond that, and yes, that's a golf club I'm holding. I'm golfing with my buddy Garrett just outside Dublin. I wasn't in Ireland to subdue a rebellion like Richard was. And fortunately I didn't come home to a country turned against me. That would have really sucked!